Oh, you people and your social sciences! j/k
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okay, I was reading the Economist today,
http://www.economist.com/science/displaySt...tory_id=1066862
and one of the articles was on the inconstant constant, to the point the alpha number, which a group of Australian physicists claim to be increasing?? I did not understand a dam thing in this article, I'm a simple social science grad, but I am interested by this possible discovery and what it means, if any one knows please drop me a note,
Cheers!
(Edited by IzmSchism at 2:51 am on April 14, 2002)
big up your self
Oh, you people and your social sciences! j/k
The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them [which] we are missing. -Gamel Nasser
Theoretical physics sometimes throws up anomolies,
I would not be to bothered by this.
The constant alpha is obtained by using other constants,
it seems to me they have to show what in the other other constants is changeable.
This is highly unusual. The simlest constant to understand is pi. The length of the circumference of a ciricle divided by its diameters length. 3.14........
Plancks constant belongs to quantuum physics
The speed of light is also constant in theory.
Alpa is used in determining the wavelength of light, to my mind.
It is highly unlikely that the change will really affect precision engineering at all or cause much of a stir in astronomy.
Man's dearest possession is life, and since it is given to him to live but once.He must so live that dying he can say, all my life and all my strength have been given to the greatest cause in the world, the liberation of mankind
Ostrovski
Muriel Spark:
If I had my life to live over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.
"To get alpha, square the charge of the electron and divide it by the speed of light times Planck's constant, a key value used in quantum theory. Then multiply the result by two times pi"
(1.6 X 10/-19)/2 X (299796304 X 6.63X10/-34) X 2(3.1415926535897)
I make it about 3.197 by 10 to the - 62 (but I think i got the speed of light wrong)
Anyway, if alpha is changing, it means one of the factors is changing (planck's constant, pi, speed of light or the charge of the electron).
Pi cannot change, because space-time has always been the same shape (as far as we know) so all circles have the same diameter:circumference ratio.
Personally, I think it is most likely that the speed of light is changing. It has been be shown that near the beginning of the universe, when the universe was much smaller, the speed of light was greater. Hubble found that the the universe is expanding, so the speed of light should gradually change with it
"The constants that physicists measure in their laboratories are only four-dimensional shadows of more fundamental entities that exist in 11 dimensions. These shadows would shift with time if the hidden dimensions changed scale."
Traditionally, space-time is 4 dimensional, but recent developments in string theory show that on the smallest scale, space time is either 11 dimensional or 26 dimensional.
As the article goes on to say, these extra dimensions are controlled by the laws of M-theory. Which we are only beginning to understand. A change in these dimensions would affect the charge of the electron and thus alpha
i don't see why any of the other consants would change, so it would probably be light.
[i]"The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently."[/
What is Planck´s constant??
\"There wouldnt be much words if the Russians got up there first, ha ha ha\"- Luca Prodan
it's h. about 6.6262 *10^-34 Js
the plank constant times the frequency of a wave is the Energy is carries. h*f = E (or W)
i lack the english terminology, but it's also the steepness or whatever of the graph of frequency and U. (f')
so if you have two lightwaves, and what U is needed to stop the electrons their photons release, then you can calculate h.
[i]"The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently."[/
