by glubglubglub » Wed Oct 12, 2005 1:49 pm
vondarnelle: if the speed of light's decreasing you wind up with all kind of bookkeeping problems for mass, energy, etc., that either contradict what weassume to be true or require additional mechanisms to explain them. <br><br>Ie: using Einstein's famous equation, the energy content of some massive object is going to be mc^2, but now if the speed of light's decreasing that means over time the energy content is decreasing too...so, we run into issues: if energy is conserved -- neither created nor destroyed -- then between an earlier and later time somehow the mass has to increase to make things equal, still, but that violates conservation of mass -- matter being neither created nor destroyed, also (in relativity these are combined into the conservation of mass-energy) -- which begs the question of by what mechanism does the matter increase; on the other hand, if we throw out the conservation of mass-energy then we're in entirely new physics...and 'free energy' ahoy! 'Cause then you can take a nice matched set of matter and antimatter, annihilate them, store the energy, then reconsitute the blocks at a later time, keeping the difference in their energy equivalents to do work...under most theories this'd never be a practical way to make energy (the timescales needed to overcome inefficiencies in the machines being too lengthy), but it'd be a theoretical possibility.<br><br>That handles the local scale stuff pretty well, the bigger issues -- is a variable speed of light even a consistent theory when integrated into general relativity as a whole -- haven't even been addressed, to my knowledge.<br><br>aristo: actually, cerca 1986-8 (or earlier) this would've been crackpot material only of interest to creationists; it's gained a few reputable adherents since then but it would definitely be way outside the norm for a physicist to be looking at then. It's entirely possible that Dr. Dolphin was just going off the fundie deep-end and this was a good excuse to get rid of him -- if you peruse his site a bit he's also into ancient mysteries, and between jetting around the globe and pushing a dubiously scientific agenda that might be enough to get the axe.<br><br>It's hard to say, really, without a bigger sense of the org-chart, whether this guy was a tolerated nutter who overstepped his bounds or whether he had some deeper falling out...or if there's something else entirely. Is made redundant a Britishism for fired? I took it to mean 'were ignored/overruled'. <p></p><i></i>
