Chronos describes how, if the speed of light is set at infinite speed in Maxwell’s Equasions, al magnetic phenomena dissapears.
What if we had a massive spreadsheet program running all the known equasions and formulae in Physics…and treat various constants (like c) and other parameters like they were variables?
Sliding the value of the speed of light up to infinity, down to zero, etc.
Making the Planck Constant larger or smaller.
Fiddling with the Hubble and Cosmological constants.
What if we get a result that we recognize in observing the universe?
When the Hubble Space Telescope sees far away galaxies billions of light-years away, it sees them as they were billions of years ago. If the physical constants we know today had different values back then, could we not have photographic evidence of such?
Apparently, scientists have concluded that, not only is the universe expanding, its rate of expansion is speeding up. Could this be a physical manifestation of this OP?
Astronomers have in fact looked for such things. The most famous result of such a search was the search by Webb et. al. (Article 1, Article 2), which actually claimed to have found a slight variation in the fine structure constant over the lifetime of the Universe. However, further searches by different teams have not managed to reproduce this result, and at this point most physicists are somewhat dubious.
Anything’s possible. Maybe the fine structure constant is a variable after all, and its dynamics drive the acceleration of the Universe (à la quintessence.) But this qualifies as speculation at best, of the type that usually occurs at the local pub on Friday evening after a few rounds.
What you are talking about is the fundamental physical constants*. Problem is, we don’t know all the ones we need to know to explain the universe. If we were to do as you propose, and if we were to come upon some other values that “work”, that could easily be explained by having them “not work” in conjunction with any values of the unknown constants.
Also, keep in mind that the known fundamental constants are either directly or indirectly measured. If there is some other value out there somewhere, we should be able to measure it. If we do, then it will be time to update the textbooks.
*speed of light, charge on an electron, Gravitational constant, etc.
Well, according to Chronos in the above link, Magnetic phenomena dissapear from Maxwell’s Equasions when c is reset to infinity. I’m probably wrong, but I assume as the slide is reduced from infinity to c, magnetism begins to appear and get stronger. Does magnetizm get stronger still as the slide goes from c to zero?
Even if doing such describes nothing in the universe, perhaps it can give insight to “might have been” universes.
One caveat in these discussions is that you always have to specify what you’re comparing the constants to. When we talk about the limit as c goes to infinity, what we really mean is the limit where all of the speeds of anything else in our system goes to zero. And of course, since magnetism is produced by moving charges, if the charges aren’t moving, there’s no magnetism. Move them some, and there’s some magnetism, and move them faster, and there’s more magnetism. As the speeds of the charges approach c, the strength of the magnetic field approaches the strength of the electric field.