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Scientists Question Laws of Nature
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Jul 12, 2006 12:04 PM
from the not-so-constant-constants dept.
from the not-so-constant-constants dept.
mknewman writes "MSNBC is reporting that scientists are finding differences in many of the current scientific 'constants' including the speed of light, alpha (the fine structure constant of the magnetic force), the ratio of proton to electron mass and several others. These findings were made by observing quasars and comparing the results to tests here on the earth." From the article: "Time-varying constants of nature violate Einstein's equivalence principle, which says that any experiment testing nuclear or electromagnetic forces should give the same result no matter where or when it is performed. If this principle is broken, then two objects dropped in a gravitational field should fall at slightly different rates. Moreover, Einstein's gravitational theory -- general relativity -- would no longer be completely correct, Martins says."
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News: Newton's Second Law, Revisited 171 comments
eldavojohn writes "Dust off your fundamental physics books, an aspiring astrophysicist by the name of Alex Ignatiev has published a paper that proposes testing special cases of Newton's Second Law on earth's surface. His goal is sort of ambitious. The time he has to test his theory is only 1/1000th of a second, twice each year, in either Greenland or Antarctica. What would he look for? Spontaneous motion. From his interview with PhysOrg: 'If these experiments were to take place, Ignatiev says that scientists would look for what he calls the SHLEM effect. This acronym stands for static high latitude equinox modified inertia and would be noticed in a condition where the forces of the earth's rotation on its axis, and of the orbital force of the earth as it moves around the sun, would be canceled out ... In the end, if Newton's Second Law could be violated, he would be forcing physicists to reevaluate much of what we understand derived from that law — which is quite a bit.'"
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Interesting Things Happen At Excessive Scales (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Interesting Things Happen At Excessive Scales (Score:5, Informative)
There is no such thing as "Ohm's Law", in the sense of a "Law".
It's just a rough estimate to Maxwell's Equations under certain conditions.
Which, themselves are rough estimates to behaviors described by Quantum Mechanics.
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Re:Interesting Things Happen At Excessive Scales (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Interesting Things Happen At Excessive Scales (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Interesting Things Happen At Excessive Scales (Score:4, Funny)
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Difference between "ARE" and "MAY" (Score:5, Informative)
"scientists are finding differences in many of the current scientific 'constants'"
in the article the sentence says:
"Recent research has found evidence that the value of certain fundamental parameters, such as the speed of light or the invisible glue that holds nuclei together, may have been different in the past."
whats the use if people cant tell the difference between MAY and ARE?
there is a big difference between "you MAY die this week" and "you ARE to die this week"
i know, its all relative, and i know what they meant... but you know what? thats not true. i opened this because i thought the may actually turned to an are... a possibliity realized. when i get there, its still may, and people cant even read basically.
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Re:Interesting Things Happen At Excessive Scales (Score:5, Funny)
2.) Apparently, you are not (or have never been around) an Electrical Engineer
3.) You definately got laid before you turned 30.
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12 Billion Year Old Light & the Expanding Univ (Score:5, Insightful)
I recall reading that as a universe expands or contracts, the constants would theoretically change to adjust to the expansion or contraction of the basic building blocks of matter.
Is it possible that the measuring instruments failed here? I thought that was always a possibility in observations. Is it also possible that the quasars we are observing are differing light years away and thus we are making observations based on data from several billion years ago (as the article states)?
Yes, I think that there is call for speculation on the constants varying over billions of years since the light we are observing is roughly 12 billion years old and all our observations here on earth remain static.
Re:12 Billion Year Old Light & the Expanding U (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, it's worse than that. The quasars are different distances away. How do we figure out how far away they are? By measuring the redshift in the frequencies of their spectra. What do we use for that? The relativistic Doppler formula. What is the key constant in the Doppler formula? The speed of light. Actualy, it's even worse, because it's not the naive Doppler formula but one that includes cosmological effects which are not independently observable.
In other words, the distance of the quasars -- and the frequency their light "should" be -- are highly model-dependent.
There's less to this story than meets the eye.
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Re:12 Billion Year Old Light & the Expanding U (Score:5, Informative)
Only at pretty low redshift, though. At any redshift appreciably close to or greater than 1, there really isn't much meaning to "distance" --- would you interpret that distance to be at the time of emission, the time of detection, or somewhere in between? We basically just use the cosmological redshift, which says that the redshift z represents how much the universe has expanded since the radiation was emitted. That's it. Any "distance" or lookback time is model-dependent. Instead of measuring slight deviations in universal constants, they are perhaps measuring perturbations in a particular cosmological model.
