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This article was originally published in Britain?s 'The Guardian' newspaper.
This excerpt comes from Melbourne?s 'The Age'

http://www.theage.com.au/news/Science/Experts-challenge-Einstein-over-speed-
of-light/2005/04/11/1113071911054.html

copied here since the online version may require registration before access.

"A century after Albert Einstein published his most famous ideas, physicists
are commemorating the occasion by trying to demolish one of them.
Astronomers were to tell experts gathering at Warwick University in England
overnight to celebrate the anniversary of the great man's "miracle year"
that the speed of light - Einstein's unchanging yardstick that underpins his
special theory of relativity - might be slowing down.
Michael Murphy, of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University, said:
"We are claiming something extraordinary here. The findings suggest there is
a more fundamental theory of the way that light and matter interact; and
that special relativity, at its foundation, is actually wrong."
Einstein's insistence that the speed of light was always the same set up
many of his big ideas and established the bedrock of modern physics. Dr
Murphy said: "It could turn out that special relativity is a very good
approximation but it's missing a little bit. That little bit may be the
doorknob to a whole new universe and a whole new set of fundamental laws."
His team did not measure a change in the speed of light directly. Instead,
they analysed flickering light from very distant celestial objects called
quasars.
Their light takes billions of years to travel to Earth, letting astronomers
see the fundamental laws of the universe at work during its earliest days.
The observations, from the Keck telescope in Hawaii, suggest the way certain
wavelengths of light are absorbed has changed.
If true, it means that a measure of the strength of the electromagnetic
force that holds atoms together has changed by about 0.001 per cent since
the big bang. The speed of light depends on this measure. If one varies with
time then the other probably does too, meaning Einstein got it wrong. If
light moved faster in the early universe than now, physicists would have to
rethink many fundamental theories.
Dr Murphy's conclusions are based on work carried out in 2001 with John Webb
at the University of NSW. Other astronomers disputed the findings, and a
smaller study using a different telescope last year suggested no change.
Dr Murphy's team is analysing the results from the largest experiment so
far, using light from 143 bright stellar objects."

- Guardian

   

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