University of New South Wales
Those looking forward to a day when science’s Grand Unifying Theory of Everything could be worn on a t-shirt may have to wait a little longer as astrophysicists continue to find hints that one of the cosmological constants is not so constant after all.
In a paper published in prestigious journal Science Advances, scientists from UNSW Sydney reported that four new measurements of light emitted from a quasar 13 billion light years away reaffirm past studies that have measured tiny variations in the fine structure constant.
UNSW Science’s Professor John Webb says the fine structure constant is a measure of electromagnetism – one of the four fundamental forces in nature (the others are gravity, weak nuclear force and strong nuclear force).
“The fine structure constant is the quantity that physicists use as a measure of the strength of the electromagnetic force,” Professor Webb says.
“It’s a dimensionless number and it involves the speed of light, something called Planck’s constant and the electron charge, and it’s a ratio of those things. And it’s the number that physicists use to measure the strength of the electromagnetic force.”
The electromagnetic force keeps electrons whizzing around a nucleus in every atom of the universe – without it, all matter would fly apart. Up until recently, it was believed to be an unchanging force throughout time and space. But over the last two decades, Professor Webb has noticed anomalies in the fine structure constant whereby electromagnetic force measured in one particular direction of the universe seems ever so slightly different.
“We found a hint that that number of the fine structure constant was different in certain regions of the universe. Not just as a function of time, but actually also in direction in the universe, which is really quite odd if it’s correct…but that’s what we found.”
LOOKING FOR CLUES
Ever the sceptic, when Professor Webb first came across these early signs of slightly weaker and stronger measurements of the electromagnetic force, he thought it could be a fault of the equipment, or of his calculations or some other error that had led to the unusual readings. It was while looking at some of the most distant quasars – massive celestial bodies emitting exceptionally high energy – at the edges of the universe that these anomalies were first observed using the world’s most powerful telescopes.
“The most distant quasars that we know of are about 12 to 13 billion light years from us,” Professor Webb says.
“So if you can study the light in detail from distant quasars, you’re studying the properties of the universe as it was when it was in its infancy, only a billion years old. The universe then was very, very different. No galaxies existed, the early stars had formed but there was certainly not the same population of stars that we see today. And there were no planets.”
He says that in the current study, the team looked at one such quasar that enabled them to probe back to when the universe was only a billion years old which had never been done before. The team made four measurements of the fine constant along the one line of sight to this quasar. Individually, the four measurements didn’t provide any conclusive answer as to whether or not there were perceptible changes in the electromagnetic force. However, when combined with lots of other measurements between us and distant quasars made by other scientists and unrelated to this study, the differences in the fine structure constant became evident.
A WEIRD UNIVERSE
“And it seems to be supporting this idea that there could be a directionality in the universe, which is very weird indeed,” Professor Webb says.
“So the universe may not be isotropic in its laws of physics – one that is the same, statistically, in all directions. But in fact, there could be some direction or preferred direction in the universe where the laws of physics change, but not in the perpendicular direction. In other words, the universe in some sense, has a dipole structure to it.
“In one particular direction, we can look back 12 billion light years and measure electromagnetism when the universe was very young. Putting all the data together, electromagnetism seems to gradually increase the further we look, while towards the opposite direction, it gradually decreases. In other directions in the cosmos, the fine structure constant remains just that – constant. These new very distant measurements have pushed our observations further than has ever been reached before.”
In other words, in what was thought to be an arbitrarily random spread of galaxies, quasars, black holes, stars, gas clouds and planets – with life flourishing in at least one tiny niche of it – the universe suddenly appears to have the equivalent of a north and a south. Professor Webb is still open to the idea that somehow these measurements made at different stages using different technologies and from different locations on Earth are actually a massive coincidence.
“This is something that is taken very seriously and is regarded, quite correctly with scepticism, even by me, even though I did the first work on it with my students. But it’s something you’ve got to test because it’s possible we do live in a weird universe.”
But adding to the side of the argument that says these findings are more than just coincidence, a team in the US working completely independently and unknown to Professor Webb’s, made observations about X-rays that seemed to align with the idea that the universe has some sort of directionality.