In other words, the distance of the quasars -- and the frequency their light "should" be -- are highly model-dependent.
Right --- I'm just picking nits, since I've seen lots of confusion by others in similar reports.
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Re:12 Billion Year Old Light & the Expanding U (Score:5, Insightful)
This is really the crux of a measurement. How many assumptions from the model are used to make the measurement? In an ideal experiment, the measurement itself is what verifies or falsifies the model, but in reality there are usually other parameters that are needed as inputs to the experiment that are computed using the model, thus the model dependence. I'm in experimental high energy particle physics and we worry about this every day, and try to reduce the number of theoretical inputs needed to make sense of our data. I'm sure the astronomers do likewise, but sometimes inputs are unavoidable. This doesn't make the measurement invalid because a model should be self consistent as well. So if you correctly compute the inputs using the model, and your results still differ from the model then some double checking of everything needs to be done because the model is showing a flaw. The true size of the flaw is the really hard thing to quantify because all of the quatities are model-dependent. In the end this could turn out to be nothing or the start of something.
I welcome all chinks in scientific theories because it generally leads to new scientific understanding and a new round of theories and models. Really that's what science is all about. In my field, we all hope that the LHC finds the Higgs, that will solidify the Standard Model, but we also hope that it finds lots of things that don't fit the Standard Model, that would point the direction for future discovery. If we didn't find anything unusual at the LHC it might put a huge damper on particle physics, and I'd have to switch areas of research.
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Err.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Look out at the stars. You're seeing them as they appeared several million or billion years ago. The light that you now see from the sun is 8 minutes old, for comparison. All the data we collect from outer space is historical information--how the universe was in the past.
Re:Err.... (Score:3, Interesting)
However, if physical constants such a the speed of light are variable, based on the expansion of the universe and the distance from the initial point of expansion, then the light from those quasars has perhaps sped up or slowed down sin
Re:Err.... (Score:3, Interesting)
All of the sudden our yardstick is broken, because if the speed of light isn't really constant, then two stars which seem to be the same distance away might actually be two very different distances away from us.
If light from a closer star came at a slower speed compared to light from a far star, then they may seem to be the same dist
Re:12 Billion Year Old Light & the Expanding U (Score:3, Funny)
Yet more evidence that the universe is just a gigantic computer simulation.
Old programmer's adage: Variables won't. Constants aren't.
Speed of Light (Score:5, Funny)
They just don't make photons like they use to...
Damn yung'uns (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Speed of Light (Score:5, Funny)
If you were travelling at the speed of light for billions of years, you'd get tired too.
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I declare a "War on Quasars" ... (Score:5, Funny)
Dharma Initiative (Score:4, Funny)
I would recommend not flying/sailing for the next few months.
honestly... (Score:5, Funny)
This is a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a good thing. One of two things will happen from this
:If option (1) is true, it means we're entering that sort of post-Einsteinian "What the hell's going on here" phase in science, where we have a theory that we thought is good and we have some measurements which we also know are good and conflict with the theory. This will lead to lots more experiments being done and allow us to invent hyperspace faster.
If option (2) is true, it means that the scientists in question will be metaphorically shot by the scientific community for daring to question the great reletivity laws, and remove bad scientists from the community.
It's a win-win!Re:This is a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Apparently 96% of our entire universe is now believed to be made up by these two substances, neither of wich have been explained. I suggest that one of the following options are true:
My bet is 2, and string theory is not it... Interesting times ahead, mark my word.
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Never close doors... (Score:4, Funny)
I'm tired of hearing people tell my friend from Georgia Tech that he can't develope a free energy device. The quantum model is far from perfect. It is entirely possible we could extract the [theories, now] ZPE (our gravitational like-force experienced in the casimir-effect) from empty space. Who are these people to comdemn him? How many of them went to Georgia Tech? Do they have the schematics and plans for a device for free energy? No. How would they know anything about it? Are they willing to fund him so he can build his? Even though that might prove them right, they're too busy running after their quantum smoke. They're no better than the Catholic Church railing on Galileo.
