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Einstein's relativity theory hits a speed bump
August 8 2002

In October, 1971, American physicists took four super-accurate atomic
clocks, kept two on the ground and put two on commercial jets flying
at 1000 kmh in opposite directions around Earth.

When the planes landed, the scientists found what they were hoping
for: The clocks on the high-speed journeys were ticking a few
billionths of a second behind their stationary friends.

Motion, it turns out, slows time - one of the funny effects of the law
of relativity. At low speeds, the effect is slight and makes no
difference to our daily lives.

We had no idea to look for such effects until the 26-year-old Albert
Einstein walked into the office of Annalen der Physik journal in Bern,
Switzerland, in 1905, gave the editor his paper on the special theory
of relativity and asked that it be printed "if you can find room for
it".

That paper, and the general theory of relativity that followed it,
revolutionised the way scientists understood the universe, and history
has remembered it ever since as a shift from Newtonian physics - where
space, time, motion and gravity are separate and proceed with rigid,
clockwork elegance - to Einsteinian physics, where things bend,
stretch and pull on each another in most unusual ways.

In between these paradigm shifts, there are leaps in understanding.
Today's announcement by Australian physicists in the leading
scientific journal Nature may turn out to be one of those moments.

Incorporating some of the most intriguing aspects of cosmology and
theoretical physics - distant quasars, black holes, event horizons
and, probably, quantum theory - they have concluded that the speed of
light has slowed down over time.

The discovery means faster-than-light travel, which is prohibited by
the law of relativity, may one day be possible. It also changes our
understanding of the beginnings of the universe. But lead author and
award-winning physicist and writer Professor Paul Davies emphasises
that Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2, is not about to be consigned
to the dustbin.

Energy, Einstein discovered, was equal to mass times the speed of
light squared, with the speed of light as a constant in a vacuum such
as space. News that the speed of light may not be constant after all
does not mean the old theory falls apart altogether, Davies says. The
theory of relativity remains good for most situations, just as
Newton's laws remained more or less correct after Einstein, except at
high speeds or under intense gravity.

"It's not going change the way we build cyclotrons or microchips or
anything of that sort," Davies says. "It's just that the theory of
relativity will be seen not to be the last word."

If the speed of light was close to infinity, immediately after the Big
Bang, as Davies believes it may have been, our theories about the way
energy cooled to form matter, giving rise to stars, planets and
people, could be completely wrong.

Still, correcting Einstein is no small feat and is likely to attract
controversy, perhaps even animosity from scientific colleagues.

"When I first heard about these observations . . . I was, frankly, not
only sceptical about it, I was appalled," Davies says. "I thought it
was horrible. The last thing we wanted in theoretical physics was to
have something like this."

Einstein, who died in 1955, is still regarded as perhaps the greatest
mind ever. The remarkable thing about his discoveries was that he
literally sat in his flat in Bern during his spare time while working
as a clerk at the patent office and thought it all up using sheer
brain power. Only later were his theories proved, repeatedly, through
experiment and observation.

Dr Charley Lineweaver, one of Davies' co-authors, along with graduate
student Tamara Davis, explains that their paper works the other way
around. They have taken observations and plugged the data into known
mathematical formulas to determine that the speed of light has slowed.

"Theorists always play with all kinds of crazy things," Lineweaver
says. "The important thing here is we have experimental evidence . . .
that's what's new here."

The theory is based on observations made at the University of New
South Wales by Dr John Webb in 1999 and further observations by one of
his PhD students, Michael Murphy.

It is hair-curling science. They looked at light from the most distant
objects in the universe, quasars up to a billion times the size of our
sun, which are 10 billion or 12 billion light years away.

"The light that comes to you from a quasar has been travelling for
most of the age of the universe - several billion years - and it
carries with it information about what happened to it along the way,"
Murphy says.

On its long journey, the light from those quasars has passed through
gas clouds full of metals. The photons in the light - little packets
of energy that make up the light itself - interact with the electrons
in the gas clouds, charged particles that orbit the nuclei of the
metal atoms. This leaves a fingerprint on the light as it arrives on
Earth, called the fine structure constant, Murphy explains.

When they measured the fine structure constant of this 12
billion-year-old light, Webb and Murphy found it was slightly higher
than it would be today. Mathematically, there were two possible
reasons for this - either the electric charge of the electrons had
increased, or the speed of light had fallen.

Using Stephen Hawking's formula for black hole thermodynamics, Davies,
Davis and Lineweaver ruled out the electric charge possibility. By
adapting Hawking's formula, they determined that an increase in
electric charge would break the second law of thermodynamics, which
says energy can only flow from hot spots to cold spots.

"That's illegal. It would be like a cup of coffee sitting on your desk
getting hotter," Lineweaver says.

But while he is still cautious about the quasar observations, he says
the implications are revolutionary if they hold true. "Supposing we do
take it seriously, then we have some very profound things to worry
about. One is, why is it doing this?"

The next question is what physical processes are at work to slow light
speed? Lineweaver says that's "the subject for a thousand other
papers."

One possibility, though, is that the structure of the vacuum in space
has changed. This is where we get into the rather spooky world of
quantum physics. When light travels through a medium other than a
vacuum, such as glass or water, it slows down. A vacuum, far from
being empty, is teeming with quantum "virtual" particles that flit in
and out of existence.

Sometimes those particles become real, such as under a strong electric
charge, Lineweaver says. If the vacuum of space is changing uniformly
across the universe, just as the universe is expanding uniformly, it
could affect the speed of light.

For now, Murphy and Webb's observations of quasars will continue to be
scrutinised and be regarded with scepticism. "If they're right, this
makes theoretical physicists very uncomfortable," Davies says. "These
are cherished laws and they don't really want to have to ditch them,
because all of the favoured frontier stuff these days, with people
working on string theory, M-theory and all these other sexy topics,
would have to down tools and start with a completely different
conceptual scheme."

"On the other hand, science is made out of iconoclasm. If old theories
never got overthrown, we'd all be out of work. So it's always nice to
have something that challenges the basic paradigm and this does so
with a vengeance."

David Wroe is The Age science reporter.

This story was found at:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/08/07/1028157961167.html