“I didn’t know anything about this paper until it appeared in the literature,” he says.
“And they’re not testing the laws of physics, they’re testing the properties, the X-ray properties of galaxies and clusters of galaxies and cosmological distances from Earth. They also found that the properties of the universe in this sense are not isotropic and there’s a preferred direction. And lo and behold, their direction coincides with ours.”
LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING
While still wanting to see more rigorous testing of ideas that electromagnetism may fluctuate in certain areas of the universe to give it a form of directionality, Professor Webb says if these findings continue to be confirmed, they may help explain why our universe is the way it is, and why there is life in it at all.
“For a long time, it has been thought that the laws of nature appear perfectly tuned to set the conditions for life to flourish. The strength of the electromagnetic force is one of those quantities. If it were only a few per cent different to the value we measure on Earth, the chemical evolution of the universe would be completely different and life may never have got going. It raises a tantalising question: does this ‘Goldilocks’ situation, where fundamental physical quantities like the fine structure constant are ‘just right’ to favour our existence, apply throughout the entire universe?”
If there is a directionality in the universe, Professor Webb argues, and if electromagnetism is shown to be very slightly different in certain regions of the cosmos, the most fundamental concepts underpinning much of modern physics will need revision.
“Our standard model of cosmology is based on an isotropic universe, one that is the same, statistically, in all directions,” he says.
“That standard model itself is built upon Einstein’s theory of gravity, which itself explicitly assumes constancy of the laws of Nature. If such fundamental principles turn out to be only good approximations, the doors are open to some very exciting, new ideas in physics.”
Professor Webb’s team believe this is the first step towards a far larger study exploring many directions in the universe, using data coming from new instruments on the world’s largest telescopes. New technologies are now emerging to provide higher quality data, and new artificial intelligence analysis methods will help to automate measurements and carry them out more rapidly and with greater precision.
###
I may have missed it, but what is that particular direction?
How does it compare with our movement relative to the CMBR?
Well. I’m certainly glad I’m stupid, because otherwise I’d be obsessing about things like the inconstancy of the electromagnetic constant. What I like to do when problems like this arise is say, God did it. There you go. (Incidentally, God is very tolerant of my imperfections, but he’s pretty annoyed with yours. So wise up.)
I have actually read and can derive (as it takes only high school Math) the Special Theory of Relativity. That’s the one where, if you assume the speed of light is constant in a vacuum to all observers, that length, mass and time are all relative. Cool. But so what? Because, let me tell you, the greatest scientific discoveries in human history were made by Isaac Newton. I took Engineering, and spent hundreds of hours learning to manipulate the Laws of Gravity ( often using Calculus, which is another of Newton’s achievements), and none fooling around with anything Einstein did other than Brownian motion.
And anyway, a strictly physical universe just doesn’t do it for me. If the universe is physical, there is no free will. Nobody on this Earth cannot believe in free will. Even people who think that they don’t believe in free will are compelled by the nature of life to actually believe in it.
Hormones drive most of our more interesting behavior and consequential actions. Not a lot of free will involved. Mortal threats also tend to evoke non-voluntary action and behavior. Expending 25% of available life asleep isn’t optional either. First time I fell in love it was love at first sight and I didn’t consciously do any choosing whatsoever, this girl had a key to my genetic programming and my body automatically recognized her key and chose without conferring with me, and that was the end of that. Not exactly predestination. Occasionally I get to make some consequential deliberative choices, but it’s a roll of the dice every time. Free will and the Law of Unintended Consequences do not play well together. Add Murphy’s Law and you can see the problem with thinking free will is a major player in the cosmos at large.
The “universe” may well be physical, or at least we can infer from signals of assumed/asserted fidelity. The near-frame may well be physical. Our bodies may well be physical and subject to constraint. Our consciousness, however, cannot be discerned to originate or be expressed in this physical vessel.
Ian,
“…none fooling around with anything Einstein did…”
Nonsense. You have to take into account relativistic effects to accurately track satellites, calculate your position using GPS signals, etc. There are engineers and scientists that “fool around with” Einstein’s work on a regular basis because it’s the only way they can get the results they need. Not to put down Newton, of course, the man was a certified genius the likes of which are extremely rare in human history, but give Einstein his due.
