Speed of light slowing down?

The theory of evolution requires unfathomable lengths of time – eons ... billions and billions of years.

Even with all that time, it's still hard to imagine how complex biochemicals such as hemoglobin or chlorophyll self assembled in the primordial goo. But to those of us who question the process, the answer is always the same. Time. More time than you can grasp – timespans so vast that anything is possible, even chance combinations of random chemicals to form the stunning complexities of reproducing life.

Modern physics is now considering a theory that could throw into confusion virtually all of the accepted temporal paradigms of 20th-century science, including the age of the universe and the billions of years necessary for evolution. Further, it raises the distinct possibility that scientific validation exists for a (gasp) literal interpretation of the seminal passages of Genesis. Goodbye Scopes trial.

The theory is deceptively simple: The speed of light is not constant, as we've been taught since the early 1930s, but has been steadily slowing since the first instance of time.

If true, virtually all aspects of traditional physics are affected, including the presumed steady state of radioactive decay used to measure geologic time.

It's an intriguing story – and like many revolutions in science, it begins with observations that just don't fit currently accepted scientific dogma.

Early in 1979, an Australian undergraduate student named Barry Setterfield, thought it would be interesting to chart all of the measurements of the speed of light since a Dutch astronomer named Olaf Roemer first measured light speed in the late 17th century. Setterfield acquired data on over 163 measurements using 16 different methods over 300 years.

The early measurements typically tracked the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter when the planet was near the Earth and compared it with observations when then planet was farther away. These observations were standard, simple and repeatable, and have been measured by astronomers since the invention of the telescope. These are demonstrated to astronomy students even today. The early astronomers kept meticulous notes and sketches, many of which are still available.

Setterfield expected to see the recorded speeds grouped around the accepted value for light speed, roughly 299,792 kilometers /second. In simple terms, half of the historic measurements should have been higher and half should be lower.

What he found defied belief: The derived light speeds from the early measurements were significantly faster than today. Even more intriguing, the older the observation, the faster the speed of light. A sampling of these values is listed below:

In 1738: 303,320 +/- 310 km/second In 1861: 300,050 +/- 60 km/second In 1877: 299,921 +/- 13 km/second In 2004: 299,792 km/second (accepted constant)

Setterfield teamed with statistician Dr. Trevor Norman and demonstrated that, even allowing for the clumsiness of early experiments, and correcting for the multiple lenses of early telescopes and other factors related to technology, the speed of light was discernibly higher 100 years ago, and as much as 7 percent higher in the 1700s. Dr. Norman confirmed that the measurements were statistically significant with a confidence of more than 99 percent.

Setterfield and Norman published their results at SRI in July 1987 after extensive peer review.

It would be easy to dismiss two relatively unknown researchers if theirs were the only voices in this wilderness and the historic data was the only anomaly. They are not.

Since the SRI publication in 1987, forefront researchers from Russia, Australia, Great Britain and the United States have published papers in prestigious journals questioning the constancy of the speed of light.

Within the last 24 months, Dr. Joao Magueijo, a physicist at Imperial College in London, Dr. John Barrow of Cambridge, Dr. Andy Albrecht of the University of California at Davis and Dr. John Moffat of the University of Toronto have all published work advocating their belief that light speed was much higher – as much as 10 to the 10th power faster – in the early stages of the "Big Bang" than it is today. (It's important to note that none of these researchers have expressed any bias toward a predetermined answer, biblical or otherwise. If anything, they are antagonistic toward a biblical worldview.)

Dr. Magueijo believes that light speed was faster only in the instants following the beginning of time. Dr. Barrow, Barry Setterfield and others believe that light speed has been declining from the beginning of time to the historic near past.

Dr. Magueijo recently stated that the debate should not be why and how could the speed of light could vary, but what combination of irrefutable theories demands that it be constant at all.

Setterfield now believes there are at least four other major observed anomalies consistent with a slowing speed of light:

4. and differences between time as measured by the atomic clock, and time as measured by the orbits of the planets in our solar system.

The red shift refers to observations by astronomers of the light emitted by galaxies. Early astronomers noticed that galaxies considered to be most distant from the earth had light spectra shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. In 1929 astronomer Edwin Hubble compared the galaxies' spectra with their presumed distances (calculated using different methods), and showed that the amount of "red shift" was proportional to the calculated distance from Earth.

Hubble and others postulated that the "red shift" was caused by the velocity of the galaxies as they receded from Earth and from each other – the farther away the galaxy, the faster the velocity, the more the observed Doppler red shift. Galaxies whose observed light is seen as shifted into the far red are considered to be moving at amazingly high speeds away from us.

