"Bill Sheppard" wrote in message
...
Steve@nospam wrote,
A good example is the bedrock axiom that holds the speed of light to be
constant all the way to the limit of visibility.. with the presumption
that it is also constant all the way to the BB itself. The doctrine of
universal c-invariance, of course, is rooted in void-space, that is, the
premise that space is functionally void or 'nothing'.

One of the unstated assumptions, when people come up with these more "out
there" speculations, is the assumption that you can change one rule or law
or constant (such as C in this case) and everything else will operate as
before, except light will travel at a different speed. Or there's the
creationist proposal that radioactive dating is flawed because radioactive
decay rates used to be different that they are now.

The trouble with these ideas is the implications involved in changing basic
constants. For instance, changing C changes the results that you get from
e=mc^2, which means (among other things) that the amount of energy that a
star gets from fusing hydrogen to form helium will change. This means that
the whole "main sequence" chart for types of stars would be different, and
the difference would be detectable. In the real world, however, stars 5
billion light years away look just like the ones next door.

In the case of the radioactive decay change, that would require a change in
the strong nuclear force. Among other problems, this would also change
stellar fusion behaviour. It's been stated by cosmologists that the physical
laws of the universe are so finely tuned that even a small change would
result in a universe incapable of supporting life or even stars.

Getting back to Bill's speculation, while there's certainly nothing wrong
with proposing "way out" ideas, the onus is always on the person proposing
an alternative to mainstream beliefs to come up with reasons why we should
take them seriously. At minimum, the new theory must explain existing
observations as well as the existing theory; in addition, it must also
either explain some observation that the existing theory can't, or it must
make a prediction that can be checked which wouldn't follow from the
existing theory. If it doesn't do these things, then really the only
reasonable reaction is "Uh huh. So?"