Constant chaos

摘要

Light from far-flung quasars is threatening to revolutionise physics. An international team of scientists say they may have found evidence from these distant beacons that a constant which determines the strength of the electromagnetic force may have been different earlier in the Universe. "It would certainly be a major development, making obsolete much of what we know about the Universe," says astronomer Mike Hawkins of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. The constant in question is known as the fine structure constant, which depends on three other quantities: the charge on the electron, Planck's constant and the speed of light. "If our results are correct, one or more of these constants must have varied over the history of the Universe," says Christopher Churchill of Pennsylvania State University in University Park.