The speed of light is not constant

2001/04/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Fisika

According to Einstein's theory of relativity, the speed of light is always the same at 300,000 km/s.

But physicist Dimitri Nanopoulos of the University of Texas A&M and his team have explained that the speed of light may not be constant, but it depends on frequency. To reach this conclusion, it has been observed how long it takes to reach the ground the photons of different frequencies emitted by objects very far from the ground. If the results obtained were correct, the laws of physics should be modified from the law of relativity itself.

And that is precisely what Nanopoulos and other scientists want to do, that is, they want to lay the foundation for the unifying theory of quantum gravity that began to work in the 1920s. However, this discovery does not mean that the theory of relativity is not necessarily correct. It depends on the current situation. For example, if the energy of the object is less than 1,019 mass of protons, or the distance between two objects is less than several million light years, Einstein's equations will remain correct.