Laws of physics 'are different' depending on where you are in the universe

[bngenoh]

Very interesting, especially in regards to the language they use in this article:

The laws of physics may not be as set in stone as previously imagined.

One of the laws of nature seems to vary depending on where in the universe you are, research suggests.

The new analysis of data from Hawaii's Keck telescope and Chile's Extremely Large Telescope, could have profound implications for our understanding of the universe.

The 'constancy' of physics is one of the most cherished principles in science - but the scientists say that the 'laws' we know may be the galactic equivalent of 'local by-laws' and things may work quite differently elsewhere.

The discovery - if true - violates one of the underlying principles of Einstein's theory of General Relativity, and has profound implications for our understanding of space and time.

The findings could mean that the universe is far bigger than we thought - possibly even infinite.

[...]

Research carried out at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Swinburne University of Technology and the University of Cambridge found that one of the four known fundamental forces, electromagnetism - measured by the so-called fine-structure constant and denoted by the symbol ‘alpha' - seems to vary across the Universe.

[...]

The researchers looked at 300 distant galaxies. The experiment found that the atoms in space behaved differently from ones on earth.

'The results astonished us,' said Professor Webb. 'In one direction - from our location in the Universe - alpha gets gradually weaker, yet in the opposite direction it gets gradually stronger.'

'The discovery, if confirmed, has profound implications for our understanding of space and time and violates one of the fundamental principles underlying Einstein's General Relativity theory,' Dr King added.

[...]

The first hints that alpha might not be constant came a decade ago when Professor John Webb and other colleagues at UNSW and elsewhere, analysed observations from the Keck Observatory, in Hawaii. Those observations were restricted to one broad area in the sky.

However, now Webb and colleagues have doubled the number of observations and measured the value of alpha in about 300 distant galaxies, all at huge distances from Earth, and over a much wider area of the sky.

The new observations were obtained using the European Southern Observatory's ‘Very Large Telescope' in Chile.

'Such violations are actually expected in some more modern ‘Theories of Everything' that try to unify all the known fundamental forces, said Professor Flambaum.

'The smooth continuous change in alpha may also imply the Universe is much larger than our observable part of it, possibly infinite.'
'Another currently popular idea is that many universes exist, each having its own set of physical laws,' Dr Murphy said. 'Even a slight change in the laws of Nature means they weren't ‘set in stone' when our Universe was born.

'The laws of Nature you see may depend on your "space-time address" - when and where you happen to live in the Universe.'

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2056018/Laws-physics-change-depending-universe.html

Very interesting "space time address," very interesting indeed.

 

[Thomas Alan]

Very interesting "space time address," very interesting indeed.

Yes, it is. Seems the Universe is alive and conscious. It can change the it's operating methods as the situation requires.

Mac

 

[bngenoh]

This goes with the topic at hand:

[...]

You write that “it would be a bit tough to organize any kind of galactic federation” because of a phenomenon called “time dilation.” Can you explain what that is?
Suppose there’s a nearby galaxy which belongs to the emperor’s galactic empire. The emperor says, “I’m going to change the law in the empire. Henceforth, everyone on getting up in the morning must devote five minutes to praising the emperor.” So he sends one of his deputies off to a nearby star system with instructions to institute his new law, and in order to get there in a reasonable length of time, he’d have to be traveling at nearly the speed of light. He will get to the planet [in the nearby star system] in, let’s say, 100 years in the future, as far as the people on the planet are concerned. So they will say the law went into affect in the year [2111], but the Emperor’s deputy will take, say, only 10 years to travel to the planet, and another 10 years to travel back to Earth because of the time dilation effect. The law will be different at every point in the galactic empire because different observers will think the law went into effect at different times. I think that would make it difficult to run a reasonable empire.

Good point. So the person in the spaceship is experiencing time at a different rate?

Essentially, clocks in the spaceship are running more slowly than clocks that are at rest [outside the spaceship].

Does this have to do with our subjective experience of time?

No. If they don’t look outside, the people on the spaceship will not be aware that the time is moving slowly for them, but they will become aware of it when they return to Earth and find out that while 20 years has elapsed for them, 200 years has elapsed on Earth.

