On Fri, Dec 02, 2016 at 10:02:49AM +1100, Bruce Kellett wrote: > On 2/12/2016 9:26 am, Russell Standish wrote: > >On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 04:26:25PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote: > >>I am not sure why he says that Einstein was wrong, as I am not sure > >>Einstein ever asserted that space-time or gravity was fundamental. > >>To say that Einstein is wrong looks like a cliché in fashion, today. > >It's code speak for saying the speed of light is not a constant. It's > >more a bone to throw to the media to stir up interest, than a real > >scientific statement. > > > >Of course, since the speed of light is just a conversion constant > >beween our time units and our space units, we are always free to vary > >the speed of light. It is just a nonlinear reparameterisation of our > >coordinates. Verlinde's proposal is much, much more than that. > > It is interesting that the speed of light can be regarded as nothing > more than a conversion constant only if special relativity is > strictly correct. If temporal variation in the speed of light is > discovered, say by finding that the fine structure constant changes > with time, then we would have to rethink the idea that c is just a > conversion constant. >
Temporal variation of alpha is a completely different beast, as it is a dimensionless quantity, and far more interesting, of course. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow [email protected] Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
