Talk:C-decay

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[edit] VSOL

Is this concept different from the one mentioned in Variable speed of light? If it's not, this article could probably be merged into that one. Even if they are slightly different, this article might be best as a section of that article. Thoughts? --ParkerHiggins ^{( talk contribs )} 07:26, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Sorry for the tardy reply (like, really tardy). VSOL "worked" during the inflationary period of the universe. During this time physics was somewhat different than it was today, and the very idea of "speed of light" is a bit questionable. It's also worth recalling that this period only 10-33 seconds. More importantly, this all took place before the visible universe existed. That means that the visible universe we see today is a result of, well, the visible universe we see today (see particle horizon). Every measurement we have taken demonstrates that the speed of light has remained constant since the formation of the visible universe.

If you're interested in understanding the theory behind the theory, you might want to look up an older book called "Cosmic Horizons". It doesn't cover inflation, but it doesn't really have to, it does cover the "basic idea" of cosmology really well though.

Maury 21:30, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] cutoff date

In Setterfield's paper he introduced a "cutoff date beyond which there is a zero rate of change", making the theory unfalsifiable by new observations of c.

Didn't Setterfield later realise that the observed cutoff date that he found in the data was due to the fact that all accurate measurements of the speed of light since the 1960s were done with atomic clocks, which slow down at the same rate as the speed of light they are measuring?

I'm sure he came up with some ad-hoc explanation, that's the way it goes. But many modern measures of the speed of light do not measure time at all. They measure the distance needed to make a standing wave at a particular frequency within a resonant cavity. The speed is calculated by dividing the length of the cavity by the frequency, sort of. Many of the modern measures in the immediate post-war era were made this way, due largely to the wartime invention of stable narrow-band oscillators used for radar. Maury 15:20, 14 November 2006 (UTC)