OK, if there are two different times, inside and outside time machine, then doesn’t time travel occur around us all the time? You mention in the book the idea of a bullet being fired. Theoretically, is the time inside the bullet slower than our time outside the bullet?

Yeah. If you imagine you had a tiny little watch in the bullet and you fired the bullet at a target, let’s say, 10 miles away. The bullet would take something like 10 seconds to get there, as seen by people on the Earth, but the little watch in the bullet, when it hits the target, will not read 10 seconds, but, say, 3 seconds. So the time as read by the clock in bullet will not be the same as the clock at the target, when the bullet get to the target — that’s provided you have synchronized the clocks.

[Going back to our previous example with the emperor], people on Earth and on the [other] planet think their clocks are running at the same rate, but then the clock on spaceship, when it arrives at the other planet, will not be synchronized with the clock on [that] planet because the clock in the spaceship (just as the clock in the bullet) has been traveling at high speed and has undergone time dilation.

A commonly repeated concern when speaking of time travel (to the past especially) is the danger of changing history. Is it possible to change the past? Can you get around the paradox of your travel being assumed (i.e., you are meant to go back but would you still be able to if your history is altered)? Is that when we run into problems?

Yes. That’s when you get into logical problems. You may go back in time trying to assassinate Hitler, but on the other hand you know that Hitler wasn’t assassinated. You cannot change the past. That past has already happened. Nothing you can do about it. If you travel back in time, the only possibility is if, somehow, you’re forced to do so in some way that doesn’t alter the past. Or, there is the other possibility that when you travel backward in time you wind up in a parallel universe. So in the universe we live in where Hitler wasn’t assassinated, we could, conceivably, travel backward in time into a different universe where you would assassinate Hitler and the subsequent time evolution in that second universe would then be quite different.

Can you explain what space-time is? We know time as the fourth dimension, but can we visualize it, spatially, like the three others?

In many ways, time is similar to the three dimensions of space but in other ways it is quite different. They are connected with one another, [but] there are important differences between them. A quantity in physics is defined by how you measure it. You measure the spatial difference between two points with a meter stick; you measure the temporal distance between them with a clock. That means, to a physicist, that they are fundamentally different quantities because the experiments that you did do to measure them are different.

Are there some fundamental truths or laws that must hold for time travel to be possible?

Among the most important laws of physics are the conservation laws, with things like energy and momentum, which must remain constant in time. As far as we know there is no way of producing or getting rid of the total amount of energy in the universe.

In Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” the characters travel by a method they call “tesseracting,” which involves folding space. Is time folding theoretically possible, in the way, say, we’re able to fold two- or three-dimensional objects?

Yes, if you can achieve the right distribution of matter and energy which would fold space in the manner you might like it to be folded. Whether you can really achieve that distribution of matter and energy is less clear. In particular, one of the things that is true is that if you want to fold space in such a way that time travel becomes possible, for example, you need a distribution of matter and energy with the property that there is a region of space and time where the energy density is negative—negative meaning that there is even less matter and energy present than the amount in empty space.

You talk about chaos or disorder in relation to backward time travel. Can you explain their relationship?

The question is: What is it that causes a difference between the two directions in time? The basic, classical laws of physics, which are Newton’s laws and their corresponding mechanical laws, make no distinction between the two directions in time—a process which can occur in one direction, can also occur in the opposite direction.Why is backward time direction different than forward time direction? To me, the answer to that is something called the second law of thermodynamics, which says that the total entropy of the universe increases as time increases. Entropy is, essentially, the amount of confusion — mixing — in the universe. So, it’s that law which says it’s perfectly possible to see a diver dive off a diving board into a swimming pool. The laws of physics say that, if you arrange the system just right, in fact you can find that the diver will pop, spontaneously, out of the water and land on the diving board. It is possible, but the probability of the system having just the right conditions for that to happen is so small that we will never see it in the whole history of the universe. So when we talk about the difference between going forward and backward in time, what is it that defines that difference? Physicists say: What is it that produces an arrow of time? The answer is the second law of thermodynamics.

Never thought about this in this manner before.

So this law explains cause and effect and why you can’t have an effect before its cause?

