Relatively constant? Roll over, Einstein!

**New York Times details investigations going on that may alter the standard of the speed of light as a constant. E and mc2: Equality, It Seems, Is Relative Read whole article

Guided by ambiguous signals from the heavens, and by the beauty of their equations, a few brave — or perhaps foolhardy — physicists now say that relativity may have limits and will someday have to be revised.
. . .Any hint of breakage of relativity, scientists say, could yield a clue to finding the holy grail of contemporary physics — a "theory of everything" that would marry Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes how gravity shapes the universe, to quantum mechanics, the strange rules that govern energy and matter on subatomic scales. . . The field, while still small, is destined for at least 15 minutes of fame next year with the publication in February of "Faster Than the Speed of Light," by Dr. João Magueijo, a cosmologist at Imperial College London. The book is a racy account of Dr. Magueijo's seemingly heretical effort to modify relativity so that the speed of light is not constant, and he will promote it on a long lecture tour."Ruling out special relativity by 2005 is a bit extreme," Dr. Magueijo said in a recent e-mail message, referring to the coming centennial of Einstein's famous paper, "although I would be very surprised if by 2050 nothing beyond relativity has been found."

E and mc2: Equality, It Seems, Is Relative Read whole article

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