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Re:This is a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they won't be shot. Stephen Hawking has challenged Einstein's theories and been wrong about nearly everything he's ever proposed, and he's still considered a good physicist. It's okay to challenge the dominant theory, just as long as you have good evidence to back it up, and your theory explains something that nothing else does. Bad science is done with poor or no evidence, explains even less than the current theory, and is usually presented to the general public without peer review. When confronted with evidence that proves their theory false, good scientists concede, while bad scientists wail on about scientific orthodoxy and appeal to popular opinion.
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Re:This is a good thing (Score:3, Informative)
Let's also not forget that Einstein was one of the founders of quantum mechanics! He won his Nobel Prize for work on the photoelectric effect, which helped prove that light was quantized, not for anything he did with Relativity. Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric [wikipedia.org], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein [wikipedia.org]
Re:This is a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
I always find this perspective to be sort of a head-scratcher. What time-frame are you using? Is it less hospitable than, say, during the ice age? Or, while the plague was slaughtering half the population of Europe? Or while the Soviets and their puppets were within inches of launching nukes from Cuba? Or, while we were paying more (in real dollars) for oil a couple decades back... or suffering horrible inflation and much higher unemployment in the 1970s? Or while millions were dying in the great world wars? Or while slavery was a key part of the colonial economy?
Personally I like antibiotics, refridgeration, satellite communication, computer networks with millions of nodes including something smaller than a bar of soap that lets me write and send things like this while sitting in the woods listening to birds chirp. We've never had a higher standard of living, longer life expectancy, or more ways to communicate with one another. That we're having cultural friction with someo groups that don't want things to play out quite that way, and have to sort out amongst ourselves the best way to deal with that (while not getting blown up on a train, etc), is unfortunate... but still nothing compared to the growing pains of the past.
That being said, I also want to zoom around the universe. A lot.
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Title is pretty circular (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't "questioning laws of nature" by definition what scientists do? Question, hypothesis, experiment, theory, law, lather, rinse, repeat - right?
Re:Title is pretty circular (Score:5, Interesting)
A more precise headline is somewhat harder to write: "Scientists find evidence that they may have to refine or even refactor some really, really well-demonstrated theories" isn't nearly as punchy.
(Scientists do, in fact, have non-rational fundamentally held beliefs, but they're nothing so simple as "Einstein was right, Darwin was right". Trying to convince somebody that a scientist's real religious belief is "The universe has some sort of fundamental, objective, and probably comparatively simple law, one that we can understand or at least produce successively more acurate approximations, one that can be modeled mathematically and is true over all space and time, one that makes predictions that can be tested and will stand up to all such tests all the time" is rather more complicated and less fun. And yes, I recognize that my approximation of that belief above is both more complicated and less accurate than some other formulations, but I'm already drifting dangerously off-topic.)
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scientific method (Score:3, Insightful)
systematic and random errors (Score:4, Interesting)
In an attempt to publish hastily, scientists often willingfully ignore some shortcomings in instrumetal calibration, etc., and may not take into account all the uncertainties that should be propagated through their calculations. I hope that those astronomers are not embarrassing themselves by making an error like that.
This isn't new (Score:5, Informative)
General Relativity (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:General Relativity (Score:4, Informative)
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"Scientists Question Laws of Nature" (Score:3, Funny)
Lack of understanding of the constants? (Score:3, Interesting)
From the blurb:
Time-varying constants of nature violate Einstein's equivalence principle, which says that any experiment testing nuclear or electromagnetic forces should give the same result no matter where or when it is performed.
Maybe there is a hidden assumption in there. Maybe space itself isn't constant.
We're already thinking that space may have an energy to it. [slashdot.org] If it has energy, then space would have an equivalent mass. Possibly you could describe that as a density of sorts.
So if space itself has a sort of density, then maybe the slight differences you see in the constants are caused by the varying density of different regions of space they are traveling through to be measured.
IANAP, YMMV, etc. But I think it might be at least possible. Einstein's principle above would have to be edited to say "in equivalent spaces".
