Laws of Nature May Change as the Universe Ages A team of international researchers has made a discovery that might force scientists to rewrite everything they know about physics -- that the basic laws of nature may be changing as the universe gets older. If true, Albert Einstein's postulation that the speed of light is a constant, and other foundation stones of the science of physics in the past century, may have to be rethought. The findings by the Australian, U.S. and British researchers may also provide fodder for adherents of new theories, such as super string theory, which postulates that there may be extra dimensions in the cosmos that we know nothing about. Scientists based their findings on observation of light from a quasar -- an extremely bright object that produces 10 trillion times as much energy per second as our sun -- passing through a cosmic gas cloud. They first took a spectrum pattern as elements such as magnesium, zinc and hydrogen, which were present in the cloud, absorbed the quasar's light. This was then compared with a spectrum pattern created down on Earth -- and they found small unexplained differences. Those differences suggested that something, possibly the speed of light, had changed by the time it reached the Earth, trillions upon trillions of miles from the cloud. The experimental results suggesting the laws of nature may not be constant came from observations of the quasar, 14 billion light years away, through Hawaii's 10-meter-wide Keck telescope. Because they are extremely distant and, assuming that light travels at a finite speed, quasars can provide a glimpse of what happened during the Big Bang in which many believe the universe was formed. (end) © Khorhseed.com - Sep 2001