Hubble's theory of the expanding universe demands an even distribution of red-shift data.

Dr. William Tifft, now retired from the University of Arizona, measured and recorded red-shift data for over 20 years. Dr. Tifft found that the red-shift data were not random at all, but grouped into quantum bands.

Quantum red-shift data simply does not fit in the comfortable world of classical physics.

Where it does fit, like it was made for it, is in the Setterfield Hypothesis. According to Setterfield and others, declining light speeds would cause changes in the quantum states of atomic structure within these galaxies, leading to quantum shifts in the light emitted – precisely what Dr. Tifft and others detected.

Setterfield believes that the speed of light was initially about 10 to the 10th power faster than it is today. After the creation of the universe, light speed declined following a curve approximating the curve of the cosecant squared. He believes that light speed reached a point where it is asymptotic since the mid 1960s. Though reasonably constant, he believes the speed still varies in waves – sometimes higher and sometimes lower than the accepted standard.

Intriguingly, recent observations of the signals received from the aging satellites Galileo, Ulysses and Pioneer are also in the category of speed of light anomalies. A unexplained Doppler frequency shift has been detected from all of these satellites, even though the satellites' distances from the Earth are only about 20 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun – way too close for a traditional Doppler shift to occur in the electromagnetic spectrum. NASA scientists have attempted with little success to attribute the anomalies to an unknown acceleration. Setterfield suggests that equally plausible explanations are variations in c.

It's important to recognize the resistance that the current hierarchy of science has to the possibility that light speed may not be constant. Dr. Joao Magueijo was forced to wait for over a year between submission of his initial work on varying light speed and publication. Setterfield, Dr. Tifft, Dr. Paul Davis, Dr. John Barrow and others have been subjected to peer review which borders on ridicule.

Dr. Tifft's discussion of red-shift anomalies was published with seeming reluctance in the Astrophysical Journal in the mid 1980s with a rare editorial note pointing out that the referees "neither could find obvious errors with the analysis nor felt that they could enthusiastically endorse publication."

After Dr. Tifft's initial publication, several astronomers devised extensive experiments in attempts to prove him wrong. Among them two Scottish astronomers, Bruce Gutherie and William Napier from the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh observed approximately 300 galaxies in the mid 1990s. They found to their surprise confirmation of quantum banding of red-shift data.

They also had difficulty publishing their data. It has been reported that the prestigious Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics refused publication until an additional set of observations from 97 other spiral galaxies was included. A Fourier analysis of the 302 early data points, and the subsequent total of 399 data points strongly confirmed the quantum shifts.

Despite this – and additional observations by Bell in 2003 – many scientists are still reluctant to give up on the theory that red shifts are solely caused by Doppler shifts and have continued to claim that the red-shift quanta results by Tifft and others are due to sloppy research or insufficient data.

It's intriguing to note that the first measurement of light speed by Olaf Roemer in the late 17th century was an attempt to disprove the Aristotelian belief that light speed was infinite. Despite overwhelming and repeatable evidence, over 50 years passed before the scientific hierarchy of the time accepted evidence which, in retrospect was clear, compelling and unimpeachable.

Thank you so much for the ping and your question!

Your area.....what's your analysis of this?

I find this very interesting and have been tracking it for some time. However, from what I have read, the most compelling indication of such a shift is the fine structure constant. Recent discoveries indicate that the changes are small (though significant) over the time involved:

American Institute of Physics bulletin 410 1/13/99

IS THE FINE STRUCTURE CONSTANT CHANGING? The inherent strength of the electromagnetic force is characterized by a parameter called the fine structure constant (denoted by the Greek letter alpha), defined as the charge of the electron squared divided by the product of Planck's constant and the speed of light. The size of alpha determines how well atoms hold together and what types of light atoms will emit when heated up. And just as the elastic band keeping a swimsuit snug will gradually relax with time, so it is reasonable to ask whether an atoms' elasticity (or alpha) might also vary with time, an idea broached by Paul Dirac in 1937. A group of scientists at the University of New South Wales in Australia (John Webb, jkw@edwin.phys.unsw.edu.au) test this proposition by sampling ancient light emitted by ancient atoms, and comparing them to modern light from modern atoms. In particular they looked at the relative spacing of doublets of absorption lines in the spectra of several types of atoms in distant gas clouds lying in front of still more distant quasars. The spacings, not easy to tease out from the faint spectra, are proportional to alpha squared. After taking into account Doppler effects owing to the expansion of the universe, the Australian scientists find that there is a consistent change in alpha with increasing redshift (z), especially above a z of one. Owing to the caution needed in claiming a "measurement" of alpha change, the researchers prefer to think of their result as constituting a new upper limit on the fractional alpha change for z>1 of about 2 parts in 10,000. (Webb et al., Physical Review Letters, 1 February 1999.)

