Electromagnetism is a key component for understanding how the Universe works since it’s among the ‘big four’ fundamental forces – the others are gravity, weak nuclear force, and strong nuclear force. You can’t understand physics at a basic level without knowing some basic stuff about electromagnetism.
After a series of measurements taken from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile on a quasar located at a staggering distance of 13 billion light-years away, a group of researchers comes to an even more staggering conclusion. They found out that a fundamental physical constant used for measuring electromagnetism between charged particles can actually be inconstant by suffering minor differences.
The discovery could change everything
As long as electromagnetism plays a critical role in understanding how our reality works, the new discovery could change our whole perception of the Universe.
Gathering data from such a huge distance of 13 billion light-years means that researchers had also been traveling 13 billion years back in time. Maybe their findings are solid proof that the laws of physics weren’t the same when the Universe was only about 700 million years old. Scientist John Webb from the University of New South Wales in Australia says:
[The new study] seems to be supporting this idea that there could be a directionality in the Universe, which is very weird indeed,
So the Universe may not be isotropic in its laws of physics – one that is the same, statistically, in all directions.
There are, however, places in the Universe when the laws of physics are being defied almost totally. These places are the black holes – they feature infinite gravity, time simply stops at their center, and even the light gets sucked in by the mysterious structures. Light is considered by many scientists to have no mass at all, so being attracted by gravity is a true mystery.
The new research about the fundamental physical constant was published in Science Advances, but the findings still require further verification and testing.
