Something to read on the topic concerned:
Speed of light slowing down, claims scientist
AFP [ THURSDAY, AUGUST 08, 2002 9:20:24 PM ]
SYDNEY: A scientist in Australia claims he has found evidence that the speed of light is slowing down, a discovery that would unravel Einstein’s theory of relativity and revolutionise modern physics.
Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist with the Australian Centre for Astro-biology at Sydney’s Macquarie University, has put forward his thesis, based on measurements of light travelling billions of years from giant stellar objects called quasars.
According to the measurements, taken by an astronomer at the University of New South Wales, a 12 billion-year-old stream of light has properties, which appear to violate accepted laws of physics.
Davies says the only possible explanation for the unusual data is that the speed of light was faster six to 10 billion years ago than its current speed of around 3,00,000 km per second. The theory, published in the scientific journal Nature on Thursday, notably raises the possibility that light may have travelled at an infinite speed at the time of the so-called Big Bang, which physicists say marks the creation point of the universe.
"It’s entirely possible that the speed of light would have got greater and greater as you go back (through time) towards the Big Bang and if so it could explain some of the great mysteries of cosmology," he said.
"If the speed of light were nearly infinite in the first split second, it would explain why the universe is so uniform, for example, on a large scale," he said.
If his theory stands up, Davies said, it would be the biggest scientific revolution since Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity — which the new hypothesis would demolish.
One of the most important elements of Einstein’s theory that energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared (E=MC2) is that the speed of light — ‘C’ in the equation — is an absolute constant.
"Einstein would have absolutely hated this," Davies said. "His theory of relativity was founded on the notion that the speed of light is an absolute fixed universal number."
"If these results hold out, we need to start re-examining the very nature of space and time," he said. "It also affects other branches of physics like thermodynamics and quantum physics. The very basis of all our fundamental physical theories — if these observations are correct — seem to be in the melting pot," he said. Davies said it also needed to be tested whether the speed of light was continuously slowing down or whether it had hit a cosmological "speed bump" billions of years ago.