Free Thinkr

I was reading a thread over at baptistboard for masochistic pleasure, when I saw that Helen mention a theory that light once traveled 10^60 times faster in the early universe, allowing light from distant stars to reach us much faster, which I suppose allows for a young universe. My question is this:
If light was traveling that fast, wouldn't the energy from the fusion occuring in stars be 10^60^2 higher than it is? And if that were the case, would this energy not destroy all the planets in the solar system?

galt23

http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...ng_010815.html

Jesse

Of course, the results mentioned in galt23's post, even if correct, would indicate a pretty small long-term change, not anything like a 10^60 speedup, and certainly not anywhere close to enough to show that the most distant objects could be less than billions of years old.

As for the original question, I'm not sure if a much faster light speed would affect nuclear fusion, since fusion depends on the strong force that binds the nucleus together, not the electromagnetic force. But I would think a speedup of that magnitude would have some very large effects on the spectrum of distant objects (which is used to determine the elements they're made up of) and on the pattern of redshifts we see from objects at different distances, effects which would be very different from what is actually observed.

galt23

Oh, I wasn't attempting to support the 10^60 statement, just trying to give a little more info on the subject. 10^60 sounds about as plausible to me as the 1day=1billion years, or whatever it's up to these days. Faster appearant, and even real, speed of light seems very realistic in my opinion, given the instable and changing nature of quantumn dynamics in the early universe.

caravelair

also, if light was slowing down, then the further we look into the past, the slower things would appear to be moving. yet pulsars and cepheid variable stars have about the same frequencies no matter how far you look back.

Undercurrent

It deepends on whether the "speed of light" that is getting faster is seen as (1) the speed that electromagnetic waves propogate/photons move at or (2) the fundimagical property describing the gerometry of the universe that photons and gluons and gravitons move at because of it being a fundamental property of the universe.

Creationists who try to invoke a changing speed of light try to imagine the former -- a universe just like ours except light travels a lot faster, and no pre-technological society can tell the difference since the speed of light seems infinite by human standards anyway.

The point of physicists in countering this is that the latter is true -- to increase the speed of light you have to increase this funadmental parameter of the universe which shows up in a plethora of non-propogation-of-light-related equations, gratuitously mucking up the rest of the universe. The big two I can think of would be a massive increase in the yield of nuclear fusion, and a massive decrease in gravity.

Tim Thompson

Helen prefers to interpret things in the way she likes, as opposed to the way they are. The effect she is referring to, the idea that the speed of light was once greater by a factor of about 10^60, is part of a set of ideas known as variable speed of light cosmology, or just VSL cosmology for short. It is the brainchild of the Portugese/British scientist Joao Magueijo (he was at Cambridge, but is now at Imperial College). He has already written a book on VSL cosmology, as well as a number of research papers, and the first draft of a large review paper for Physics Reports (New Variable Speed of Light Theories). Magueijo first proposed the hypothesis, along with Andreas Albrecht, back in 1998 (A time varying speed of light as a solution to cosmological puzzles). Helen & friends were all over it as soon as it came out, since it seems to support the idea of Barry Setterfield that changes in the speed of light are responsible for the appearance of age in the young universe.

Of course, the big difference is that Setterfield thinks there is evidence for this in the historical record (on which matter he is sadly mistaken). The VSL theory first advanced by Mageuijo uses the time varying speed of light in the extremely early universe, as an alternate idea to inflation. After all, in general relativity the speed of light is just the "constant" of proportionality between space & time (see `c' is the speed of light, isn't it?). So the variation in the speed of light all takes place long before there is anything in the universe except pure, unadulterated energy.

It is of no consequence that this appears to violate special relativity (which should not be considered a-priori inviolate anyway), since it all takes place in the infant universe. The VSL idea is certainly not accepted as viable by the majority, but Magueijo certainly pushes hard enough. There may be problems conserving the electron charge, but even that may have been solved by now.

Bottom line for now is that the idea, as presented in science, is not by any means "crackpot", and has a lot of merit. But it's not the majority view either. But you know how creationists work, they think that anything which is not an eternal truth, cannot have any truth in it at all. So they go after every little vision of a chink in the scientific armor, such as the possibility of a time varying speed of light. There is a huge gap between Setterfield's ideas and Magueijo's ideas. Mageuijo's might even work, but Setterfield's is just a bad joke.

ex-xian

The speed of light can be derived using "Maxwell's Wonderful Equations." Specifically, the square of 1 divided by the permutivity of free space times the pearmeability of free space is equal to c. So if the speed of light were faster, then those constants would be different, so all the interactions of electromagnetisms would be different. Furthermore, if gravitons are truly the mediam of gravity, then there would be similiar effects upon the gravitational force. Also, the weak nuclear force has been unified with EM (the electroweak force).

So if the VSL theory is true, then we would have to rewrite physics. That's not to say that it isn't true (in the sense that Mageuijo uses it), but it sounds like a helluva of a lot of work for something for which there is no evidence (that I know of).

ComestibleVenom

I think it's something like 1.95 billion years per day btw.

ex-xian