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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Not only does a universal constant seem annoyingly inconstant at the outer fringes of the cosmos, it occurs in only one direction, which is downright weird.

Those looking forward to a day when science's Grand Unifying Theory of Everything could be worn on a t-shirt may have to wait a little longer as astrophysicists continue to find hints that one of the cosmological constants is not so constant after all.

In a paper published in Science Advances, scientists from UNSW Sydney reported that four new measurements of light emitted from a quasar 13 billion light years away reaffirm past studies that found tiny variations in the fine structure constant.

UNSW Science's Professor John Webb says the fine structure constant is a measure of electromagnetism—one of the four fundamental forces in nature (the others are gravity, weak nuclear force and strong nuclear force).

"The fine structure constant is the quantity that physicists use as a measure of the strength of the electromagnetic force," Professor Webb says.

"It's a dimensionless number and it involves the speed of light, something called Planck's constant and the electron charge, and it's a ratio of those things. And it's the number that physicists use to measure the strength of the electromagnetic force."

The electromagnetic force keeps electrons whizzing around a nucleus in every atom of the universe—without it, all matter would fly apart. Up until recently, it was believed to be an unchanging force throughout time and space. But over the last two decades, Professor Webb has noticed anomalies in the fine structure constant whereby electromagnetic force measured in one particular direction of the universe seems ever so slightly different.

"We found a hint that that number of the fine structure constant was different in certain regions of the universe. Not just as a function of time, but actually also in direction in the universe, which is really quite odd if it's correct ... but that's what we found."

[...] If there is a directionality in the universe, Professor Webb argues, and if electromagnetism is shown to be very slightly different in certain regions of the cosmos, the most fundamental concepts underpinning much of modern physics will need revision.

"Our standard model of cosmology is based on an isotropic universe, one that is the same, statistically, in all directions," he says.

"That standard model itself is built upon Einstein's theory of gravity, which itself explicitly assumes constancy of the laws of Nature. If such fundamental principles turn out to be only good approximations, the doors are open to some very exciting, new ideas in physics."

[...] Professor Webb's team believe this is the first step towards a far larger study exploring many directions in the universe, using data coming from new instruments on the world's largest telescopes. New technologies are now emerging to provide higher quality data, and new artificial intelligence analysis methods will help to automate measurements and carry them out more rapidly and with greater precision.

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Journal Reference:
Michael R. Wilczynska, John K. Webb, Matthew Bainbridge, et al. Four direct measurements of the fine-structure constant 13 billion years ago [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aay9672)

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