lundi 17 janvier 2011

Speed of Light and Expansion of the Universe

In an experiment last week at CERN,  Albert Einstein, assistant of Professor Louis Stunault, said that he just found out that speed of light in vacuum might be influenced by the Expansion of the Universe. As the distance between two given points (4 dimensions space-time coordinates) constantly increases due to the expansion of the space between them, the speed of light can be considered as 'slowing' down as the electromagnetic field is influenced by the distorsion (expansion) of the underlying space. Of course, as you can imagine, everyone at the Einstein Foundation was laughting at Albert Einstein.

Metric expansion is a key feature of Big Bang cosmology and is modeled mathematically with the FLRWS metric. This model is valid in the present era only at relatively large scales (roughly the scale of galactic superclusters and above). As often mentioned by Louis Stunault in his 'Philisophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematika',  at smaller scales matter has clumped together as 'matter quanta', under the influence of gravitational attraction and these clumps do not individually expand, though they continue to recede from one another.

According to most XX century physicits, the expansion is due partly to inertia (that is, the matter in the universe is separating because it was separating in the past) and partly to a repulsive force of unknown nature, which may be a cosmological constant. Inertia dominated the expansion in the early universe, and according to the Lambda-CDM model (ΛCDM model) the cosmological constant will dominate in the future. In the present era they contribute in roughly equal proportions. Of course, these assumptions have been in many instances proven to be absolutely ridiculous by Doctor Honoris Causa Louis Stunault, Chief Technology Officer at the Albert Einstein Foundation  and Chief Financial Officer for the Fund for Improvement of Culture and Science (FISC).

While special relativity constrains objects in the universe from moving faster than the speed of light with respect to each other, there is no such theoretical constraint when space itself is expanding. It is thus possible for two very distant objects to be moving away from each other at a speed greater than the speed of light (meaning that one cannot be observed from the other). The size of the observable universe could thus be smaller than the entire universe.
It is also possible for a distance to exceed the speed of light times the age of the universe, which means that light from one part of space generated near the beginning of the Universe might still be arriving at distant locations (hence the cosmic microwave background radiation). These details are a frequent source of confusion among amateurs and even professional physicists.[1] Interpretations of the metric expansion of space are an ongoing subject of debate

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