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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • According to my understanding, yes. For example, it is usually assumed that there was a period of time shortly after inflation when matter was in a quark-gluon plasma, which would imply a larger strong coupling than today, since a small strong coupling is associated to confinement. There was also the electroweak-epoch, during which the electromagnetic and weak interactions were unified, and the corresponding gauge bosons were massless. The masses of the W and Z bosons can thus also be regarded as time-varying, as well as the electron charge. However, it should be noted that these changes are not all that significant on the cosmological scales under investigation here (e.g. the quark epoch ended at about 10-6 seconds after the big bang, which is much much less than the age of the universe, and it’s assumed that it still took quite a while before the first stars formed). A time-varying cosmological constant could potentially be much more relevant (and some quantum gravity theories even predict it), and I’ve heard some people suggesting it as a potential solution for the H0 tension. However, I unfortunately can’t access the paper and assess what precisely the author did there, and whether it is in any way similar to what I just mentioned.


  • He says he has a new way of describing light where it loses energy over time (something weird) and so it explains redshift.

    From what I understand, the main idea behind tired light isn’t particularly weird, it’s just that scattering could potentially lead to a redshift as well. The issue is that if you assume enough scattering to explain cosmological redshift you would also get some other effects, which are however not observed. This basically ruled out the original tired light theory by Zwicky from the beginning. The author of this paper seems to try to get around that by combining a smaller amount of “tired light” with time-varying couplings. Unfortunately the paper is behind a paywall and I can’t tell any more details.

    He also says universal constants can change (something never observed before that would fundamentally change physics)

    No, he says that coupling constants (not sure if that is what you mean by “universal constants” or not) can change, which is a generic consequence of the RG and has in fact been observed in nature (e.g. electron charge or strong coupling, to name just the most famous examples). From a QFT perspective, the cosmological constant is also a coupling, and several quantum gravity theories do in fact generically predict or suggest a time-varying cosmological constant. So this part by itself isn’t really that out there, nor that original for that matter. However, since I can’t access the paper I can’t judge whether the author’s way of varying Λ is reasonable or just a way to fit the data without any physical motivation, and I don’t really know what the article means by “he proposes a constant that accounts for the evolution of the coupling constants”.

    and he can explain dark matter

    That seems like a more grandiose claim to me, if accurate. Do you have a source for where the author claims that? Although he wouldn’t be the first to do so.

    I’m pretty sure this guy isn’t toppling physics today as the bar is set high for whatever evidence he is sharing.

    I think this can be said for a lot of popular science article with topics like this. However, in many cases the blame can lie more with the pop-sci journalists who are looking for a cool story and might over-interpret the author’s claims (I guess “physics toppled!!!11” sounds more interesting than “some guy suggests that some data might be fitted in a slightly different way”). Although in this case at least the age of the universe claim does seem to come from the author.







  • While it is true that “should of” etc. can easily originate from a confusion between “‘ve’” and unstressed “of”, which sound identical, the statement

    “Should of” is incorrect

    itself is at least a bit misleading and prescriptivist in its generality.

    Interestingly, there seem to be at least some native English speakers who genuinely do say “should of” (with a stressed “of”) sometimes. This paper for example argues that people who say “should of” really do use a grammatical construction of the form modal verb + of + past participle. One argument the author mentions is that this would also explain the words “woulda”, “coulda” and “shoulda”, since “of”->“a” is quite common in general (e.g. “kind of” -> “kinda”), but “'ve”->“a” basically doesn’t occur elsewhere (e.g. no one says “I’a” or “you’a” instead of “I’ve” or “you’ve”). Another is that the reverse mistake, i.e. using “‘ve’” in place of “of” (e.g. “kind’ve”), is much rarer, which is a clear difference to e.g. the situation with “they’re”/“their”/“there”, where people use these words in place of the others in all combinations frequently. I recommend this blog article for a much longer discussion.

    Also, whether genuine mistake (which it almost certainly is in many cases, although probably not all) or different grammatical construction, YSK that “should of” etc. didn’t just become popular recently, but have been used for centuries. E.g. John Keats wrote in a letter in 1814: “Had I known of your illness I should not of written in such fiery phrase in my first Letter.”. Many more examples (some older as well) can be found e.g. here or here.

    TL;DR: While in many cases “should of” etc. can well be a mistake, originating from the fact that it sounds identical to “should’ve” when unstressed, there is some interesting linguistic evidence that at least in some dialects of English native speakers really do say “should of” etc. (i.e. in those cases it is not a mistake, merely non-standard/dialectal).