New varying speed of light theories · HackerPapers discussions

New varying speed of light theories — mentioned by raattgift

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 09:23:07 GMT

Physicists (and in particular the subset doing physical cosmology) don't usually explore parametrizations of c because they're not clearly physical (and sometimes even clearly unphysical), or alternatively don't help solve astrophysical or cosmological problems. Relativists sometimes like to explore things that make using the Tangherlini transformations rather than the Lorentz transformations look positively benign. (To be clear, the Tangherlini synchronization system is clearly unphysical, requiring infinite speeds. His thesis also proposed using a distinguished global frame, which is not…

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New varying speed of light theories — mentioned by raattgift

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 20:02:25 GMT

1/2 tl;dr: coincident-events first, then labels (coordinates). [Einstein 1916, p.117 [2] although I remembered to look there only after writing all of the below]. One-way speed of light arguments are in danger of being coordinates-first, and thus insufficiently general for physics.[3] The key word in your comment is > directly But why do we care? We have an abundance of indirect evidence, premised on direct tests of coordinate-independent features of our best most-fundamental theory. The two important features of (general) relativity are pointwise local Lorentz covariance -- where c is the…

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New varying speed of light theories — mentioned by raattgift

Wed, 20 Oct 2021 11:14:06 GMT

Thank you for putting this as a question. I'll try to answer. GR is not restricted to describing our universe. It deals in general curved spacetimes, an infinite number of which are manifestly unphysical, a classic example being the Gödel solution of 1949. Physical applications of General Relativity require one to impose a number of constraints, most of which are motivated by evidence. I will restrict myself here to the constraint you asked about. Our universe is up to measurability and for all practical purposes Lorentzian (3 spacelike and one timelike dimension), giving us local…

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New varying speed of light theories — mentioned by alphydan

Wed, 20 Aug 2014 14:05:05 GMT

There is plenty of evidence, but it would require to change some of our cosmological models (so it's not without controversy). A physicist that has explored the issue in detail is Joao Magueijo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%A3o_Magueijo For a good review of the VSL Theories (Varying Speed of Light Theories) and the evidence behind them see http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0305457

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New varying speed of light theories — mentioned by diminoten

Thu, 14 Nov 2013 07:43:43 GMT

Well yeah, people are different, this is blatantly obvious. But gravity isn't 9.81m/s^2 either[0]. And the speed of light isn't "c" (299,792,458 m/s) or even constant at all[1]. But these "wrong" facts are useful when creating predictive models of our universe. That's all this is - a "wrong" fact used to help simplify a model. Turns out the representative agent might be an oversimplification, but so are G (9.81 m/s^2) and c (299,792,458 m/s), depending on what you're doing. In a "science" (science is a methodology and lies a spectrum, and is not a dogma, so let's try to keep some perspective)…

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