Did the speed of light change over the history of the universe?
I read recently on the internet that the speed of light early in the expansion process, post-Big Bang, may have been greater than the speed of light now. How is that possible, and if true, what are the general implications for our understanding of the basic scientific principles we live by now? The article was in yahoo’s science news section sometime last week. Close as I can get, sorry. It seems like the article you read was only one of many which reviewed a paper sent to the journal Nature this month. The New York Times and CNN.com also both carried a similar article (based on your description – I could not find the one from Yahoo). The article in Nature talks about the possibility of the speed of light changing over the history of the universe. Where this stems from is observational evidence that the “fine structure constant” has changed. The fine structure constant determines the exact wavelength of fine structure lines in the spectra of atoms, and measurements of the spectra of qu
