Updated: 16/02/2005; 10:40:02.
Outwardly Normal 2
Julius Welby's (currently broken) displacement activity web site
        

01 July 2004

Richard Seaman's photographs of the SpaceShipOne flight on June 21st [Samizdata.net < Joseph Brennan]
A good write up of the event, too.
2:13:10 PM    comment()

The Garden of Earthly Delights art installation [del.icio.us/tag/art]
2:01:11 PM    comment()

Speed of light may have changed recently [New Scientist]

(Julius is about to prove that a little learning is a dangerous thing. Be nice).

The article says in passing that a varying speed of light contradicts Einstein's theory of relativity, but I'm not sure that this is strictly true. My understanding is that relativity theory requires a value of c that is the same (for all observers regardless of their state of motion) everywhere in the Universe.

In other words, the theory requires no gradients in in the three spacial dimentions we walk around in. The theory has no particular preference for any specific value of the constant c - its value comes from measurement, not from any predictions of relativity theory itself.

If c does change, but without any spacial gradient,  - i.e. any change in c has to happen simultaneously throughout the Universe, it would imply that any cause of that change would have to be related to a process occuring in some dimention other than the four dealt with by relativity theory, as any local change would not be able to propogate from a particular location in 4d space-time without creating gradients in c.

I would guess that the information content of such a change would be zero, but if not, we could transmit information at much faster than light speed by manipulating something in one of the higher dimentions. Which would be nice.

It would be interesting to conjecture that changes in c may be quantized, but I'll leave that to others who have a clue what they are talking about.

Alternatively, you may just want to look at pictures of kittens.

(Corrections, additions, clarifications, insults etc. in the comments, please).
1:07:22 PM    comment()

if you.job == 'web developer' and you.browser in ('Firefox','Mozilla'):
     you.install('web developer extension')
else: print "Why not?"
11:43:54 AM    comment()

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