” … Professor Webb’s team believe this is the first step towards a far larger study exploring many directions in the universe, using data coming from new instruments on the world’s largest telescopes. New technologies are now emerging to provide higher quality data, and new artificial intelligence analysis methods will help to automate measurements and carry them out more rapidly and with greater precision.”
—
Besides everything else he may well have discovered a whole new cosmological mechanism with which to pay for hot dinners. You don’t see that very often. And the article made no mention of dark E or m … not seen that since 1998.
From the article: “Those looking forward to a day when science’s Grand Unifying Theory of Everything could be worn on a t-shirt may have to wait a little longer as astrophysicists continue to find hints that one of the cosmological constants is not so constant after all.”
I love this stuff!
THIS is science.
The caption on my gravestone is going to say “It’s all magic …again”
The fine structure constant has some another interesting properties.
It’s also the ratio of 2 impedance’s, Zo/Zp, where Zo is the impedance of free space given as sqrt(u0/e0) and Zp is the resonant impedance of the LC equivalent circuit for a photon storing energy E=hv and given as Zp=2h/q^2. An EE might also recognize the fine structures reciprocal, Zp/Zo , as the Q of a resonant circuit whose resonant impedance is Zp and whose load impedance is Zo.
When you equate E=hv to the energy stored in a capacitor given as q^2/2C, the C of the free space occupied by the photon is 1/a times too large, conversely, the L is 1/a times too small. Recognizing that u0 and e0 are immutable and L and C are functions of u0, e0 and the geometry, the only way to achieve the required L and C is to locally warp half of the geometry occupied by a photon by 1/a and the other half by a. The fine structure constant is now representative of a scalar matric of space-time curvature that warps the space-time occupied by a photon so that it may conform to Maxwell’s equations. Otherwise, the energy, wavelength and geometry of a photon combined with the L and C of the containing free space geometry are inconsistent with each other and do not conform to Maxwell’s equations.
This makes the fine structure the connection between curvature (gravity) and charge and once this is understood, warp drive using specfically crafted EM fields becomes practical.
“specifically crafted EM fields”
We’ll first need to find some dilithium crystals for that.
Actually no. It does require significant high voltage power, but nothing beyond current capabilities. A craft predicted by my hypothesis will have the EM signature of a low frequency photon while the craft ‘hides’ in the boundary between the more curved space-time and the less curved space-time characteristic of a photon.
My hypothesis that all of existence is manifested by space-time curvature leads to a photon’s propulsion method being a manifestation of an Alcubierre Warp Drive and that’s what we need to mimic at the macroscopic scale. Any matter enclosed by the exactly flat space-time boundary between the curved and uncurved space-time becomes isolated from the space-time it’s traveling through, i.e. it becomes inertia less mass, which you can almost consider as the craft existing in its own sub-space. What makes it a bit tricky is that in a photon, this boundary is a point, and for a craft, that point needs to be stretched out into a surface that encloses it. One possibility is a superconducting skin.
co2, quite interesting. Is there any way to experiment w/that idea? A superconducting enclosure should be possible (but requiring extreme chilling).
beng135
Yes. Producing and validating the resulting fields is easier than applying those fields as a propulsion method.
Space-time resonates as a transmission line with a characteristic 377 ohm impedance which is what Maxwell’s equations describe as fundamental to propagating planar EM energy. I’ve discovered a second resonance impedance at 377/a (about 51K ohms), where a is the fine structure constant. This is the resonant impedance of photons based on their energy given by E=hv. Putting energy into space-time at this resonant impedance doesn’t propagate as planar EM, but builds into a standing EM wave manifesting curvature fields, i.e. photons, which propagate by freefall in a curvature field. This can be tested with a laser interferometer setup to distinguish a physical difference between planar EM and photons by detecting the predicted local changes in curvature. Note that wave/particle duality allows either to be modeled as the other, but the predicted locally curved space-time of a photon required for the 51K resonance, but not for the 377 ohm resonance, should be detectable for large wavelength photons as compared to the same wavelength planar EM wave.
CO2, what is “a” in your equations?
