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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, its dependence on a medium's refractive index or its measurement in a remote observer's frame o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Speed Of Light
The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted , is a universal physical constant that is important in many areas of physics. The speed of light is exactly equal to ). According to the special theory of relativity, is the upper limit for the speed at which conventional matter or energy (and thus any signal carrying information) can travel through 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 very sensitive measurements, their finite speed has noticeable effects. Starlight viewed on Earth left the stars many years ago, allowing humans to study the history of the universe by viewing distant objects. When communicating with distant space probes, it can take minutes to hours for signals to travel from Earth to the spacecraft and vice versa. In computing, the speed of light fixes the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 historically significant science journals. The journal contains several articles written by the most celebrated names in science, 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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Dirac
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English theoretical physicist who is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a professor of physics at Florida State University and the University of Miami, and a 1933 Nobel Prize recipient. Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation which describes the behaviour of fermions and predicted the existence of antimatter. Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory". He also made significant contributions to the reconciliation of general relativity with quantum mechanics. Dirac was regarded by his friends and colleagues as unusual in character. In a 1926 letter to Paul Ehrenfest, Albert ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cosmic Inflation
In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation, is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the early universe. The inflationary epoch lasted from seconds after the conjectured Big Bang singularity to some time between and seconds after the singularity. Following the inflationary period, the universe continued to expand, but at a slower rate. The acceleration of this 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 80s, 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. Alexei Starobinsky, Alan Guth, and Andrei Linde won the 2014 Kavli Prize "for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation." It was developed further in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 origin, structure, evolution, and ultimate fate.For an overview, see Cosmology as a science originated with the Copernican principle, which implies that 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 with the development in 1915 of Albert Einstein's 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 galaxies beyond the Milky Way; then, work by Vesto Slipher and others showed that the universe is expanding. These advances made it possible ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 billi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 more m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 and studies the formation of the early universe, cosmic structure, and . Life and career Albrecht graduated in 1979 from ,[...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Moffat (physicist)
John W. Moffat (born 24 May 1932) is a Danish-born British-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 30 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 discovere ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean-Pierre Petit
Jean-Pierre Petit is a French engineer. Education Jean-Pierre Petit obtained his engineer's degree in 1961 at the Institut supérieur de l'aéronautique et de l'espace (Supaéro). Petit defended his doctoral thesis, ''Applications de la théorie cinétique des gaz à la physique des plasmas et à la dynamique des galaxies'', at the University of Provence in 1972. Petit worked in topology with Bernard Morin on the torus and sphere eversion in 1978. Ummo Petit said in 2018 that he experienced personal contacts with unidentified entities that may or not be related to the Ummo case, but that he believes are aliens. The Ummo affair has been admitted to have been a hoax A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into pu .... References External links Official website {{D ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 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 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. Background LNH was Dirac's personal response to a set of large number "coincidences" that had intrigued other theorists of his time. The "coincidences" began with Hermann Weyl (1919), who speculated that the obse ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
