Can the laws of physics change over time and space?

As far as physicists can tell, the cosmos has been playing by the same rulebook since the time of the Big Bang. But could the laws have been different in the past, and could they change in the future? Might different laws prevail in some distant corner of the cosmos?

"It's not a completely crazy possibility," says Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech, who points out that, when we ask if the laws of physics are mutable, we're actually asking two separate questions: First, do the equations of quantum mechanics and gravity change over time and space? And second, do the numerical constants that populate those equations vary?

This is an artist's impression of the quasar 3C 279. Astronomers connected the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), in Chile, to the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii, USA, and the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT) in Arizona, USA for the first time, to make the sharpest observations ever, of the centre of a distant galaxy, the bright quasar 3C 279. Quasars are the very bright centres of distant galaxies that are powered by supermassive black holes. This quasar contains a black hole with a mass about one billion times that of the Sun, and is so far from Earth that its light has taken more than 5 billion years to reach us. The team were able to probe scales of less than a light-year across the quasar - a remarkable achievement for a target that is billions of light-years away.


To see the distinction, imagine the whole universe as one big game of basketball. You can tweak certain parameters without changing the game: Raise the hoop a little higher, make the court a little bigger, change the way you score, and it's still basketball. But if you tell the players to start running bases or kicking field goals, then you're playing a different game.

Most of the current research into the changeability of physical laws has focused on the numerical constants. Why? It's the easier question to answer. Physicists can make solid, testable predictions about how variations in numerical constants should affect the results of their experiments. Plus, says Carroll, it wouldn't necessarily blow physics wide open if it turns out that constants do change over time. In fact, some constants have changed: The mass of an electron, for instance, was zero until the Higgs field turned on a tiny sliver of a second after the Big Bang. "We have lots of theories that can accommodate changing constants," says Carroll. "All you have to do to account for time-dependent constants is to add some scalar field to the theory that moves very slowly."

A scalar field, Carroll explains, is any quantity that has a unique value at every point in space-time. The celebrity-du-jour scalar field is the Higgs, but you can also think of less exotic quantities, like temperature, as scalar fields, too. A yet-undiscovered scalar field that changes very slowly could continue to evolve even billions of years after the Big Bang - and with it, the so-called constants of nature could evolve, too.

Luckily, the cosmos has gifted us with some handy windows through which we can peer at the constants as they were in the deep past. One such window is located in the rich uranium deposits of the Oklo region of Gabon, in Central Africa, where, in 1972, workers serendipitously discovered a group of "natural nuclear reactors" - rocks that spontaneously ignited and managed to sustain nuclear reactions for hundreds of thousands of years. The result: "A radioactive fossil of what the rules of nature looked like" two billion years ago, says Carroll. (For perspective, the Earth is about 4 billion years old, and the universe is edging toward 14 billion.)

The characteristics of that fossil depend on the value of a special number called the fine structure constant, which bundles up a handful of other constants - the speed of light, the charge on an electron, the electric constant, and Planck's constant into a single number, about 1/137. It's what physicists call a "dimensionless" constant, meaning that it's really just a number: it's not 1/137 inches, seconds, or coulombs, it's just plain 1/137. That makes it an ideal place to look for changes in the constants embedded within it, says Steve Lamoreaux, a physicist at Yale University. "If the constants changed in such a way that the electron mass and the electrostatic interaction energies changed in different way, it would show up in the 1/137 unambiguously, independent of measurement system."

But interpreting that fossil isn't easy, and over the years researchers studying Oklo have come to apparently conflicting conclusions. For decades, studies of Oklo seemed to show that the fine structure constant was absolutely steady. Then came a study suggesting that it had gotten bigger, and another that it had gotten smaller. In 2006, Lamoreaux (then at Los Alamos National Laboratory) and his colleagues published a fresh analysis that was, they wrote, "consistent with no shift." But, they pointed out, it was still "model dependent" - that is, they had to make certain assumptions about how the fine structure constant could change.

Using atomic clocks, physicists can search for even tinier changes in the fine structure constant, but they're limited to looking at present-day variations that happen over just a year or so. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, compared time kept by atomic clocks running on aluminum and mercury to put extremely tight limits on the present-day change in the fine structure constant. Though they can't say for certain that the fine structure constant isn't changing, if it is, the variation is tiny: just quadrillionths of a single percent each year.

Today, the best limits on how the constants could be varying over the life of the universe come from observations of distant objects on the sky. That's because, the farther into space you look, the farther back in time you can see. The Oklo "time machine" stops two billion years ago, but, using light from distant quasars, astronomers have dialed the cosmic time machine 11 billion years back.

