The Declining Speed of Light

Time was tied to the speed of light by Albert Einstein and he defined it as a constant, but we have recently found it is not.  This is one bit of physical evidence that time may be a navigable dimension.

Early in 1979, Australian undergraduate student Barry Setterfield thought it would be interesting to chart measurements of the speed of light since Dutch astronomer Olaf Roemer first measured it in the late 17th century.  Setterfield’s data included 163 measurements using 16 different methods over 300 years.

Early measurements tracked transits of the moons of Jupiter when it was near  Earth compared with observations when it was farther away.   The distance varies by 186 million miles over the year and time varied by 16.66 minutes between near and far transits so this data was used to compute the speed of light.

17^th century astronomical clocks were calibrated by the stars daily.  Some wooden clocks were amazingly accurate as a result of the constant tinkering with the technology. The gears were made with exotic South American hardwoods, some with the strength of mild steel.  With regular calibration they told virtually perfect time. 

These observations are repeatable and have been done by astronomers regularly.  Early astronomers kept meticulous notes and sketches that are still available.

Setterfield expected to see recorded speeds grouped around the accepted value for light speed, 299,792 kilometers /second.  Half the historic measurements should have been higher and half lower. 

That was not the case.: The derived light speeds from the early measurements were consistently higher than today. The older the observation, the faster the speed of light!

Setterfield worked with the statistician Dr. Trevor Norman who demonstrated the speed of light was higher 100 years ago.  It was seven percent higher in the 1700’s!  Dr. Norman confirmed the measurements were correct with a statistical confidence greater than 99%.

Setterfield and Norman published their results at SRI in July 1987 after extensive peer review.  It would be easy to dismiss two relatively unknown researchers if theirs were the only voices and the historic data anomalous. But, that was very much not the case.

Since the SRI publication in 1987 researchers from Russia, Australia, Great Britain and the United States have published papers in prestigious journals questioning the constancy of the speed of light.   And, theoretical work suggests the speed of light was 10^10 (Ten followed by ten zeros.) times faster than now immediately after “Big Bang.” 

Where the values plotted on a curve approximate the math function cosecant squared there are interesting implications for the nature of time and space as this suggests, if not confims, an empirical physical regularity.

The night sky is a trip through time in billions of years. What does this do to the size of the universe?  At the very least it expands it by 10^10^th, or ten billion times. And even more profoundly:  Time and the velocity of light are intertwined; the equations say at infinite light speed time vanishes!

There have been challenges to the original Hubble red-shift theory, particularly by Dr. William Tifft who found shifts not to be uniform, per Hubble, but in quantum-like bands with nothing in between.

Could this suggest stepped “C?”  Quantum time!  According to the Setterfield Hypothesis declining light speeds would cause changes in the quantum states of atomic structure within these galaxies, leading to quantum shifts in the light emitted which is precisely what Dr. Tifft detected.  His work has been confirmed.

And, where time is tied to the velocity of light, which is symbolized by the lettet "c," does this suggest that there was no time before the Big Bang? 

And, if we were from a time zero universe where everything happened all at once, could it be everything has happened?  And we a "movie" in a matrix?

Could we, as the Schroedinger-Heisingberg equations suggest, navigate time by changing our "when" much as electrons  change their address, vanishing here and appearing there?

Setterfield believes the speed of light was initially 10 to the 10th times faster than it is today. That is 10 billion times! After the creation of the universe, light speed declined following a curve fitting that of the cosecant squared curve.  Why?  He believes light speed reached a point where it is asymptotic (flat) in the mid 1960s.  Though reasonably constant, he believes the speed still varies in waves, sometimes higher and sometimes lower than the accepted standard. ( This is the part we question.)

After Dr. Tifft's initial publication, several astronomers devised extensive experiments in attempts to prove him wrong. Among them two Scottish astronomers, Bruce Gutherie and William Napier from the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh observed approximately 300 galaxies in the mid 1990s. But, they found confirmation of quantum banding in red-shift data.

They also had difficulty publishing their data. It has been reported that the prestigious Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics refused publication until an additional set of observations from 97 other spiral galaxies was included. A sophisticated Fourier analysis of the initial 302 early data points, and the subsequent total of 399 data points strongly confirmed quantum shifts.

Despite this and additional observations by Bell in 2003, many scientists are still reluctant to give up on the theory that red shifts are caused by Doppler effects and have continued to claim that the red-shift quanta results by Tifft and others are due to research and data insufficiencies or errors.

It is intriguing to note the first measurement of light speed by Olaf Roemer in the late 17th century was an attempt to disprove the Aristotelian belief that light speed was infinite. Overwhelming and repeatable evidence over 50 years accumulated before the scientific hierarchy of the time accepted evidence which, in retrospect was clear, compelling and unimpeachable.

A sampling of these values is listed below:

In 1738: 303,320 +/- 310 km/second (303,010 to 303,630)

In 1861: 300,050 +/- 60 km/second   (299,090 to 300,110)

In 1877: 299,921 +/- 13 km/second   (299,908 to 299,934)

In 2004: 299,792 km/second (accepted constant)

This is clear, undeniable evidence of the declining speed of light and much of what it implies.

Adrian Vance