That always seems to be the way of scientific progress. You create a set of equations describing what you see, like Newton did. Then someone can see a little farther, and amend them like Einstein did. Another amendment wouldn't be "questioning the laws of nature", it would just simply be understanding them a little better.
heisenberg priciple, say "hello." (Score:3, Interesting)
also called the "uncertainty principle."
there is a good chance that all these differing microerrors in all sorts of differing directions are different diffractions through inteference in what we can observe, thus proving the heisenberg principle has raised its ugly head again.
aka don't sweat it until you get a couple thousand indicators in the same direction. just like this week's surprise medical discovery that pesticides cure cancer, or coffee cures cancer, or coffee cures pesticides, or whatever bogus wrong-way publication made it into print on one limited study. the last line of those articles always reads, "The findings suggest that further studies in the field should be undertaken," which is code for "The previous article was written to get more grant money, send to PO Box 666, Unterderlinden, NJ."
Physical laws are not "wrong" (Score:5, Informative)
Einstein's gravitational theory -- general relativity -- would no longer be completely correct, Martins says.
First of all, let me preface this by saying IAAP (I am a physicist):
All this talk of laws being "wrong" or no longer "correct" is just popular fluff the press either hypes or makes up.
No physical law is ever completely correct. A physical law is simply a description of reality to the degree to which we understand it, and is "correct" (i.e. produces predicitions which fit our measurements) within the realm of our present experience of the phenomenon it describes. As our understanding and experience of a phenomenon grows to encompass a wider range of circumstances (e.g. scale, velocity), the law needs to be either refined or replaced with new law, possibly based upon a new paradigm.
Newton's laws of motion are no less "correct" now than they ever were. Einstein determined that the realm in which they accurately described reality did not include large velocities near the speed of light (i.e. >0.1c). Quantum mechanics explained how at small scales these same rules no longer applied. Even today, no one yet knows how to reconcile the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics when their realms overlap--this is still pioneering work.
Yet Newton's laws are still taught as the foundation of physics to all new students because they are still valid within the realm or experience in which all of our normal lives are conducted. Models, and the laws derived with them, are valid only within the realm of experience within which they were formed (and, if the inventer is lucky, they hold even beyond that). And they remain valid within that realm even when we find later than they don't hold outside that realm. Even Aristotle's belief that heavier objects fall faster than light objects is valid to a point (within a realm where air friction is a significant contributor), even though Galileo later "proved" this was wrong (i.e. it is not a general law).
Re:Physical laws are not "wrong" (Score:3, Insightful)
Offtopic? Maybe.... SM not working. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it predicted a number of cool particles, and sure enough, there they are. It also craps out more and more lately. Neutrinos oscillate, huh? Uh, well, we'll fix that later. Gravity... yeah. That's a bitch. I know! More free variables! We're at 19 now, what's 10 more?
This whole thing smacks of turn-of-the-20th-century Newtonians trying to cobble together a decent explanation for black-body radiators [egglescliffe.org.uk]. They tried all kinds of tricks--turns out they didn't work, because the system is not Newtonian. Newtonian physics was awesome for predicting meso-scale behavior, but it's a dog at small and large scales. Similarly, I think, the Standard Model was super-dynamite for a good number of years, but to hang on to it through all these issues should be a red flag that something else might be a better explanation. Kuhn, here we come. [wikipedia.org]
Star Trek TNG for real? (Score:4, Funny)
Geordi: "What?"
Q: "Change the gravitational constant of the universe, thereby altering the asteroid's orbit."
Geordi: "How do you do that?"
Q: "You just DO it, that's all..."
Data: "What Geordi is saying is that we do not have the ability to change the gravitational constant of the universe."
Q: "Well, then, you obviously never read slashdot."
What a load of bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sod's Law? (Score:3, Funny)
All good programmers know... (Score:3, Funny)
Variables won't; constants aren't.
Thank the BSD fortune file on my machine at home.
Remember: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Filota? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Filota? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Chaos Theory (Score:3, Insightful)
This is an incorrect interpretation. Some things are chaotic, and some are not. Things that are chaotic have regimes where they behave chaotically and regimes where they do not.
Also, you don't need a fart or butterfly wing to make a coupled pendulum sensitive to initial conditions, the simple fact that it's impossible to exactly replicate the position is enough. any difference, even a single atom's width, will
Re:two objects dropped in a gravitational field (Score:3, Insightful)
The Jupiter ball will indeed 'exert more gravity force', however, the extra masses involve require extra energy to accelerate. Drop a 1kg ball, 9.8m/s/s. drop a 2 kg ball, 9.8m/s/s. Twice the mass in the 2kg, but twice the force required to create the same acceleration.
You are wrong, have a nice day