(January 8, 2012 at 2:35 am)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: Regardless of that, they don't support his speculation that light might have traveled faster in the past - unless he's further implying that there's something fundamentally different about the matter in interstellar/intergalactic space now vs. then.
Precisely - I poitned out elsewhere that the speed of light is also used in the equation of E=MC^2 - so if the speed of light is variable over time, then the nature of all matter of energy changes over time - which means that the universe could not have formed as it did and all of physics both of the very small and very large (quantum and astro) would be meaningless given that our calculations of the history of the earth and the universe all involve E=MC^2 in some form or another.
That equation alone is practically the difference between now and 19th century science, technology, and understanding.
Even if things like tacheyons exist in the universe (imporbable but not impossible), then that doesn't change the fact that light not only must be constant for our sake, but it is foundational to the underlying mechanics of all matter and energy.
A universe in which C can be variable cannot be our universe.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