It should be alpha–the fine-structure constant.
Jim
E=MC’2
Speed of light being the definitive , not the variable .
Light speed is a snail , Scotty and Capt. Kirk know that .
Is there some reason to not believe that some 13 billion years ago constants may have had different forces acting on them causing different values? Good to be sceptical.
If you accept the expansion theory as being true, I guess this becomes the question everyone should have asked…
Does anybody understand how they measured the fine structure constant? They seem to provide no description.
I suspect they’re measuring the relative relationships in the fine structure of the line spectra for Hydrogen. Since the fine structure constant shows up in quantifying the energy levels in Hydrogen, a different fine structure constant will result in differently spaced lines.
Most likely. However, they were “looking at some of the most distant quasars” – or, equivalently, some of the most powerful quasars. Four measurements total, of most extreme environments. Too weak a foundation for far-reaching proposals. It feels like asking for more grants.
Yes, in addition to a tiny data set, it’s questionable whether or not they have the precision and accuracy to actually discern such minuscule differences with reasonable certainty.
It could also be caused by chromatic aberation in a gravitational lens and we know that the quasars are super massive black holes exhibiting extreme gravity.
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/357/1/135/1034335
“Our standard model of cosmology is based on an isotropic universe, one that is the same, statistically, in all directions,” he says.
Wouldn’t we only expect that to be true if Earth were smack dab in the center of the universe?
Surely the odds against that must be… astronomical?
Nick,
Technically, all places in the Universe appear from their location to be in its center and relatively speaking, they are. This is because we don’t actually see the Universe, and what we observe are slices of it’s Electromagnetic history. Everywhere in the now Universe is at the end of current history and in each speed of light limited viewport, the past extends radially away as each observation point will concurrently view a different slice of the Universes Electromagnetic history. All possible viewports appear to be centered in a sphere of time which is actually a spherical projection of a 4-d space-time manifold, where the radius of the projection is time.
or not.
All pretended “symmetries” are idealizations.
They may hold on small scales.
They never hold on cosmological scales.
Don’t be an idealist.
You’d be de-illusioned once.
Alex,
What pretend symmetry idealizing nature are you referring to that doesn’t hold true on cosmological scales?
Could this be more evidence of “dark flow”?
Booming voice with shaking/closed fist — “You don’t know the powwweeer of the dark flow.”
““So if you can study the light in detail from distant quasars, you’re studying the properties of the universe as it was when it was in its infancy, only a billion years old. The universe then was very, very different. No galaxies existed, the early stars had formed but there was certainly not the same population of stars that we see today. And there were no planets.””
Discovering you are wrong about a long believed constant and still parrot the same old crap about pretending to even have a remove idea of how old the universe is, or how large it is.
Press releases from 20 years ago, are scientific facts today, ugh Science was taken over by institutions and since around the 1970s has been on a steady decline.
Mark- Helsinki. It comes from fatigue that not a lot of anything fundamental has been discovered in about a century. Dark matter, dark energy, strings and things are the product of this idleness. Lord Kelvin wasn’t very far out in is thought that all that remained for science was “cleaning up” the odd controversy, and refinements. Einstein followed, of course, and K was criticized because of this quick ‘refutation’ however Kelvin would have been pretty much right on if he had waited 7 to 10 years.
At the end of the nineteenth century it was said that a bright person could easily read the entire scientific literature from Biology to Physics, Chemistry, medicine and the rest. What a delicious thought; what a nutritious thought.
The number of papers now is about 50 million! So much chaff and small potatoes. Most of this is after the first couple of decades of the twentieth century!
A study by pharma reseach company Amgen looking to gear up for new drug development selected 53 breakthrough cancer treatment studies and found only 6 could be replicated. Recent studies of climate topics found egregiously poor research design (ocean biology research, in particular – marinating creatures in strong acids was common), improper statistical methods, data selection biases, unsupported conclusions drawn.
https://duncan.hull.name/2010/07/15/fifty-million/
https://www.salon.com/2013/09/01/is_cancer_research_facing_a_crisis/
I better not add more links, Mods treat me fairly severely even with no links. But think of how research is hampered with a largely worthless tonnage of papers to sift through by postmodern, mostly under educated practioners that flooded into universities over the 30yrs+ or so of university, diversity perversity instead of simple merit.
