Changing Light Speed

Thanks to Carl Brannen for pointing out a new paper by Sanejouand, Empirical evidences in favor of a varying speed of light. The paper summarises results from lunar laser ranging, the Pioneer anomaly, supernovae redshifts and the known fixed constants, namely fine structure and Rydberg. He finds that the varying speed of light hypothesis is (a) consistent with all these results and (b) explains the results that the Dark Force cannot.

Assuming fine structure, Rydberg and electron charge to be truly constant, one must have constants

$\epsilon \hbar c$ and $\frac{m_e c^{2}}{\hbar}$.

There are then two natural alternatives to consider under the varying $c$ hypothesis. First, if the electron mass is constant in cosmic time, we find that

$\frac{c^{2}}{\hbar}$

must be constant, forcing $\hbar$ to vary, but not as in the usual description of Louise Riofrio's cosmology. Because $\hbar c$ cannot then be constant, fine structure depends on a variation in $\epsilon$. Secondly however, if we assume that $\hbar c$ is constant, it follows that the electron mass $m_e$ must go as $\hbar^{3}$. That is, electron mass starts out at zero and grows larger with Riofrio's cosmological law $M = t$. This is also reminiscent of Penrose's thermodynamic cosmology.

Note that the latter alternative would not prevent, in principle, the computation of local mass relations; only the computation of absolute scales. Such a cosmology, at least initially, therefore relies on precisely one parameter, which is a measure of our epoch.