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74 Comments
- BloodJunkie, on 10/12/2007, -4/+47I thought I felt a tingle.
- BloodJunkie, on 10/12/2007, -5/+35Skel: in a post-9/11 world, the only thing that is constant is that you should be very afraid, and you should buy stuff. Lots of stuff.
- dwdrummerboy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+21Forget about light speed.........we need LUDICROUS SPEED!
- Takteek, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20In other news, following a comment posted on the website www.digg.com, scientists have now discovered TWO other constants that have changed in the last 10 years!
First, pi. Mathematician Alan Brundfeller explains: "Well I was measuring a circle- don't ask why- and I had this strange idea to measure the circumference and then divide it by the diameter. I was completely astounded when my calculator gave me the answer 4! Since then I have tried it using hundreds of other circles, and sure enough, pi is now 4."
When asked to explain how this may have happened he responded, "Uhhh...." and then ran away.
Second, the constant e has also changed within the last 10 years. "Well, I was solving an equation, and when I pressed the "e" button on my calculator it displayed 2.341249. I tried 6 different calculators before actually writing out and approximating e by hand. To my surprise, I also got 2.341249 on paper! I have no idea how the calculator changed the value that it had stored it memory, but hey, maybe it has something to do with circles being different sizes lately....," commented Brian Phillipson when we interviewed him on Wednesday.
On a related note, every bank in the country has run out of money after their computers incorrectly calculated continuous interest for every account. - SkeletaLlama, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15What kind of universe are we living in where even our constants are inconsistent?
- Phyltre, on 10/12/2007, -6/+18Pi changes every time we calculate it to a few more decimal places!
- MrBabyMan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13Mmmm... Pi....
- ericpp, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14Farnsworth: These are the dark matter engine I invented. They allow my starship to travel between galaxies in mere hours.
Cubert: That's impossible. You can't go faster than the speed of light.
Farnsworth: Of course not. That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.
Cubert: Also impossible. - etruscan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12That was just me.
- brewer, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13Didn't you hear? Variables: they're the new constants.
(see also: "Pink: It's the new black") - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7maybe it changed because we observed it?
- ynggrsshppr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I think when they say constant, they mean constant through a vacuum.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8I know alot of people dont care it is a dupe. See most of the people commenting here didnt see it when it was posted earllier. ENough people later ran into this post to digg it to the front page. SO enough people missed the orginal information. Just becuase they dont hang here 24/7 doesnt mean they should be left out of the site until they catch up on what should be dugg and what shouldnt.
I personally dont care if the same thing shows up on the front page everyday.. oviously a large amount of people are still interested and in the dark on the subject. It is also futile to try to prevent something as organic as digg from becoming what ever it becomes even if that is something you dont like.
enough with the dupe comments so what if some person didnt get the credit for finding a news story they didnt write. - neondiet, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6@rebrad: "The only constant is uncertainty"
I think a better oxymoron would be: The only constant, is change. - davidirock, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7The change in speed of light is a logical explination. But, just to be diffrent I'll go for the far feched therory that the quarks that make up electrons were somehow diffrent then they are today and that that is what changed alpha and not the speed of light. Just to throw a new idea out there and get people to say I'm wrong.
- manfrin, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6It's not really a constant. The speed of light changes based on different forms and magnitudes of gravitational pull. There was an article here on digg about how a professor at the University of Arizona had outlined how to achieve FTL speeds, and it was just using magnetic copper coils (giant ones) to create a huge force of gravity, wherein the speed of light changed to something like, 2-4x what we consider it to be.
- volcompimp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I thought my batterys in my remote control were runnin low... Turns out the speed of light slowed down.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4well you can make light travel faster than light through a medium by shifting the wavelength so that a crest exits when a valley should but it is more of a gimic as you cant send messages back in time or faster than light.
And all em travels at C. But it isnt em or light that limits the fastest speed.. It better called the speed of causality were as it is the limit of information transfer. But calling it the "speed of light" was a misfortunate mistake that has stuck. - rincebrain, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4So, who else noticed the article is from June 2004?
- cinder, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Probably a joke, but I have to correct you: electrons are fundamental (as far as we can tell), meaning they are not made up of quarks..
- carpespasm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe wikipedia says about 13.7 billion
- tylerni7, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Electrons aren't made up or quarks, but they aren't fundamentel either, I believe they are made up of leptons, along with Muons and Kaons. (I'm about 78% sure about that...) Either way, they still might have changed, there's no reason of thinking that they haven't if the speed of light can change.
- aadsm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2*g*, a whole article about changing speed of light without even mention Magueijo... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/João_Magueijo
- steelphantom, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Those darn unicrons!
- seenthefuture, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6Old news, since when in almost 2 years old recent?
19:00 30 June 2004
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2well they slowed it down in a vaccum too..
using virtual atoms. But that doesnt mean it isnt a constant.
