Graviton Sambhalah Artwork

Terrence McKenna used to say that modern science is based upon the principle ‘give us one free miracle, and we’ll explain the rest.’ Things like the gravitational constant, the speed of light are called the fundamental constants. Are they really constant? Well, when I got interested in this question, I tried to find out. They’re given in physics handbooks. Handbooks of physics list the existing fundamental constants, tell you their value. But I wanted to see if they’d changed, so I got the old volumes of physical handbooks. I went to the patent office library here in London – they’re the only place I could find that kept the old volumes. When I did this I found that the speed of light dropped between 1928 and 1945 by about 20 kilometres per second. It’s a huge drop because they’re given with errors of any fractions of second/decimal points of error. And yet, all over the world, it dropped, and they were all getting very similar values to each other with tiny errors. Then in 1948, it went up again. And then people started getting very similar values again. I was very intrigued by this and I couldn’t make sense of it, so I went to see the head of metrology at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. Metrology is the science in which people measure constants. I asked him about this; I said: “What do you make of this drop in the speed of light between 1928 and 1945?”And he said “Oh dear”, he said, “you’ve uncovered the most embarrassing episode in the history of our science.” So I said “Well, could the speed of light have actually dropped? And that would have amazing implications if so.” He said “No, no, of course, it couldn’t have actually dropped. It’s a constant!” I said “Oh, well then how do you explain the fact that everyone was finding it going much slower during that period? Is it because they were fudging their results to get what they thought other people should be getting and the whole thing was just produced in the minds of physicists?” He said,“We don’t like to use the word ‘fudge’.” I said, “Well, so what do you prefer?” He said, “Well, we prefer to call it ‘intellectual phase-locking’.” So I said “Well if it was going on then, how can you be so sure it’s not going on today? And the present values produced are by intellectual phase-locking?” And he said, “Oh we know that’s not the case.” And I said, “How do we know?” He said “Well”, he said, “we’ve solved the problem.” And I said “Well how?” And he said, “Well we fixed the speed of light by definition in 1972.” So I said, “But it might still change.” He said, “Yes, but we’d never know it because we’ve defined the meter in terms of the speed of light, so the units would change with it!” So he looked very pleased about that, they’d fixed that problem. But I said, “Well, then what about big G?” The gravitational constant, known in the trade as “big G”, it was written with a capital G. Newton’s universal gravitational constant. “That’s varied by more than 1.3% in recent years. And it seems to vary from place to place and from time to time.” And he said “Oh well, those are just errors. And unfortunately, there are quite big errors with big G.” So I said “Well, what if it’s really changing? I mean, perhaps it is really changing.” Then I looked at how they do it, what happens is they measure it in different labs, they get different values on different days, and then they average them. And then other labs around the world do the same, they come out usually with a rather different average. And then the international committee of metrology meets every ten years or so and average the ones from labs all around the world to come up with the value of big G. But what if G were actually fluctuating? What if it changed? There’s already evidence actually that it changes throughout the day and throughout the year. What if the earth, as it moves through the galactic environment went through patches of dark matter or other environmental factors that could alter it? Maybe they all change together. What if these errors are going up together and down together? For more than ten years I’ve been trying to persuade metrologists to look at the raw data. In fact, I’m now trying to persuade them to put it up online, on the internet with the dates, and the actual measurements, and see if they’re correlated. To see if they’re all up at one time, all down at another. If so, they might be fluctuating together. And that would tell us something very, very interesting. But no-one has done this, they haven’t done it because G is a constant. There’s no point looking for changes. You see, here’s a very simple example of where a dogmatic assumption actually inhibits enquiry. Rupert Sheldrake on The Science Delusion Speed of light ‘c’ 1926: 299,798 1928: 299,778 1932-5: 299,774 1947: 299,792 http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/lightandcolor/speedoflight.html

Mixed Media:Algorithmic Art on Other

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:16 W x 16 H x 2 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.