Quasars are extremely bright, ancient objects that astronomers believe are probably glowing supermassive black holes. As light from these quasars travels to us, some of it gets absorbed by the gas it travels through along the way. But it doesn't get absorbed evenly: only very particular wavelengths, or colors, get plucked out. The specific colors that are "deleted" from the spectrum depend on how photons from the quasar light interact with atoms in the gas, and those interactions depend on the fine structure constant. So, by looking at the spectrum of light from distant quasars, astrophysicists can search for changes to the fine structure constant over many billions of years.

"By the time that light has reached us here on Earth, it has collected information regarding several galaxies going back billions of years," says Tyler Evans, who led some of the most rigorous quasar measurements to date while he was a PhD student at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. "It is analogous to taking a core sample of ice or the Earth in order to tell how climate was behaving in previous epochs."

Despite some tantalizing hints, the latest studies all show that changes to the fine structure constant are "consistent with zero." That doesn't mean that the fine structure constant absolutely isn't changing. But if it is, it's doing so more subtly than these experiments can detect, and that seems unlikely, says Carroll. "It's hard to squeeze a theory into the little daylight between not changing at all, and not changing enough that we can see it."

Astrophysicists are also looking for changes to G, the gravitational constant, which dials in the strength of gravity. In 1937, Paul Dirac, one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, offered up the hypothesis that gravity gets weaker as the universe ages. Though the idea didn't stick, physicists kept looking for changes in G, and today some exotic alternative theories of gravity embrace a shifting gravitational constant. While lab experiments here on Earth have returned confusing results, studies off Earth suggest that G isn't changing much, if it all. Most recently, radio astronomers scoured 21 years of precise timing data from an unusually bright, stable pulsar to see if they could trace any changes in its regular "heartbeat" of radio emission to changes in the gravitational constant. The result - nothing.

But back to the second, tougher half of our original question: Could the laws of physics themselves, and not just the constants sewn into them, be changing? "That's much harder to say," says Carroll, who points out that there are different degrees of disruption to consider. If the rules of some "sub-theory" of quantum mechanics, like quantum electrodynamics, turned out to be fluid, maybe existing theory could accommodate that. But if the laws of quantum mechanics itself are in flux, says Carroll, "That would be very bizarre." No theory predicts how or why such a change might happen; there is simply no framework from which to investigate the question.

As far as we can tell, the universe seems to be playing fair. But physicists will keep scouring the rulebook, looking for clues that the rules of the game could be changing at a level we haven't yet perceived.


Discover: Is the Search for Immutable Laws of Nature a Wild-Goose Chase?
Astrophysicist Adam Frank profiles four theorists who challenge the notion that there is one set of unchanging laws that perfectly describes the universe.

Michael Murphy: Are Nature's Laws Really Universal?
Murphy, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University of Technology, provides a general-audience overview of the search for changes in the fundamental constants, with links to related articles and video.

Natural History Magazine: On Earth As In The Heavens
In this essay, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explains why physicists think that the same laws that apply on Earth apply throughout the cosmos, and how we may one day use this knowledge to communicate with alien civilizations.




http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2015/10/are-the-laws-of-physics-really-universal/

There are numerous laws of physics, both within classical and modern physics. The field is slowly piecing things together. With the ability to probe deeper and deeper into space they are likely to find where constants do change and that physics, itself, posesses an evolutionary component much like species posess.

true, they base everything on mathematics, and if the math is wrong, then they would be wrong as well... but everything is a learning process...

Very good point. The best physics law is Occam's razor being the simplest explanation is usually the best one.

Scientists need to be reminded of that one time to time.

The laws of physics probably don't change. There are probably many aspects of how the universe works of which we are totally unaware. Some aspects of the unknown could affect what we perceive as the the laws of physics in ways that look like the laws are changing when, in reality, they are only being affected by unknown factors.

A good example would be how gravity and speed affect the measurement of time. Another would be how size changes the laws of physics from General Relativity to Quantum physics.

seems there's some confusion between quantum and relativity... somehow, a "battle" between what they are saying how quantum works and Einsteins ideas is forming...


but i'm not sure that the laws of physics are actually laws, but maybe more of a guideline, since most are less than a few hundred years old... maybe our understanding of them is changing?

That is exactly the thought that I had when I first read the subject line for this thread.

Great article OP, thanks for posting it!

I've run across a couple of aspects of this, one to watch out for misrecognizing, and another to expand our understandings about it all.

You're especially right to watch out for confusing the actual laws of physics changing, and the human-created mathematical model of the actual laws of physics having to be altered, in order to account for either new data, or old, heretofore unresolved conflicts or conundrums to be addressed. In that sense, physics doesn't change at all, only our recognition and understanding of how things really work after all, changes.


The other interesting aspect of this that I've come across, is where the people studying some specific portions of the universe have said that there may have been a sort of evolution of physical "laws," during the first moments of the "Big Expansion" that brought the universe into being. In this kind of study, the theoretical physicists might say that gravity didn't start behaving in the manner that we think of it right away, but went through a process of "settling in," before the universal "laws" that we live with today, fully came into being.

