BBC Focus Magazine

[M Paul Lloyd]

Basically if this is correct (which it may not be) then pretty much everything we think we know about the universe could be wrong.

By Ron Cowen
Friday, September 3rd, 2010
The constants, they may be a-changin’ — and so may some of the fundamental laws of nature, a controversial new study suggests.
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.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic ... _constants

[Healerman]

Yes, a bit bothersome

Frankly, there are too many unanswered questions to get particularly worried by this just yet. Considering our understanding of inflation, dark energy, dark matter, the pioneer anomaly etc, etc, it may be that the observations are sound but the data is distorted by fitting them into an incomplete or innaccurate model of the universe.

Every time I see anomalous findings announced, I cross my fingers and hope that this is the data that produces the new model that makes all those odd observations fall into place.

[M Paul Lloyd]

Or a new model that actually works?

[The Beige Avenger]

I'm almost keeping my head out of cosmology... keeps blummin changing!!