QUOTE from an editorial on the New Scientist website:
"It looks like physics works differently in different places. If so, everything we think we know about the cosmos may be wrong."
Astronomer John Webb says that, according to his team's analysis of the light from distant galaxies, the way physics works may depend on the direction you're facing.
The .pdf article on which that editorial was derived was originally printed in 2003 in Physics World. The original article can be found here:
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/astro/re...WAPR03webb.pdf
...
via UFO Evolution
New Scientist has an article about this, but they've moved their content behind a registration system. Good luck with that. The story is always available elsewhere. Related:
In a paper just submitted to Physical Review Letters, a team led by John Webb and Julian King from the University of New South Wales in Australia present evidence that the fine-structure constant may not actually be constant after all. Rather, it seems to vary from place to place within the universe. If their results hold up to the scrutiny, and can be replicated, they will have profound implications—for they suggest that the universe stretches far beyond what telescopes can observe, and that the laws of physics vary within it. Instead of the whole universe being fine-tuned for life, then, humanity finds itself in a corner of space where, Goldilocks-like, the values of the fundamental constants happen to be just right for it.
via ThinkAtheist
Using two major observatories, the Keck Telescope in Hawaii and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, Webb and his team observed the light from quasars, the most luminous objects in the known universe. Although quasars are incredibly far away, we can detect them due to the sheer quantity of light that they emit. The light is thought to come from material that heats up as it plunges into the central, “supermassive” black holes. Because the light that reaches us from these objects actually left them billions of years ago, the images we receive offer a record of the way they would have looked back then.
“The interaction of the light from the quasars with the gas clouds provides an impressive opportunity to investigate the physical conditions when the Universe was just a fraction of its current age,” said PhD student Julian King, also of the university, who played a major role in the research. It’s “exciting that we have the technology to be able to measure the laws of physics in the early Universe so precisely,” he added.
The new results can be explained if our Universe is exceptionally or even infinitely large, the researchers said. This would allow fundamental quantities and “constants” to have different values in different areas. In such a scenario, we would exist in just a tiny patch of the cosmos, with correspondingly small changes in the physical constants.
This view, the scientists said, raises questions as to why a whole range of these “constants” happen to be just right—in our area—for developing life, along with physics and chemistry as we know them. ...
via World-Science
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