>>
“It’s a dimensionless number and it involves the speed of light, something called Planck’s constant and the electron charge, and it’s a ratio of those things. . . .”
<<
Something called Planck’s constant? How about just Planck’s constant?
Dr. Leon Lederman on page 147 of his book, “The God Particle” tells this story about Planck:
Once, when he (Max Planck) forgot which room he was supposed to lecture in, he stopped by the department office and asked, “Please tell me in which room does Professor Planck lecture today?” He was told sternly, “Don’t go there, young fellow. You are much too young to understand the lectures of our learned Professor Planck.”
Jim
Unsettled science, indeed!
Looking at a single paradox that goes nowhere is boring.
Also this calculation and subject is complicate which makes it difficult to explain to a general audience.
Astronomy is chock full of very simple physical in your face paradoxes and dead science. Astronomy also has a hard paradox.
Astronomy is what happens when the first guess is incorrect and then we math up and have 40 years of fun creating new physics to keep the dead theory going. Eventually there are so many paradox that Forest Gump would find the ‘solution’.
An example of a simple in your face paradox, in the Big Bang theory,….
Is the fact the Big Bang theory cannot provide a physical explain as to why Quasars which we assume are separated by billions of light years, can line up.
There must be something physical that is causing the quasars and the spiral galaxies’ axises to line up.
And the quasars must be close together not billion of light years in separation to enable the force to cause the alignment. There is no force that reach across billion of light years and cause the quasars and galaxies to axises to line up.
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1438/
Spooky Alignment of Quasars Across Billions of Light-years
“The first odd thing we noticed was that some of the quasars’ rotation axes were aligned with each other — despite the fact that these quasars are separated by billions of light-years,” said Hutsemékers.
The team then went further and looked to see if the rotation axes were linked, not just to each other, but also to the structure of the Universe on large scales at that time.
When astronomers look at the distribution of galaxies on scales of billions of light-years they find that they are not evenly distributed.
They form a cosmic web of filaments and clumps around huge voids where galaxies are scarce. This intriguing and beautiful arrangement of material is known as large-scale structure.
This is another paradox. There is evidence of cold gas that appears to have been created by the quasar which is the only explanation as to how 19 quasars all have cold gas near them.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.6098v1.pdf
Giant glowing halos discovered around distant quasars
(Of cold gas that is close to the quasars which should be possible to occur.)
‘Cosmic’ Microwave Background Paradoxes
The signal which was hypothesized to be the ‘cosmic’ record of the ‘big’ bang should be isotropic, if the big bang happened.
What we found was the ‘C’MB signal had a large cold spot and an axis of evil.
The ‘axis’ of evil in the ‘CMB’ signal are anomalies that all line up with an axis that lines up with our galaxy.
In addition, to the called large angle paradoxes, we the microwave signal was 30 times too smooth, based on the Big Bang predictions for small angle variation.
Comment: If the Big Bang happened, too smooth a ‘C’MB would theoretically imply that matter would be too evenly distributed and there would be no galaxies. Lay people have no idea that half of the ‘cosmic’ microwave background signal is filtered out and these isotopic anomalies should have killed theory or at least put the theory in crisis.
The 30 times too smooth problem required the creation of the scalar expansion of the universe at 100,000 times faster than the speed of light which astronomers call ‘Inflation’.
‘Inflation’ is some new ‘physics’ that scalar expands space at 100,000 times faster than the speed of light and then instantly stops this super expansion and continues to expand at the normal rate universe expansion rate.
This special new Inflation physics expands space independent of the distribution of matter in the space. There is not more or less expansion where there are clumps of gas that will form galaxies.
The fundamental theoretical problem with the Inflation Theory is:
If ‘Inflation’ occurred once it saves the big bang theory. Theoretically if it occurred once there is sufficient quantum cyclic change for it to have happened again. If it happened again our universe would not exist.
The solution to inflation occurring again is called ‘fine’ tuning.
The justification for the fine tuning is the anthropogenic principal…. which assumes there are infinite universes and all of them are dead except the lucky few which are ‘fine’ tuned.
