It has now been proven that the speed of light is NOT constant, it is in fact slowing down, such that the speed of light is now about 2000 miles per second slower than when it was first measured.
Since many important calculations use the speed of light as a constant doesnt that mean all those calculations are off, and can never be precisely correct??
Cite? One cannot attempt to answer your question if you don’t initially provide a proper basis for it.
Here’s a quick history of attempts to find the speed of light:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/measure_c.html
OP, please return with either a cite, or point out which measurement you are accepting as the first.
I’ve seen this idea presented as a hypothesis (it’s one possible explanation for some paradoxic astronomical observations) but never as a proven fact.
If light continues to slow down at that rate, it will have stopped moving altogether in a few thousand years.
I think the news item I heard a couple years ago cited 1958 K. D. Froome, because the item said Interferometer was used.
This New Scientist article suggests the opposite: that c may be increasing. Locally.
This could mean that the fabric of space is not homogenous and isotopic but may vary as an EM propagation medium. So, maybe warp drive will be possible after all. Or not.
Ok maybe I dont remember the rate right, maybe it was about 2000 miles per hour slower, but if the speed of light is slowing at any rate then using it as a constant is erroneous.
I also heard that the decay rate for isotopes we use for measuring rods such as atomic clocks and carbon 14 has slowed because of some strange new emanations from the sun.
Anybody have any good scientific Dope-worthy cites about this?
I’ve seen sporadic mentions from time to time that scientists have some clues that the speed of light is slowing down. Inspired by the above posts in this very thread, I just spent some time looking for something on it. I googled speed of light slowing down.
What I found was a whole bunch of really strange cites. You can google that yourself and see what I mean. The very first cite was an article on WorldNetDaily :dubious: which seemed to want to imply that it proves all known science wrong (things like age of the universe, age of the earth, and evolution), and therefore the Bible might have gotten it right all along in the first place, but the researchers are having a helluva time getting their stuff published, in an apparent conspiracy by the evil mainstream scientific establishment to squelch this new evidence that Bible is True!!!
The second cite was an article on FoxNews taken from LiveScience, which seemed unusually bland, dumbed down, and garbled. A whole bunch of other cites seemed to be various religious or creationist “news” sites, and/or really dumbed down popular news articles like one from CBS News. Several of these articles discussed completely different research by completely different people, than some other articles. None of them seemed very informative, at least not scientifically or rationally so.
WTF? I know I’ve seen seemingly serious mentions of this idea kicking around. But today, all I’m seeing is woo and trash on the subject. Yes, I searched on DuckDuckGo too, with mostly the same results.
ETA: Posts #7 through #10, above, came in while I was researching and typing the above. I’ll take a look at those now . . .
The HuffPo article linked by deltasigma is the same article I found on the FoxNews site. I thought it might be attempting to describe some possibly serious science, but was doing a poor job doing so. It’s full of paragraphs of buzzwords like:
The New Scientist article linked by For You looked like it might have better scientific information (at first glance anyway), but I’ve only quickly skimmed it for now.
The usual point needs to be made about the difference between c and the speed of light. c is the limit of propagation speed of anything. The speed of light is the speed that light travels in a vacuum. The issue here seems to be whether the speed of light is c or something a tiny bit smaller. c doesn’t change, but the linked article deltasigma provides is suggesting that a vacuum is not quite vacuum enough for light to travel at c. If it turned out to be true it would be a bit of a surprise, but not in any way invalidate much of physics. That article isn’t suggesting that either the speed of light, or c, has changed.
There have been a few claims over the years that c has changed, but the OP’s assertion that it has been proved isn’t so. A few people have made suggestions about how a changing value would account for some unsolved questions in cosmology, but it is merely one of a range of suggested solutions, and given there is no reason to suspect that the idea is true beyond it being a possible solution, so it doesn’t get much traction. Some of the really bad claims about a changing speed of light have attempted to draw a line through measurements made over the last century or so. This isn’t valid as the errors of the measurements have become increasingly small over time, and these ham fisted attempts at line fitting don’t actually pass even the most trivial of statistical metrics. The religious 6000 year old Earth arguments about a changing speed of light has been doing he rounds for about three decades, and may have had its origin here in Oz. It uses a very early, very poor quality measurement as its single point of difference. Utterly bogus, but the damn thing still won’t die.
What force is acting on photons to slow them down? There isn’t any ‘ether’. If the light is going through some other medium, or displaying curvature in its path due to gravity, we can account for those things.
From deltasigma’s article:
So… if space isn’t empty, then forces are acting on the photons (which move at a constant speed)!
What’s next, 2+2=3.9?
That’s the only context I’ve seen it in before (and I saw it a lot there) - Creationists want the speed of light to be slowing down, in the hope that it would explain how we can see things much further away in light years than their timeline for the existence of the universe.
(It’s useless as an explanation - if the speed of light was slowing down that dramatically, we would be seeing these distant events happening in extreme slow motion - slowing down light in transit is the same as stretching a linear recording medium - like if you were to stretch magnetic audio tape)
Do you use regular google, or google scholar? Here’s a link if you haven’t tried it - http://scholar.google.com.
Yes I know what you mean, also lottsa articles its obvious author is just trying to make copy for his job, you have to strain it all to get less than a paragraph of story. Another thing I hate is when they call pesticide or herbicide or insecticide or fungicide “pesticide(s)”.
I agree with all what you said there.
I am not a creationist, and if there was any kinda creator it was the collective conscious of man.
I haven’t had time to check the article, but in quantum electrodynamics, there exists something called the Scharnhorst effect, by which you can give the vacuum an effective refractive index smaller 1 if you introduce two Casimir plates; roughly, the idea is that there are less quantum fluctuations for the photon to interact with between two closely spaced metal plates (because long wavelength fluctuations simply don’t ‘fit’ between them). This doesn’t straightforwardly imply a speed of light greater than c, however, and I think the interpretation of the effect is still somewhat contentious.
As for a cosmologically varying speed of light, I think the theorist most associated with that idea is Joao Magueijo; however, as has been noted, the idea hasn’t made it past the speculative stage so far. And there’s certainly not been any proof that the speed of light has slowed down, by 2000 miles per second, hour, or any other amount.
Wait for it . . . Someone’s bound to come in here any time now and try to convince us that 2+2=3.99999…