Is the spped of light slowing down?

[Avinash]

I wonder why nobody has posted it so far. Anyway, let me do that.

 

The crux of Einstein's theory of relativity -- that E = mc 2 -- is under challenge, following evidence that the speed of light might be slowing down.

 

The discovery, made by a team of Australian scientists, undermines Einstein's key formula which maintains that the speed of light must remain constant.

 

The team's findings, which are published in the latest edition of respected science journal Nature, are causing a major stir in the lofty circles of theoretical physics.

 

Team leader Paul Davies, of Sydney's Macquarie University, says that if the speed of light has slowed over billions of years, physicists will have to rethink many of their basic ideas about the laws of the universe.

 

"That means giving up the theory of relativity and E = mc2 and all that sort of stuff," Davies told Reuters news agency on Thursday.

 

What Davies and his team did was study a 12 billion-year-old stream of light.

 

They discovered it did not have the properties it was expected to, and by a process of elimination deduced that the speed of light must have been much faster billions of years ago.

 

"It's entirely possible that the speed of light would have got greater and greater as you go back," he told the Herald Sun newspaper.

 

"If the speed of light were nearly infinite in the first split second [of the universe's creation] it would explain why the universe is so uniform."

 

[Jahnava Nitai Das]

Just when I was getting used to the old speed of light. /ubbthreads/images/icons/smile.gif

[gHari]

Oh Doctor Frog, how much more must my mind 'learn' and relearn from you? It seems so full of so much useless nonsense already.

 

All in all, it's just another brick in the wall.