The issue of light-speed in
the early cosmos is one which has received some attention recently in several
peer-reviewed journals. Starting in December 1987, the Russian physicist V. S.
Troitskii from the Radiophysical Research Institute in Gorky published a
twenty-two page analysis in Astrophysics and Space Science regarding the
problems cosmologists faced with the early universe. He looked at a possible
solution if it was accepted that light-speed continuously decreased over the
lifetime of the cosmos, and the associated atomic constants varied
synchronously. He suggested that, at the origin of the cosmos, light may have
travelled at 1010 times its current speed. He concluded that the
cosmos was static and not expanding.
In 1993, J. W. Moffat of the
University of Toronto, Canada, had two articles published in the International
Journal of Modern Physics D (see also [75]). He suggested that there was a high
value for 'c' during the earliest moments of the formation of the cosmos,
following which it rapidly dropped to its present value. Then, in January 1999,
a paper in Physical Review D by Andreas Albrecht and Joao Magueijo, entitled
"A Time Varying Speed Of Light As A Solution To Cosmological Puzzles"
received a great deal of attention. These authors demonstrated that a number of
serious problems facing cosmologists could be solved by a very high initial
speed of light.
Like Moffat before them,
Albrecht and Magueijo isolated their high initial light-speed and its proposed
dramatic drop to the current speed to a very limited time during the formation
of the cosmos. However, in the same issue of Physical Review D there appeared a
paper by John D. Barrow, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of
Cambridge. He took this concept one step further by proposing that the speed of
light has dropped from the value proposed by Albrecht and Magueijo down to its
current value over the lifetime of the universe.
An article in New Scientist
for July 24, 1999, summarised these proposals in the first sentence. "Call
it heresy, but all the big cosmological problems will simply melt away, if you
break one rule, says John D. Barrow - the rule that says the speed of light
never varies." Interestingly, the initial speed of light proposed by
Albrecht, Magueijo and Barrow is 1060 times its current speed. In
contrast, the redshift data give a far less dramatic result. The most distant
object seen in the Hubble Space Telescope has a redshift, 'z', of 14. This
indicates light-speed was about 9 ( 108 greater than now. At the
origin of the cosmos this rises to about 2.5 ( 1010 times the current
value of c, more in line with Troitskii's proposal, and considerably more
conservative than the Barrow, Albrecht and Magueijo estimate. This lower, more
conservative estimate is also in line with the 1987 Norman-Setterfield Report.
(Barry Setterfield, January 24, 2000)