Yes.

Is it theoretically possible to get stuck in a time loop, like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day”?

The answer is yes, but you have to assume the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics is the correct one, and then you’re not exactly stuck in a time loop — every time you go around the loop, you come back to the same starting point in a parallel universe.

So, even if time travel is not possible for humans (for now), what do you think of its future prospects? And what kind of social impact does this kind of research bear on daily life?

Well, it’s hard to say because you don’t know what the results of the research are going to be. Physicists have learned quite a bit about the consequences of relativity as the result of this kind of research, so we know a lot more than we did, say, maybe 30 years ago. A person on the street might say, “So what?”—and that’s not an unreasonable attitude to have. Will there be actual consequences on people’s lives? It’s hard to answer that question. I would hope that the evolution of human society is going to be a lot different if it turns out that in some way or other, one can travel faster than light, in which case we would probably expand into the galaxy. From the point of view of humanity, I think the question of whether superluminal travel is possible will have a lot more consequence than the question of whether time travel is possible.

Source: http://www.salon.com/2011/12/11/the_science_of_warp/

Interesting, very, very, very, interesting.

 

[Ðekel]

'space time address' ! ! !

 

[RobertB]

We are told that Gravity is going to change as the Solar System hurtles forward through the Galactic Plane (and we encounter this Wave). We are along for the ride currently, on the 3rd Rock from the Sun. So, I would imagine that if Gravity is about to change here, so are other forces. They may already be changing.

 

[Ðekel]

for the record.. i still have 'space time address' in my mind.
it's been echoing back every few hours for the past couple of days.

it's amazing how a short string of words, can appear in an order you have not read/heard before, and suddenly a whole new avenue of thought opens up. just by simply putting a few regular words in a specific order.

 

[RobertB]

"every time you go around the loop, you come back to the same starting point in a parallel universe."

And spiral in or out. Forward or backwards. CME's from the Sun travel in a spiral outward. Rockets shot from Earth also go in a trajectory, due to the orbit of Earth about the Sun.

 

[bngenoh]

for the record.. i still have 'space time address' in my mind.
it's been echoing back every few hours for the past couple of days.

it's amazing how a short string of words, can appear in an order you have not read/heard before, and suddenly a whole new avenue of thought opens up. just by simply putting a few regular words in a specific order.

Yes transietP,

A few words in a specific sequence, literally opens up a whole new world, that was seemingly not there before, it truly is amazing.

 

[Buddy]

Apologies y'all, but I'm having problems following this thread and might need some help. When I read the article on the first post, all I got from it was that the Newtonian (classical) mindset was going "golly gee" at some apparently unexpected phenomena at some apparently non-local context.

If I may ask, what am I missing?

 

[bngenoh]

Apologies y'all, but I'm having problems following this thread and might need some help. When I read the article on the first post, all I got from it was that the Newtonian (classical) mindset was going "golly gee" at some apparently unexpected phenomena at some apparently non-local context.

If I may ask, what am I missing?

Lets see if i understand it by explaining it. The opening article, goes with this article http://www.sott.net/articles/show/237317-Is-the-electromagnetic-constant-a-constant-.

They're using redshift as a measure of distance, from the article:

Could yet another universal constant, the value assigned to the electromagnetic force, be less constant than we thought? And could variability of the constant help explain life in the universe?

That's the tantalizing hypothesis offered by Australian astronomers, who believe that the value alpha, referring to the strength of the electromagnetic force (and measured at 1/137.03599976), may not be constant everywhere.

According to a paper published on arxiv.org and by Physical Review Letters, the fine structure constant alpha increases at high redshifts and, to quote from the abstract, "fits a spatial dipole, significant at the 4.2σ level" - in other words, the constant's value increases a little in one direction and falls in the other.

Actually, Dr John Webb of the University of NSW School of Physics has formed a stronger opinion about alpha: unless there's an error in the data, he told The Register, he is positive that its value is different in different parts of the universe.

"I don't see any other possibility, other than systematic effects in the data," he said.

