This article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2181455.stm
Has gotten me wondering again about the speed of light and my private cosmology in which I believe that the universal constants can shift over time, but that because we exist inside the system we cannot gauge these changes accurately. Mostly it’s my small attempt at explaining the issues most Christian’s throw at Radio-Carbon Dating, and to overcome the baby-bathwater syndrome.
If you allow that universal constants can slow or expand over time (time itself being a constant that can change) and you follow Einstein’s frame concepts in Relatitivity then roughly (and I’m not a physicist) you can explain both the mythic young earth and the scientific old earth phenomoneons with a single theory. Isn’t this what science is about? Granted I allow non-scientific data to enter into my theorization, but I generally work from the same premise as Sherlock Holmes, eliminate everything that is impossible, and whatever is left, no matter how improbable, is the truth. For example, nobody belives the earth is the center of the solar system anymore.
Back to the article above though. What this has me now thinking (other than Yippee! Evidence that I may have been right!) is that there’s nothing to say that this expansion/slowing of constants takes place at a uniform rate in all places at all times. There could be situations where for a localized setting it actually reverses temporarily, but how this would affect the local area of space-time and what effect would be mesuarable to test this theory I have no clue. If only I had the ear of a decent research physics department to prove my own pet theories about Life the Universe and Everything.
More idle pratter later. Work now.
Written on August 14th, 2002 by Chris Prather