Cosmology - Changing Fine Structure Constant
Eureka Alert has an article on the possibility that the Fine Structure Constant may not be constant
If this is true, it will have huge implications for all of cosmology.

Of course, one phrase in the article sticks out to me

Murphy has used quasars as incredibly distant light sources, whose light encounters gas clouds on its way to Earth. The light takes time to reach Earth, so he sees the fingerprints as they were billions of years ago. By comparing these fingerprints with those obtained in experiments on Earth, he concludes that alpha has changed by about one part in two-hundred-thousand during the last 10 billion years

Quasars are not the most well-known phenomena. There is certainly debate in science circles about how far away they really are, or even what they are exactly. Halton Arp has done a fair amount of work documenting connections between quasars and galaxies that seem to indicate it isn't accurate using the red-shift of a quasar to determine its distance. You can read about it at Electric Cosmos or over at Halton Arp's website

If this is the case, then assuming the light travels 10 billion light years to get to earth may have some effect on Murphy's research.

Add to this the fact that the difference is only 1 part in 200,000, which may not even be statistically significant would lead me to believe there is no cause for concern just yet...

(HT: Creation Safaris
- posted by Alan Grey @ Tuesday, April 12, 2005