“It’s a dimensionless number and it involves the speed of light, something called Planck’s constant and the electron charge, and it’s a ratio of those things. And it’s the number that physicists use to measure the strength of the electromagnetic force.”
I’m not sure what to make of a “Science Professor” who refers to “something called Planck’s constant” and who thinks a ratio comprised of km/s, m^2 kg / s, and coulombs would be “dimensionless.”
So is the universe left handed or right handed?
Constants that turn out not to be quite as constant as they should be are a bit of a problem.
Debate about C here:
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/examination-of-sheldrakes-claim-the-speed-of-light-is-not-constant.1295/
Maybe this universe has a quantum entanglement with another universe out there somewhere. One is the mirror opposite of this one, just waiting for an observer to pop it all into existence.
Paul Penrose writes that I should give Einstein his due. Fair enough, but Albert’s due is considerably less than most people think it is. Albert Einstein is the third most overrated human being of the Twentieth Century. (The first is Bob Dylan and the second is Joe Namath.)
I don’t know nothin’ about the relativistic effects involved in designing satellite systems, Paul, but there is no Einstein relativity involved in civil or mechanical engineering. There may be a little in the design of transistors, but I doubt it. Einstein’s theories just don’t have much in the way of practical value.
As a side note of some interest, a good choice for the man with the most advanced intellect of the Twentieth Century is John von Neumann., who was the lead mathematician at Los Alamos, and one of the founding fathers of modern electronic computers. His Wikipedia page is a very good read. von Neumann was to scientific geniuses as Secretariat was to race horses.
Who’s Joe Namath?
The Relativistic correction to the atomic wave function i necessary to explain heavy atom states. That has practical application, certainly in explaining the reaction chemistry of molybdenum enzymes, and heavy metal catalysts. Probably also in theories of lanthanide high TC superconductors.
wiki’s take.
I don’t know nothin’ about the relativistic effects involved in designing satellite systems
Ian, the precise timing of satellite communications is vital & requires accounting of relativity to maintain its precision.
Yes, well, the speed of light was amazingly discovered to not be constant a few years ago, too. It’s known as “experimental error.” Quite often mistaken for “new physics,” however. They look awfully similar.
” I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” R. Feynman
““So if you can study the light in detail from distant quasars, you’re studying the properties of the universe as it was when it was in its infancy, only a billion years old. The universe then was very, very different. No galaxies existed, the early stars had formed but there was certainly not the same population of stars that we see today. And there were no planets.””
Unless I misremember, quasars are supposed to be the cores of galaxies, AGN’s…
So how could there be a quasar before there are galaxies?
And if we’re going to propose galaxies formed AROUND quasars, what process produced such entities prior to there being the masses available to collapse?
Hello RoHa . This is a primarily a Science and frequently a political blog but, since you asked, Joe Namath was the lavishly rewarded beneficiary of the fixing of Super Bowl III. You didn’t ask, but Bob Dylan is an American songwriter who wrote some good songs for Peter Paul and Mary in the sixties. Many of his lyrics are practical jokes on his listeners, as they don’t actually mean anything, although they sound profound. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Albert Einstein really did radically advance our understanding of how the universe operates. He just didn’t change the quality of our lives in any great way, unlike, say, William Shockley, who led the invention of the transistor.
He just didn’t change the quality of our lives in any great way
Einstein’s relativity enables our satellite communications.
Okay, you’ve got me there, beng. But relativistic effects are applicable only to systems requiring extreme accuracy. The moon landing, for example, did not require an application of relativistic effects. It is a simple thing to compile a list of a hundred scientific advances that had a greater effect on human prosperity than the Theories of Relativity. People believe that Relativity is so important because Albert Einstein had really good press, and because his discoveries were so startling. (Clocks run at different times if they’re in motion relative to each other? Wow.)
I realize that I’m drifting way off the topic here, but who was the single most influential human being of the Twentieth Century? Well, it wasn’t Einstein, although so many people think it was. Walt Disney had more real influence over more people than Einstein. My own vote for most influential human, incidentally, is Josef Stalin. Unfortunately.