The Speed of Light May NOT Be Constant


 In physics and astronomy, the speed of light in the proximate faultless void of space is 299,792,458 meters per second (186,282 miles p/s). This is “the speed of light.” This constant speed means that it takes more than 8 minutes for light to travel from the sun’s photosphere to Planet Earth. It also means that light takes more than four years to travel from the sun to Proxima Centauri (our closest neighbor star). However that number can differ a little here on Earth, dependent upon whether or not a photon’s pathway is disturbed by something like water, as an arbitrary example.




I hope most of you will possibly remember the neutrino fiasco that happened two ago, when a team of scientists claimed they had detected neutrinos speeding fast enough to break the ultimate speed barrier-speeding a photon by only a part of a second, such a finding would displace the foundation of many of our well proven theories regarding how the universe works on both a macro and micro scale. But, those judgments were thrown out due to some defective wiring, leading us to once again accomplish that a photon is the fastest particle in the universe and that it constantly travels at the similar speed. This is such a deep-rooted fact that scientists have distinct a meter using its speed (one meter matches the distance light travels in a mere 1/299,792,458th of a second). Might that be wrong?

So coming back to the topic, the team, which was directed by Marcel Urban from the University of Paris-Sud, claims to have found that the speed of light does vary ever-so-slightly, merely by as little as 50 quintillionths of a second per square meter. Though that figure is small, it is quiet enough to point to a new fundamental kind of physics, which is dictated by the properties of the particles that occupy the vacuum, something that has been deeply discussed for years now, after it was discovered that apparently empty space is not empty at all, but filled with virtual particles (quark-antiquark pairs) that pop in and out of life at their own freedom. Usually when a companion particle is slurped into a singularity, thus affecting their energy values to fluctuate.

Rendering to the group, these fluctuations may occasionally influence the speed that light travels over space. Also, light speed and other astrophysical constants: “are not fundamental constants but apparent parameters of the quantum vacuum.” What does this really mean? Well actually, in another paper published by Luis L. Sánchez-Soto and Gerd Leuchs, who come from the Max  Planck Institute for the Physics, Germany, the impedance of free space, which is extra hypothetical electromagnetic constant, whose values depends on the speed of light, does not hinge on the mass of particles in space, but on their electric charge, somewhat that answers a long erect question postured in physics…why does the light has a constant speed? Also, what initiates the speed? This might also mean that it is probable to guess the total number of charged elementary particles per unit volume that occur in the universe.



It states as, “… there is a theoretical possibility that the speed of light is not fixed, as conventional physics has assumed. But it could fluctuate at a level independent of the energy of each light quantum, or photon, and greater than fluctuations induced by quantum level gravity. The speed of light would be dependent on variations in the vacuum properties of space or time.”

If right, this may really be experimental with the aid of ultra-short pulse lasers. It would also clarify the polarization and magnetization of the vacuum somewhat that is discussed to as vacuum permeability and permittivity. But it seems as if experimental results support this theory.

 Sources: Christian Science Monitor, Phys.Org and LiveScience 

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