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What if Einstein was wrong? Now Joao Magueijo, a young Portuguese physicist at Imperial College in London is challenging the underpinnings of the that theory, as Einstein challenged Newton a century ago. Joao Magueijo refers to his theory as VSL, short for varying speed of light. Based on VSL, he could actually explain where the cosmic unity of the universe comes from. According to his theory, a black hole is not a hole, but like an edge to space. Nothing can come out, but nothing can go in either. His theory is supported by the discovery by John Webb, an astronomer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. The finding involves what physicists and cosmologists have considered a basic law of nature involving the strength of attraction between electrically charged particles. Studying how light was absorbed by metallic atoms in gas clouds some 12 billion light-years away, researchers found that the fine structure constant, as it is called, may be changing subtly as the universe grows older. The universe is thought to be roughly 13 billion years old, so the light observed in the new study was emitted when the universe was roughly a billion years old. Does VSL discribe a fundermental law of Nature, or is it just "Verry SiLly"? Future discoveries will tell us. More details, please refer to materials in http://www.cvil.wustl.edu/~dawei/life/astronomy.htm>. |