Light travels at
299,792,458 meters per second, as was definitively stated in 1983 and has
believed to have been a constant since that time. But that may not be the case.
Now, according to
the Christian Science Monitor:
A pair of studies suggest that this universal constant might not be so constant after all. In the first study, Marcel Urban from the University of Paris-Sud and his team found that the speed of light in a vacuum varies ever so slightly.
This happens because what we think of as nothing isn't really nothing. Even if you were to create a perfect vacuum, at the quantum level it would still be populated with pairs of tiny "virtual" particles that flash in and out of existence and whose energy values fluctuate. As a consequence of these fluctuations, the speed of a photon passing through a vacuum varies, about 50 quintillionths of a second per square meter.
That may not sound like much, but it's enough to point the way toward a new underlying physics.
3 comments:
There is not a new underlying physics. Instead there is an upper and lower limit to the speed of light in a vacuum that depends on the quantum fluctuations of virtual particles. Just as the speed has been determined by exactness in measurement, just so the variation can be established. This makes "c" slightly fuzzy and also the meter, but the variations are so small that there is no practical effect.
In the quantum fields there is one more layer of indeterminacy to deal with, and yet a further entanglement of issues. These same virtual particles operate at the edges of black hole event horizons in order to create "real" matter and thus give a slight brown tinge to black holes.
Thank you for your insightful elaboration, Christopher. Hope all is well with you!
cool post! Thank you for sharing. I am inspired by your posts and am grateful you share with us internet peeps. This ramblinrose wants to say thank you!
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