What is redshift? from http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2011/arch11/110329redshifts.htm:

The two principle tenets of the Big Bang theory are that redshift is proportional to distance and that it is an indicator of velocity. The larger an object's redshift the farther away it is and the faster it is moving away from the observer. Those two ideas provide the backdrop for the commonly held belief that the Universe is expanding.

And this from Editorial Review of Big Bang Blasted by Lyndon Ashmore http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1419639226/ref=ord_cart_shr?ie=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER:

Is the Universe really expanding? When the Big Bang Theory was first conceived it looked good - but since then, result after result has gone against the theory. Instead of rejecting the model, as we are told 'real Science' should do, mainstream scientists have continued to invent patch after patch in a bid to save it - but in doing so, the theory has lost its experimental support.

What the author has done here is to go back to the beginning and start again. He follows the history of the Big Bang and the characters involved - explaining at every step how it was done.

He then introduces 'Ashmore's Paradox' and shows that after all these years of searching for the Hubble constant, all they ended up with was something any schoolchild could have found by recalling three very common physical constants from their calculator memory!

Lyndon explains that redshift - originally thought to show that the Universe is expanding, is just an effect caused by photons travelling through space and losing energy to electrons. From this, he goes on to explain the CMB and other observations normally associated with an expanding Universe.

The thunderbolts guys are with Halton Arp in saying that there is intrinsic redshift which is an indicator of age rather than distance, but also cosmological redshift, due to the doppler effect. Highly redshifted quasars are newly born, and it takes time for them to become low redshift companion galaxies. That is one part, another part could be Lyndon Ashmore's explanation, another still could be error due to the scientists especially in this article http://www.sott.net/articles/show/237317-Is-the-electromagnetic-constant-a-constant- not taking into account the above mentioned factors, which leads them to a possible erroneous interpretation of the data.

So, it turns out that your question, although simple (like "what makes an apple fall to the ground?") can't be answered, atleast not by me at the moment, way too much i don't know & understand. Gotta hit the books, thanks for reminding me. :)

Like Dr. John Webb himself said:

"I don't see any other possibility, other than systematic effects in the data,"

Don't know if i helped you out Buddy (funny name :D) but i thank you for posing the question, as it made me dig deeper & learn more.

 

[Buddy]

OK, I see. Lots of comment-able stuff here. Thanks for explaining. :)

Reminds me of that quote:

"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."

Wolfgang Pauli on a paper submitted by a physicist colleague

As some see it, of course "time" (for example) is not a constant. That notion may be a symptom of trying to understand Quantum Theory with a Newtonian frame of reference. Not that I "totally got it" either, but I'm on it.

Depending on who's talking, it seems that "time" is just another one of our "monisms". IOW, one size fits all - one "time" for all reality at every scale. I sometimes wonder how the "time" argument would be affected if all of a sudden Earth stopped rotating.

Anyway, something I've learned that "art" has in common with physics: whenever paradox seems to arise, it's a dang good clue that we simply have a context-limited view of the problem.

With that in mind, this article I found yesterday might interest someone. The author seems to do a decent job trying to explain:

The Quantum Reality Map — A look at the philosophy of quantum theory:

_http://www.energygrid.com/science/2004/12ap-quantummap.html

 

[John G]

It may be more a cosmological constant thing than a fine structure constant thing. That's related to conformal vs Minkowski spacetime metric stuff that Ark works on. I would definitely pay more attention to Ark than Arp.

 

[bngenoh]

It may be more a cosmological constant thing than a fine structure constant thing. That's related to conformal vs Minkowski spacetime metric stuff that Ark works on. I would definitely pay more attention to Ark than Arp.

Agree with that Bluelamp,

Ark's lecture at Barcelona was very fascinating, and i haven't even scratched the surface of the research of the questions that were arisen in me while & after watching it.

 

[Ðekel]

Ark's lecture at Barcelona was very fascinating, and i haven't even scratched the surface of the research of the questions that were arisen in me while & after watching it.

bngenoh,

would you happen to know if this is up on the net anywhere ?

 

[bngenoh]

bngenoh,

would you happen to know if this is up on the net anywhere ?

It's here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3gnV09j3Vc&list=UUhKuOoR8feUt2Ab5VzAiOag&index=1&feature=plcp