
Originally Posted by
merumario
Cheers,i thought the thread was about c,or has anyone said anything that says c ain't constant? Forgive me please.i dnt wanna start reading from post one.
Capsule summary: QFY continues to cling to anti-scientific beliefs. This is necessary for him, since science's rigor prevents him from enjoying a magical world.
There is no evidence of c changing. It would be more accurate to say that the fine structure constant seems to be quite constant, over a period of two billion years, to within some ridiculously tight bound. A summary may be found here:
http://www.int.washington.edu/talks/...ld_C/gould.pdf
As Strange has pointed out, if c were really varying as much as QFY keeps going on about, GPS would be observably unreliable. As GPS is manifestly quite reliable, we can rule out variations in c over the period of time during which GPS has been operating.
John Galt has correctly observed that considerable advances in metrology have been made over the last century. As measurements have improved, the error bounds have tightened. QFY prefers to view the tightening as evidence of a variation in c itself. However, the constancy of the fine-structure constant rules out that interpretation, unless you argue that both the charge of the electron, and the value of Planck's constant, have magically varied in just the right way to compensate. In the absence of any evidence to support that view, Occam demands that we provisionally assume that c has remained constant.
That's the way science works. It's all about the evidence. QFY prefers to cast scientists as sloppy, venal, conspiratorial and cliquish, as that serves his purpose of casting doubt on the entire scientific enterprise, and thus of cracking the door open for magic.
Psychic dogs.
Really?
Sheldrake may have studied the scientific method, but he sure as hell doesn't practice it.