Science: Changing One of Nature's Constants?

Studying the pattern in which gas clouds absorb the light from distant quasars, astronomers say they have found evidence that one of nature's physical constants changes in a lopsided manner.

Along one direction the fine-structure constant, which governs the strength of the electromagnetic force, grows slightly weaker with time, while in the other direction it grows slightly stronger. The research, by John Webb of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues, was posted online at arXiv.org on August 25 (http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.3907). The work is the latest in a series of controversial studies on the fine-structure constant, also known as alpha, that the researchers have conducted since 1999.

If the study is correct, it would force physicists to reconsider many of their most cherished ideas about the universe, including the notion, touted by Einstein, that the laws of physics are the same everywhere in the cosmos.

“This would be sensational if it were real, but I'm still not completely convinced that it's not simply systematic errors” in the data, comments cosmologist Max Tegmark of MIT. Craig Hogan of the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., acknowledges that “it's a competent team and a thorough analysis.” But because the work has such profound implications for physics and requires such a high level of precision measurements, “it needs more proof before we'll believe it.”

For more, see Changing One of Nature's Constants by Ron Cowen, September 3, 2010 at ScienceNews.