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Variable Speed Of Light
A variable speed of light (VSL) is a feature of a family of hypotheses stating that the speed of light may in some way not be constant, for example, that it varies in space or time, or depending on frequency. Accepted classical theories of physics, and in particular general relativity, predict a constant speed of light in any local frame of reference and in some situations these predict apparent variations of the speed of light depending on frame of reference, but this article does not refer to this as a variable speed of light. Various alternative theories of gravitation and cosmology, many of them non-mainstream, incorporate variations in the local speed of light. Attempts to incorporate a variable speed of light into physics were made by Robert Dicke in 1957, and by several researchers starting from the late 1980s. VSL should not be confused with faster than light theories, which depends on a medium's refractive index or its measurement in a remote observer's frame of refer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Speed Of Light
The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted , is a universal physical constant exactly equal to ). It is exact because, by international agreement, a metre is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of second. The speed of light is invariant (physics), the same for all observers, no matter their relative velocity. It is the upper limit for the speed at which Information#Physics_and_determinacy, information, matter, or energy can travel through Space#Relativity, space. All forms of electromagnetic radiation, including visible light, travel at the speed of light. For many practical purposes, light and other electromagnetic waves will appear to propagate instantaneously, but for long distances and sensitive measurements, their finite speed has noticeable effects. Much starlight viewed on Earth is from the distant past, allowing humans to study the history of the universe by viewing distant objects. When Data communication, comm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Schwarzschild Coordinates
In the theory of Lorentzian manifolds, spherically symmetric spacetimes admit a family of ''nested round spheres''. In such a spacetime, a particularly important kind of coordinate chart is the Schwarzschild chart, a kind of polar spherical coordinate chart on a static and spherically symmetric spacetime, which is ''adapted'' to these nested round spheres. The defining characteristic of Schwarzschild chart is that the radial coordinate possesses a natural geometric interpretation in terms of the surface area and Gaussian curvature of each sphere. However, radial distances and angles are not accurately represented. These charts have many applications in metric theories of gravitation such as general relativity. They are most often used in static spherically symmetric spacetimes. In the case of general relativity, Birkhoff's theorem states that every ''isolated'' spherically symmetric vacuum or electrovacuum solution of the Einstein field equation is static, but this is c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Gravitational Constant
The gravitational constant is an empirical physical constant involved in the calculation of gravitational effects in Sir Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation and in Albert Einstein's general relativity, theory of general relativity. It is also known as the universal gravitational constant, the Newtonian constant of gravitation, or the Cavendish gravitational constant, denoted by the capital letter . In Newton's law, it is the proportionality constant connecting the gravitational force between two bodies with the product of their masses and the inverse-square law, inverse square of their distance. In the Einstein field equations, it quantifies the relation between the geometry of spacetime and the energy–momentum tensor (also referred to as the stress–energy tensor). The measured value of the constant is known with some certainty to four significant digits. In SI units, its value is approximately The modern notation of Newton's law involving was introduced i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Proceedings Of The Royal Society A
''Proceedings of the Royal Society'' is the main research journal of the Royal Society. The journal began in 1831 and was split into two series in 1905: * Series A: for papers in physical sciences and mathematics. * Series B: for papers in life sciences. Many landmark scientific discoveries are published in the Proceedings, making it one of the most important science journals in history. The journal contains several articles written by prominent scientists such as Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Schrödinger, William Lawrence Bragg, Lord Kelvin, J.J. Thomson, James Clerk Maxwell, Dorothy Hodgkin and Stephen Hawking. In 2004, the Royal Society began '' The Journal of the Royal Society Interface'' for papers at the interface of physical sciences and life sciences. History The journal began in 1831 as a compilation of abstracts of papers in the '' Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'', the older Royal Society publication, that began in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Paul Dirac
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac ( ; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English mathematician and Theoretical physics, theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Dirac laid the foundations for both quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and a professor of physics at Florida State University. Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger for "the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory". Dirac graduated from the University of Bristol with a first class honours Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1921, and a first class honours Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics in 1923. Dirac then graduated from the University of Cambridge with a PhD in physics in 1926, writing the first ever thesis on quantum mechanics. Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Cosmic Inflation
