Peter, I hope you're not emulating Pentcho Valev's bad habit of dropping outrageous statements, sending people like me to search for the source and find the result is considerably less than advertised.
The substance is contained in:
"On its long journey, the light from those quasars has passed through gas clouds full of metals. The photons in the light - little packets of energy that make up the light itself - interact with the electrons in the gas clouds, charged particles that orbit the nuclei of the metal atoms. This leaves a fingerprint on the light as it arrives on Earth, called the fine structure constant, Murphy explains.
When they measured the fine structure constant of this 12 billion-year-old light, Webb and Murphy found it was slightly smaller than it would be today. Mathematically, there were two possible reasons for this - either the electric charge of the electrons had increased, or the speed of light had fallen.
Using Stephen Hawking's formula for black hole thermodynamics, Davies, Davis and Lineweaver ruled out the electric charge possibility. By adapting Hawking's formula, they determined that an increase in electric charge would break the second law of thermodynamics, which says energy can only flow from hot spots to cold spots.
"'That's illegal. It would be like a cup of coffee sitting on your desk getting hotter,'" Lineweaver says."
Right. Big problem:
The fine structure is empirical and cannot be derived. The vacuum speed of light *is* derived from the equivalence of mass and energy. So at any point of the continuum of the light on its journey, one should find that the measure of mass-energy equivalence precisely corresponds to the measure of the vacuum speed of light.
As I have said consistently, I lend no hope to the completeness of any theory that defies either the theory of relativity or thermodynamics.
Tom
