Are there no universal laws?

 

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