Based on little more than this summary of the article, it's not particularly clear to me how this solves the purported problems it's trying to address.<p>First, it appears that this gets rid of the cosmological constant (which some people seem to have an aesthetic aversion to, but there's no reason it shouldn't exist) by replacing it with 'both a varying gravitational “constant” and a varying speed of light'. In other words, it appears to make the model more complicated and less aesthetically pleasing. Skimming the article, the author appears to make a fairly arbitrary seeming argument about how those constants ought to vary with time which simplifies things a bit, but it's still more complicated than traditional GR with a constant c and G.<p>It's not clear to me how this model purports to solve the flatness problem. There just seems to be an assertion that because the model predicts a 3-sphere geometry that the flatness problem is moot, but that seems to dodge the question. The whole point of the flatness problem is that space appears to be flat, and not a 3-sphere or hyperbolic. If you say it's a 3-sphere, the problem becomes why the universe ought to be so big that the curvature isn't apparent.<p>Similarly, the claim to solve the horizon problem is unsatisfying. Most attempts to explain the horizon problem require you to assume that the universe was once much, much smaller and expanded very rapidly at some point (inflation). This model appears to give you a knob to do that (variable speed of light), but doesn't really say why it should have evolved in that way.<p>Finally, there are some red flags to be had here from observing that the author works in the statistics department, appears to have never published any previous physics research, and in 5 months has not gotten this paper published in a peer reviewed journal and has not been cited by any other work.<p>Bottom line: I wouldn't put much weight on this.
My summary. <i>New class of theories with lots of tunable parameters can explain existing observation through choosing the right parameters to tune.</i><p>The idea is worth exploring, but don't expect it to overturn the existing orthodoxy overnight. Particularly given that we don't actually have a physical model for how parameters can be tuned, and previous attempts to find evidence of variation in fundamental physical parameters over time have so far failed to find such variation. (See <a href="http://thefutureofthings.com/news/1254/proton-electron-mass-constant-for-6-billion-years.html" rel="nofollow">http://thefutureofthings.com/news/1254/proton-electron-mass-...</a> for an example.)
If you'll read the paper itself [1], you'll see that the author takes well known equations, replaces some constants with functions of time and tries to draw conclusions from there. In short, it's bogus.<p>You can read some of the funnier details at [2].<p>[1] <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.1750" rel="nofollow">http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.1750</a><p>[2] <a href="http://badphysics.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/nobang/" rel="nofollow">http://badphysics.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/nobang/</a>
As an academic, I would advise lay science enthusiasts to steer clear of anything classified as "general physics" (or "general mathematics") in the arXiv. There's far too much of it, mostly junk, and you'd be better spending your time elsewhere.
Relevant - "Matter and energy had ended and with it, space and time. Even AC existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken computer ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man.
All other questions had been answered, and until this last question was answered also, AC might not release his consciousness.<p>All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected.<p>But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.<p>A timeless interval was spent in doing that.<p>And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.<p>But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer -- by demonstration -- would take care of that, too.<p>For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.<p>The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done."<p><a href="http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html</a>
While I love reading articles about science they are almost always simplified to the point if being frustratingly meaningless. Phrases like "as the universe expands" loose all meaning when you're talking about time being converted into space. If only there was somewhere that explained the implications of what seems like this beautifully elegant idea in an equally elegant way... <i>sigh</i>
So if time, mass and length are convertible, does this mean we (the Defense Department) could theoretically (secretly) make a 'time-bomb?' Sort of like an atom bomb, except instead of releasing heat/energy, it releases a time-bubble in which, I dunno, NP problems (enemy ciphers) could be brute-force computed and solved within our lifetimes (wartimes).
I am kind of flummoxed by the opening sentence: "mass, time, and length can be converted into one another as the universe evolves."<p>Later on, it goes on<p>"Mass and length are also interchangeable... Basically, as the universe expands, time is converted into space, and mass is converted into length."<p>How do you convert length into mass? The length of what?
So if the speed of light was slowing down, since everything else seems to obey the same unknown rule, would we even know it? It would be impossible to measure the change right?