In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation, is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the very early universe. Following the inflationary period, the universe continued to expand, but at a slower rate. The re-acceleration of this slowing expansion due to dark energy began after the universe was already over 7.7 billion years old (5.4 billion years ago). Inflation theory was developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with notable contributions by several theoretical physicists, including Alexei Starobinsky at Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Alan Guth at Cornell University, and Andrei Linde at Lebedev Physical Institute. Starobinsky, Guth, and Linde won the 2014 Kavli Prize "for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation". It was developed further in the early 1980s. It explains the origin of the large-scale structure of the cosmos. Quantum fluctuations in the microscopic inflationary region, magnified t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Physical Cosmology
Physical cosmology is a branch of cosmology concerned with the study of cosmological models. A cosmological model, or simply cosmology, provides a description of the largest-scale structures and dynamics of the universe and allows study of fundamental questions about its Cosmogony, origin, structure, Chronology of the universe, evolution, and ultimate fate.For an overview, see Cosmology as a science originated with the Copernican principle, which implies that astronomical object, celestial bodies obey identical physical laws to those on Earth, and Newtonian mechanics, which first allowed those physical laws to be understood. Physical cosmology, as it is now understood, began in 1915 with the development of Albert Einstein's general relativity, general theory of relativity, followed by major observational discoveries in the 1920s: first, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe contains a huge number of external Galaxy, galaxies beyond the Milky Way; then, work by Vesto Sliph ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Horizon Problem
The horizon problem (also known as the homogeneity problem) is a cosmological fine-tuning problem within the Big Bang model of the universe. It arises due to the difficulty in explaining the observed homogeneity of causally disconnected regions of space in the absence of a mechanism that sets the same initial conditions everywhere. It was first pointed out by Wolfgang Rindler in 1956. The most commonly accepted solution is cosmic inflation. Different solutions propose a cyclic universe or a variable speed of light. Background Astronomical distances and particle horizons The distances of observable objects in the night sky correspond to times in the past. We use the light-year (the distance light can travel in the time of one Earth year) to describe these cosmological distances. A galaxy measured at ten billion light-years appears to us as it was ten billion years ago, because the light has taken that long to travel to the observer. If one were to look at a galaxy ten bill ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
João Magueijo
João Magueijo (born 1967) is a Portuguese cosmologist and professor in theoretical physics at Imperial College London. He is a pioneer of the varying speed of light (VSL) theory. Education and career João Magueijo studied physics at the University of Lisbon. He undertook graduate work and Ph.D. at Cambridge University. He was awarded a research fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge. He has been a faculty member at Princeton and Cambridge and is currently a professor at Imperial College London where he teaches undergraduates General Relativity and postgraduates Advanced General Relativity. In 1998, Magueijo teamed with Andreas Albrecht to work on the varying speed of light (VSL) theory of cosmology, which proposes that the speed of light was up to in the early universe. This would explain the horizon problem (since distant regions of the expanding universe would have had time to interact and homogenize their properties) and is presented as an alternative to the m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Andreas Albrecht (cosmologist)
Andreas J. Albrecht is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist who is a professor and chair of the physics department at the University of California, Davis.CV of Dr Andreas Albrecht. He is one of the founders of inflationary cosmology and studies the formation of the early universe, cosmic structure, and . Life and career Albrecht graduated in 1979 from and was awarded a doctorate in 1983 at |
John Moffat (physicist)
John W. Moffat (born 24 May 1932) is a Danish-born Canadian physicist. He is currently professor emeritus of physics at the University of Toronto and is also an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo and a resident affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Moffat is best known for his work on gravity and cosmology, culminating in his nonsymmetric gravitational theory and scalar–tensor–vector gravity (now called MOG), and summarized in his 2008 book for general readers, ''Reinventing Gravity''. His theory explains galactic rotation curves without invoking dark matter. He proposes a variable speed of light approach to cosmological problems. The speed of light ''c'' may have been more than 15 orders of magnitude higher during the early moments of the Big Bang. His recent work on inhomogeneous cosmological models purports to explain certain anomalous effects in the CMB data, and to account for the recently discovered accelerati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Dirac Large Numbers Hypothesis
The Dirac large numbers hypothesis (LNH) is an observation made by Paul Dirac in 1937 relating ratios of size scales in the Universe to that of force scales. The ratios constitute very large, dimensionless numbers: some Orders of magnitude (numbers)#1039, 40 orders of magnitude in the present cosmological epoch. According to Dirac's hypothesis, the apparent similarity of these ratios might not be a mere coincidence but instead could imply a physical cosmology, cosmology with these unusual features: *The strength of gravity, as represented by the gravitational constant, is inversely proportional to the age of the universe: G \propto 1/t\, *The mass of the universe is proportional to the square of the universe's age: M \propto t^2. *Physical constants are actually not constant. Their values depend on the age of the Universe. Stated in another way, the hypothesis states that all very large dimensionless quantities occurring in fundamental physics should be simply related to a single v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