American Institue of Physics bulletin 517 12/21/2000

LIMITS ON THE COSMIC EVOLUTION OF THE FINE STRUCTURE CONSTANT. Denoted by the Greek letter alpha, the fine structure constant sets the absolute strength of the electromagnetic force at work inside atoms and in the cosmos. Besides this, alpha incorporates within itself several of the other important fundamental constants of nature, and is defined as 2 times pi times the charge of the electron squared, divided by the product of the speed of light and Planck's constant. If alpha has changed over the eons, then part of the redshift exhibited by the spectra of distant galaxies would not be attributable exclusively to the expansion of the universe, thus throwing off many astrophysics calculations. Hence it is desirable to troll for different physical constants in past epochs much as one scans core samples from Greenland to gather fossil bits of ancient air trapped in the ice layers A new comparison of the 21-cm-wavelength emission of hydrogen atoms in distant radio galaxies with that of terrestrial hydrogen reduces the systematic uncertainties by an order of magnitude relative to previous studies using this technique and suggests that any non-expansion contribution to redshifts would be in the fifth decimal at best. Equivalently, the measured limit on proportional change in alpha is less 3.5 x 10^-15 per year out to a look-back time of 4.8 billion years. This study was carried out by astronomers at the National Radio Astronomy (Chris Carilli, 505- 835-7000, ccarilli@nrao.edu), Max Planck Institute (Bonn), University of Colorado, Space Telescope Science Institute, Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy, Kapteyn Research Institute (NL), Onsala Space Observatory (Sweden), and Harvard Smithsonian. (Carilli et al., Physical Review Letters, 25 December 2000)

American Institute of Physics bulletin 552 8/20/2001

Is alpha, like pi, a fundamental constant, or does it change over time? Pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter (pi can be defined in other ways too) doesn't seem to be changing, but alpha, the symbol for the fine structure constant, might be.

Alpha is a measure of the intrinsic strength of the electromagnetic force and thus determines how strong an atom is bound and what kind of light is absorbed or emitted by the atom when an electron inside the atom moves from one internal quantum state to another.

In 1999 a group of scientists at the University of New South Wales in Australia reported some positive evidence that alpha was not staying the same (See Update 410). The evidence for a changing alpha--at the level of a part in 100,000, according to a new report being issued by the same group--consists of the spacings of pairs of absorption lines of metal atoms in gas clouds in front of quasars at various redshifts. The spacings are proportional to alpha squared. The new observations suggest that alpha is growing bigger.

This, if confirmed by further tests, runs counter to the law which prescribes that elasticized objects lose their holding power with the years. Swimsuits might droop with age, but atoms would get stronger as time goes by. (Webb et al., Physical Review Letters, 27 August.)

CERN: Are fundamental constants evolving?

Making a return appearance on the physics stage is a report of the possible evolution of the fine structure constant, a.

This constant, which governs fine structure in the emission and absorption spectra of atoms, is defined by other fundamental constants: the charge of the electron, the Planck constant and the speed of light. If , a were to vary, then at least one of the other "constants" would have to change as well. If the speed of light were evolving, this would have important implications for recent cosmological observations, such as the apparent need for negative gravitational pressure and a cosmological constant.

The new results are based on the spectroscopy of gas clouds using light from distant quasars and then comparing the spectral lines with those observed in the laboratory today. The results suggest that , a is evolving with time.

The reported fractional change is minute, being -0.72 ¥10-5 over the redshift range from z = 0.5 to 3.5. However, even such a minute change would have tremendous significance. The researchers have not yet identified any systematic effects that could otherwise explain the results.

However, it is clear that the "constants" that scientists claim "prove" the age of the universe and thus "disprove" Creation are in fact nothing more than flawed theories.

Actually, it seems that the 14-billion-year estimate of the present age of the universe, and the 4-billion-year estimated age for the Earth, rest on very solid empirical foundations, wagglebee. Yet even if true, neither falsifies the Biblical creation.

The God of Genesis created the universe and all things in it out of nothing "in six days." But ask yourself: What is the length of a "day" to an eternal (timeless) Being? That is, to God Himself? In part, I read a "day" in Genesis as referring, not to "day" as we humans understand it (i.e., the amount of time it takes for the Earth to complete one rotation along its axis), but to the successive stages of divine creative development. Recall that God speaks of "day" even before He creates the Earth itself:

1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

1:4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.

"Day" is God's name for "light."

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Aha!