Variability in the Speed of Light: An Odd Theory
[Please note that clearly I have decided to continue writing, at least for the time being - thank you for reading]
I want to begin this week’s offering by stating that this is a One-Off essay. I will not be writing crazy theories about astrophysics other than on this singular occasion, so please bear with me this one time.
Part (A) - A few basics and a note that this offering will include quite a few “What If’s” which will take it from the realm of science fact to more along the lines of science fiction. So let’s begin by noting that for sound to travel, it needs a medium of some sort. For the most part this is air. The source of sound is a vibration that causes sound waves which travel using the air. The sound waves then land on your ear membrane where they are translated into specific sounds we can interpret. Sound travels through air at around 767 miles per hour, or Mach 1 as it is sometimes known.
When sound vibrations are produced under water, the water acts the same as air, allowing the sound waves to travel, sometimes across great distances as with a whale’s song. But in water, because the density is greater than with air, sound waves travel at 4 to 5 times the speed they do in air. I hope this make sense so far. The greater the density of the medium, the faster those sound waves travel.
Part (B) - Okay, so the next portion has to do with light waves. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (just a bit faster than sound). To place this in some context, it takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds for the light produced by our Sun to reach the Earth. Light from our nearest star neighbor, Proxima Centauri, takes 4 and a half years to reach us. And most of the stars we view in the night sky emitted their light hundreds of thousands of years ago [WHEW!]. As with sound, light also travels in waves, though light waves are made up of photons or electromagnetic energy particles, as compared to the vibrations that create sound waves.
Science tells us that one of the big differences between sound and light waves is that light waves can travel through a vacuum such as that found in space whereas sound cannot. That light does not need a medium in order to go from Point A to Point B which is why we can see the light from far off stars and galaxies. In space there is a profound silence since sound waves do not have the necessary medium through which to travel.
So, here’s the first of my big “What If’s”. What if light does indeed need a medium in which to travel from Point A to Point B, just like sound, but we just don’t know what that medium might be, especially since space appears to be devoid of material that could act as a medium. Now wait just a darn minute, science also tells us that space is filled with something called Dark Matter. At this point in the essay we have to go back in time to the late 1800s when researchers were attempting to explain how light traveled. They came up with a theory about a substance they called Aether to suggest it as a medium for light waves. Albert Einstein nixed that theory coming up with his own which is now called the Theory of Relativity leaving no room for Aether (a simpler explanation).
We are told that Dark Matter has no electromagnetic capabilities which is why it can’t act as a medium for electromagnetic light waves. And yet we still don’t know what Dark Matter is except that it has a major impact on gravitational pull throughout the universe. Why, if no one knows what Dark Matter is or does, can’t it even remotely be considered a medium for light without electromagnetic interaction. [Am I losing you yet?]
Part (C) – You have probably heard of The Big Bang Theory (not the TV show). This concept attempts to explain the origins of the universe which, as the theory suggests, happened in a huge cosmic explosion sometime around 14 billion years ago. There are many competing theories about what happened next though the general consensus is that the universe entered a phase of continual expansion where gas clouds formed galaxies along with stars, followed by solar systems and eventually (in rare circumstances) life, as happened here on Earth.
Here’s where my own theory about what happened next veers off of the standard opinions held by physicists who know a great deal more than I do, hence a lot of “what if’s”. Within the first few billion years of the universe’s existence, everything was much more compact. The edges of what we might think of with regard to the universe were pushing outward, but inside that realm there would have been Dark Matter that was only beginning to expand. IF light were using Dark Matter as a medium to travel and IF light reacted much the same way as sound waves do in that light travels faster in a denser environment, the speed of light at the time would have to have been exponentially faster.
Again, if this were the case, the speed of light would have diminished over billions more years to achieve the current level of 186,000 per second, which appears, at least on the surface, to be a standard speed throughout the universe. Through the use of the Hubble Telescope and more recently the James Webb Observatory that is orbiting the Earth at a distance of 1 million miles, astronomers have been able to detect light from extremely distant galaxies they believe are billions of lightyears away. They have also been able to ascertain that the universe is not only expanding but expanding at an accelerating rate. Everything is ostensibly moving away from everything else at a faster and faster pace. At first blush this seems counter intuitive since it would seem that gravity would be slowing down this expansion, like putting on the brakes when driving down a hill instead of hitting the accelerator.
But what if the light that was emitted from that far distant galaxy was traveling at a different speed when it was emitted and over time has slowed down. Here’s where is gets a bit more complex. The way scientists can tell if a light source is moving away from us and at what rate of speed, is something called a “redshift”. This is when the light waves are stretched much like the sound waves created by a siren’s change in pitch as the source moves past you and down the block. This is called the Doppler effect.
