Are Physical Constants Really Constant?

Image: Courtesy of Wolfgang Steffen Instituto de Astronom?a, UNAM and Cosmovisi?n

In Brief

• Physicists routinely assume that quantities such as the speed of light are constant: they have the same values everywhere in space and time.
• The authors and their collaborators have called that assumption into question. By comparing quasar observations with laboratory reference measurements, they have argued that chemical elements in different regions of the universe may be absorbing light differently than the same elements on Earth. The data suggest that one of the constants, known as the fine-structure constant, drifts gradually by a few parts per million across the entire observable universe.
• Small though it might seem, this change, if confirmed, would be revolutionary. It could be a sign that space has extra dimensions.

Some things never change. physicists call them the constants of nature. Such quantities as the velocity of light, c, Newton?s constant of gravitation, G, and the mass of the electron, m_e, are assumed to be the same at all places and times in the universe. They form the scaffolding around which the theories of physics are erected, and they define the fabric of our universe. Physics has progressed by making ever more accurate measurements of their values.

And yet, remarkably, no one has ever successfully predicted or explained any of the constants. Physicists have no idea why constants take the special numerical values that they do (given the choice of units). In SI units, c is 299,792,458; G is 6.673 ? 10^?11; and m_e is 9.10938188 ? 10?31?numbers that follow no discernible pattern. The only thread running through the values is that if many of them were even slightly different, complex atomic structures such as living beings would not be possible. The desire to explain the constants has been one of the driving forces behind efforts to develop a complete unified description of nature, or ?theory of everything.? Physicists have hoped that such a theory would show that each of the constants of nature could have only one logically possible value. It would reveal an underlying order to the seeming arbitrariness of nature.

In recent years, however, the status of the constants has grown more muddied, not less. Researchers have found that the best candidate for a theory of everything, the variant of string theory called M-theory, is self-consistent only if the universe has more than four dimensions of space and time?as many as seven more. One? implication is that the constants weobserve may not, in fact, be the truly fundamental ones. Those live in the full higher-dimensional space, and we see only their three-dimensional ?shadows.?

Meanwhile physicists have also come to appreciate that the values of many of the constants may be the result of mere happenstance, acquired during random events and elementary particle processes early in the history of the universe. In fact, string theory allows for a vast number?10⁵⁰⁰?of possible ?worlds? with different self-consistent sets of laws and ?con-
?stants. So far researchers have no idea why our combination was selected. Continued study may reduce the number of logically possible worlds to one, but we have to remain open to the unnerving possibility that our known universe is but one of many?a part of a multiverse?and that different parts of the multiverse exhibit different solutions to the theory, our observed laws of nature being merely one edition of many systems of local bylaws.

No further explanation would then be possible for many of our numerical constants other than that they constitute a rare combination that permits consciousness to evolve. Our observable ?uni?verse could be one of many isolated oases surrounded by an infinity of lifeless space?a surreal place where different forces of nature hold sway and particles such as electrons or structures such as carbon atoms and DNA molecules could be impossibilities. If you tried to venture into that outside world, you would cease to be.

Thus, string theory gives with the right hand and takes with the left. It was devised in part to explain the seemingly arbitrary values of the physical constants, and the basic equations of the theory contain few arbitrary parameters. Yet so far string theory offers no explanation for the observed values of the constants.

A Ruler You Can Trust
indeed, the word ?constant? may be a misnomer. Our constants could vary both in time and in space. If the extra dimensions of space were to change in size, the ?constants? in our three-dimensional world would change with them. If we looked far enough out in space, we might begin to see regions where the ?constants? have settled into different values. Ever since the 1930s researchers have speculated that the constants may not be constant. String theory gives this idea a theoretical plausibility and makes it all the more important for observers to search for deviations from constancy.

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