The tricky thing with that, is that most of what I've seen, doesn't say that the laws of physics are STILL changing significantly. But some people who report about the theoretical stuff can make it sound as though the door has been opened for up to become down, and inside to become outside, and all scientific predictability to cease. So far in actuality, I've not run across anyone claiming that the changes that DO take place over time, are random in any way. Quite the reverse, actually.

Good thread subject. Recognizing that certainty isn't quite as "solid" as we tend to think it is, can be good fuel for further understanding.

To the extent we can safely-say we've an absolute constant in physics and providing we don't find other properties that remain at a constant for as often as they're tested, I'd argue the Laws Of Physics remain the same.

Unless, God Almighty chooses to usurp these rules. (This Is Called A Miracle)

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Sir Isaac Newton declared three fundamental laws of motion with regards anything that has mass for example.

"'For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction in proportion to its mass.'"

"'An object at rest has a tendency to stay at rest unless effected by an outside force, and likewise an object in motion has a tendency to continue in motion unless effected by an outside force.'"

"'The greater the mass of an object the greater the amount of energy to accelerate or decelerate that object, and likewise the lesser the mass of an object the lesser amount of energy is required to accelerate or decelerate that object.'"

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To this day these fundamental Laws Of Planetary Motion seem to be without dispute even though centuries have passed.

I don't think the Laws of Physics are changing over time. I think there are errors in the laws as we understand them and over time we come closer and closer to the reality.

Nothing is constant, ev'rything changes
Even bars of virtue are varying.

very true, they can't predict chaos values...

Just recently:



So, we have developed the technology to study anti-matter...



So, Water is abundant in the cosmos...



So, Nanotechnology is still making breakthrus



So, Even tho the Earth is estimated at 4.5 Billion years old there are parts that are much younger that are much deeper than can be readily measured



So, even tho we imagine our current form as the last one there could be many more changes to the human body



So, we can now manufature things from thin air?

We can also ask: do the same laws of physics rule in other worlds of the universe as in ours?

If we have confirmed (in quantum physics)that there is no real matter, but that all that we see as it is just a different form of vibrations of a pure energy, there is no reason why shouldn't this vibrating energy make completely different laws of physics in other worlds.

it also depends on the frequency of the vibrations of the atoms and electrons...i think you are correct, if the frequency changes for whatever reason, then the atoms change their energy output...

A particularly mind-bending (and controversial) physics paper surfaced in the past week that should make you feel pretty special. It seems the laws of physics can change after all, and it just so happens they're uniquely suited for us right here, right now.

The paper, recently submitted to Physical Review Letters and posted to the physics arXiv, suggests the fine structure constant is not actually constant at all. This could mean that if we were in a different place or time period, atoms would not stay together and nothing — neither planets nor people — could exist.

A team led by John Webb at the University of New South Wales, Australia, has been studying whether the fine structure constant, otherwise known as alpha, changes over time. Alpha is a special number that essentially describes the strength of the electromagnetic force. The famous physicist Richard Feynman called its value "one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics." If it is not 1/137.036, things fall apart.

If alpha was different in the past, the universe might have looked different, too, which could be determined by looking at distant interstellar gases and how they absorb light. Observations by Webb and others at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii suggest that this is exactly the case — over time, alpha has changed ever so slightly.

Competing studies did not find the same result, however, so this is still a controversial idea. But it's a fair bet Webb's follow-up is even more tendentious: He says alpha also changes over space. According to his theory, we're smack in the Goldilocks zone, where alpha is exactly the right value to make matter possible.

This paper happened because Webb and his team wanted to reexamine their Keck findings, which suggested alpha was a tiny bit smaller about 9 billion years in the past. They went to the Very Large Observatory in Chile to check it out, and were shocked by what they saw: the further they looked, the bigger alpha got. The discrepancy is even stranger given the two telescopes' positions: they are in two different hemispheres, so they look in two different directions.

So, to recap: in one direction, alpha was once smaller; in exactly the opposite direction, it was once bigger. This implies that alpha continuously varies throughout space. As Technology Review's physics blog puts it, that's a mind-blowing result. If it's true and can be verified, it could mean the universe is much larger than what we can see, and that the laws of physics vary within it.

It would not be possible for our type of life to exist in a place where alpha were any different. So here's to here and now.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-09/physics-laws-change-depending-when-and-where-you-are-new-study-says

I find that interesting.
A few years ago I watched a video about the Higgs-Boson.
The scientist was saying that the Higgs-Boson was what slows matter down and keeps reality from flying apart at the speed of light.
Just recently, the LHC confirmed that the Higgs-Boson exists. Now there is growing speculation of the same forces being discovered.
I think it could all be related.

The video on youtube is
The Mystery of Empty Space
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY8vCbU-qmw&feature=youtu.be
Part one of Four
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-vKh_jKX7Q
as one 45 minute video