This same phenomenon could be partially explained by a shift in the speed of light itself. In fact, if this were the case, it would appear that the source was moving away from us faster than it would actually be traveling because the light had slowed down over the course of those billions of years, thereby giving an observer a false sense of acceleration.
As noted earlier, I’m not a physicist nor have I ever even taken a physics course, so the likelihood of my ideas having any credibility is slim to none. I once posited this theory to someone on a website called “Ask an Astrophysicist.” His response was curt and fairly direct, but the bottom line was that the speed of light is not variable nor has it ever been [PERIOD]. Anyway, my observations make some sense to me. Perhaps someone else will have the credentials to make a case for this concept. Or, on the other hand, if you know someone who can obliterate my theory, please, I would love to gain better understanding of why this has zero merit, perhaps from someone with PhD after their name.
Regardless, it’s still fun to think about this kind of material, whether or not it has viability.
Next week I’ll be back to a subject that’s more down to Earth.
“Ask an Astrophysicist” at least responded to you. Pot couldn’t have been that cracked.
Thank you, I think?
Well, it seems to me that we give too much credence to people we put labels on such as “Astrophysicist” or “Rocket scientist”. They may be smart, but often it takes a layman’s perspective to take an outside the box view of scientific dogma for breakthroughs to happen, especially when many in high end fields of study have a preconceived idea about how things work, generally speaking.
This becomes apparent when the dilemma of quantum entanglement rears its head. We all know Einstein stated God does not play dice, but the quantum dilemma is just one of the divides that creates continued debate among those that seek the truth. I do believe there was an experiment recently that confirmed quantum entanglement with the use of distant quasars which generated the gates used for measuring the particle connections.
When it comes to dark matter and dark energy, the established scientific community is pretty much in the dark, no pun intended. We know that galaxies are surround like a halo by this dark matter, which helps explain why galaxies clump together, along with the massive gravitational fields created by the black holes at the center of most if not all of these galaxies.
As for the “Big bang” theory, it has been postulated that at the moment of creation, matter must have traveled faster than the speed of light in order for some of the scientific theories to work. Tobin has suggested that light may have slowed down after the initial event, but since the speed of light is a verified constant, I’m not sure if there was ever an actual variation in the speed, but rather an immediate expansion of the universe in order to compensate for the amount of matter distributed throughout the universe. If this is a possible explanation, then the idea of an infinite universe, one that loops back upon itself, as demonstrated in the symbol for eternity, omega, may be a reality. The idea that the universe would have an “edge”, seems rather silly. But a universe that continues on eventually leading back to itself, feels poetically feasible, in my opinion.
Lastly, the light emitted by distant galaxies does slow to a certain degree as far as I know. As light passes through the universe, it passes through numerous gravitational fields as light is bent around the trillions of galaxies, gravitational lensing is what I think it’s called. But of course we must factor in those galaxies that are moving towards us, such as the Andromeda Galaxy, which will probably collide with the Milky Way in a few billion years, creating new star and galactic cloud formation.
In losing, whichever way you care to theorize about and imagine how the universe works, it’s all pretty much a guess. Until we figure out how dark matter and energy (along with black holes) fit into the grand scheme of life, each and every theory should be looked at with an open mind without the bias of what we think we know.
Carl, I can’t thank you enough for this well thought through reply. In a separate critique sent to me by email, a person who has studied astrophysics suggested, once again, that this theory has no weight. One of the major aspects of that excoriation was that Dark Matter is no spread consistently throughout the universe. That it clumps, and so if my suggestion on the variability of the speed of light had any merit, we would have to drop the notion of it being tied to Dark Matter.
In my response to him I agreed my hypothesis, that included Dark Matter, was not possible. But the inclusion of Dark Matter was not meant to be as specific to what we do know about this elusive substance and more about something that might act as a medium for light. In the 19th century there were laymen researchers, sometimes referred to as Gentlemen Scientists who had extraordinary curiosity but did to have an education that gave them credibility. These included key figures like Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, and Francis Galton who defined this era, working in home laboratories to advance fields like biology, chemistry, and physics. I realize that was a different era, in some ways the dawn of true scientific research, so the field was more open to off-the-wall and innovative concepts.
It’s a bit more difficult these days since there are hundreds of thousands of scientists around the world who have greater knowledge about a wide variety of subjects than anyone from the 19th Century may have had. That doesn’t mean that great ideas cannot come from a layman’s perspective, but it does mean that breaking through the constructs set in place by academia is much more difficult.
But us PONCI’s can still dream.