The term c is very unfortunately accociated with the speed of light when light isnt what limits the maximum speed in the universe. Light isnt what stops us from build ships that go c.. it is information exchange. Put it this way.. light slows down in water.. this doesnt slow everything down in water.. particles can and do exceed light speed in water. - paulrus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Well, there have been discussions about this topic for years:
"A finite cosmos with a center of gravity is quite different from the nonbounded universe the big bang depicts. In the big bang theory, if you could travel from our galaxy to a neighboring one, you would go gravitationally "up" for the first half of the journey and then gravitationally "down" for the next half. Going further outward would continue the ups and downs, but they would average out to about zero. On a large scale, such a universe would have no part which would be significantly higher (gravitationally) than any other part."
However if you have a universe that has basically a center and an edge (an event horizon - beyond which nothing exists) you get a center of gravity from which you can travel away:
"A center of gravity is important because an effect in general relativity called gravitational time dilation comes into play. Experiment and Einstein's theory agree that time and all physical processes run more slowly in areas which are lower in a gravitational field than in areas which are higher."
So basically if the earth is closer to the center of gravity in the universe, time would run more slowly for us when compared to objects nearer to the edge.
Check out the book from 1994 called "Starlight and Time" - hiro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yes, I've had to move my chair nearer to the TV recently because of this
- Ultim8Fury, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Lack of funding is what stops us from building ships that can do C. That and not really having anywhere to go. It's not like the neighbours are inviting us over for a drink.
- FilCab, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Electrons aren't made by quarks... ;)
Really... They aren't. - Agret, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Just becuase they dont hang here 24/7 doesnt mean they should be left out of the site"
That's why there's more than just the front page, two day news isn't more than 5 pages back. - McLurker, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3When I first saw the headline I thought "Hey, the Creationists are right!" I used to be one of them, I REALLY don't want to have to return to the fold.
Nevertheless, I'm sure they will find some way to make capital out of this discovery. Sigh. - igutekunst, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Notice how all the comments with lots of diggs are jokes. . .
- carpespasm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2since the universe is 12 or so billion years ago, or at least it's been about that long since the last big bang
- ComputerWiz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I think that the logical explanation is inflation. Think about it. As the universe accelerates and expands rapidly, the speed of light would have to change depending on the instantaneous rate of expansion at the spot of the point in space being measured. You need a bit of calc and lots of data to figure it out, but you can probably calculate a hypothesis on the rate of change. The rate of the change of light may not even be constant. You may have to go through a few derivatives to figure out the change.
Anyone else agree?
Just my thoughts... - starmanjones, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1or maybe earlier we were traveling closer to the speed of light... so we are seeing the effects of time dilation and we're mistaking it for a change in the speed of light. maybe that is somehow related to the fact we seem to be accelerating as we plow through the universe. :D
wouldn't it be great to get paid to sit around and figure this stuff out. i wish i had talent enough to do that. i can digest what someone else thinks up but... not so good at originating it. - Roger, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5First G, now c. I love hearing when "constants" have changed.
Whats next, pi? - Unknown1987, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1for those of you havnt taken physics the speed of light is constantly varing as it travels through different mediums
- dhcmrlchtdj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2interesting. you can also achieve FTL speeds by warping spacetime itself with negative energy. the idea is that you compress the space between you and your destination, while expanding the space between you and your source. this works because the rate of expansion or compression of space is not bound by c, because no information is being transmitted. the problem is in creating huge amounts of negative energy that aren't tied to huger amounts of positive energy, which would otherwise prevent space from expanding. one possibility is to use something like a quantum camera shutter, to capture only the negative energy and block out the positive wave, but this has problems too...
- starmanjones, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1ya, its a lot more annoying to have the dupe spotters posting. i didn't see it the other day.
- YesWorld, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"I personally dont care if the same thing shows up on the front page everyday"
For those you see Digg as more than a single frontpage, the proliferation of dupes in the cloud views is a major annoyance. Consider also the frustration of our most alert submitters, who see their work invalidated by new submissions of their exact same links. - AETAaAS, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2The next digg story will be the "Not so constant 'constants'"
But I guess they could change, what with the advancements in detection technology and/or research techniques. - smorik, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2c just wants to be as cool as pi with its infinite stream of numbers
- starmanjones, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1ya, it makes sense to me to leave newtonian and einsteinian physics alone. they have proven themselves and predict accurately. so moving the other peices around to get a fit seems right to me. the space we inhabit reletive to us may appear to be constant. we only see it isn't when we look at distances great enough that our instruments can detect the difference. if we take that measurement and apply to our local space it could appear to different-slower. or anything in between i guess.
>for those of you havnt taken physics the speed of light is constantly varing as it travels through ?>different medium
hey we know. we're just having fun in our own amateur way. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1At first I thought it was a rabbit, but now I see it is a cat.
- drwtsn32, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1n/a
- rebrad, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2The only constant is uncertainty.
- LucasVB, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Well, since pi is NOT a physical constant but a mathematical one, it can't really change at all, unless we decide to change our definition of what "pi" is. But that doesn't mean squat.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0But the universe is not expanding at a constant rate - it is accelerating in its rate of expansion. On your assumptions, should this not mean we would be able to watch the 'constants' change as the rate of expansion changes over the years?
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