Are the Constants of Physics Constant? BY VENKAT SRINIVASAN
The weird thing about
such constants is that there is no theory to explain their existence. They are
universal and appear to be unchanging.
When Max Born
addressed the South Indian Science Association in November 1935, it was a time
of great uncertainty in his life. The Nazi Party had already suspended the
renowned quantum mechanics physicist’s position at the University of Göttingen
in 1933. He had been invited to teach at Cambridge, but it was temporary. Then,
the Party terminated his tenure at Göttingen in the summer of 1935. Born took
up an offer to work with C.V. Raman and his students for six months at the
Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. While there, he found that his family
had lost its German citizenship rights. He was stateless and without a
permanent home. And then, there was this uncertainty about two numbers.
The scientific world
had been coming to terms with two numbers that had emerged after a series of
discoveries and theories in the previous four decades. They were unchanging and
they had no units. One, the fine structure constant, defined the strength of
interactions between fundamental particles and light. It is expressed as 1/137.
The other, mu (μ), related the mass of a proton to an electron.
Born was after a
unifying theory to relate all the fundamental forces of nature. He also wanted
a theory that would explain where these constants came from. Something, he said, to “explain the existence of the heavy, and light
elementary particles and their definite mass quotient 1840.”
It might seem a little
bizarre that Born worried about a couple of constants. The sciences are full of
constants—one defines the speed of light, another quantifies the pull
of gravity, and so on. We routinely use these numbers, flipping to dog-eared
tables in reference books, and coding them into our software without much
thought because, well, they are constants. But the weird thing about such
constants is that there is no theory to explain their existence. They are
universal and they appear to be unchanging. So is the case with the masses of
protons and electrons. But time and time again, they are validated through
observation and experiment, not theory.
What Born and so many
others were after was a unifying theory that would demonstrate that there could
only be one unchanging value for a constant. Without this theory, scientists
resort to testing limits of a constant. Measuring the constant is a good way to
verify that theories using them make sense, that science stands on firm ground.
Error from the measurements can be a huge concern. So, instead of validating
the masses of protons and electrons, it’s useful to measure the ratio of their
masses, a number that is free of the burden of units.
The search for a
unifying theory continued. Two years after Born’s lecture, his Cambridge
colleague, Paul Dirac,wondered in a Nature paper whether
the constants were indeed constant if one were to look at the entire history of
the cosmos. Measurements on earth are useful but it is a tiny blue dot in the
vast universe. What Dirac asked decades ago is what physicists continue to ask today. Is it a constant everywhere in the universe? Why is
it a constant? How constant?
The question lingered even as the decades rolled
on. “The most exact value at present for the ratio of proton to electron mass
is 1836.12 +/-0.05,” wrote Friedrich
Lenz in a 1951 Physical Review Letters paper. “It may be of interest to note
that this number coincides with 6pi^5=1836.12.” That was the entire paper.
Questioning the
constant is really not that far fetched an idea: the existing theories don’t
prevent the constants from having a different value. The universe went through
three broad phases – the initial radiation dominated phase soon after the Big
Bang, a long matter dominated phase, and then a very long dark energy dominated
phase that began six billion years ago. One hypothesis is that the mass ratio might have varied
only in transitions between the phases. The actual value of the mass ratio (1836.15267389) is not of as much a concern as the
uncertainty around its stature as a constant. And scientists have made
incredible progress at tackling this uncertainty number.
Later this year,
researchers from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam along with collaborators
from the University of Amsterdam and the Swinburne University of Technology in
Melbourne will publish an overview of their findings in the quarterly journal Review
of Modern Physics (the paper is available on arXiv). The mass
ratio, they write, varies less than 0.0005%, not enough to call it a change.
This is based on telescope observations going as far as 12.4 billion years back
in time when the universe was only 10% of its current age.
The conclusion is both
mundane and astonishing. Change is so omnipresent that we don’t think twice
about how much it is part of our fabric. A human cell might endure a million
DNA mutations within a day. Summer’s green leaves become fall’s orange before
crackling as winter’s brown under our feet, all within a year. Gases coalesced
and gravitated around each other over millions of years, packing into rocks
like our water-drenched Earth that orbits the sun. But underneath all that
change lies one number that connects them all and a number that has remain
unchanged as far as we can see in the cosmos. And we don’t know why. The mu is
like scientific gospel that wills the universe into existence.
The history of the
cosmos is a good sandbox for measuring drifts in the constant. Since light from
the early universe continues to reach earth, radio telescopes are effective
tools to study the mass ratio. Ancient light interacts with gases in faraway
galaxies and stars before reaching earth. The light arrives at earth with a
fingerprint of these gases, which absorb certain frequencies of light. It shows
up as absences in the spectrum when reviewing the telescope data. By comparing this fingerprint with lab measurements on
the same gas, scientists can deduce the mass ratio variations.
The Vrije Universiteit
group is one of a handful of teams in the world that has been on the case of
the proton-electron mass ratio for over a decade. They have collaborated with
scientists from Australia, France, Russia, Switzerland, the US, the UK, India
and the Philippines. They have probed tiny bits of hydrogen, ammonia and
methanol hovering billions of years away in space. They have compared signals
from the Very Large Telescope in the cold, dry desert of north Chile, from a
100-meter radio telescope in a historic spa town in Germany, and from a 30-meter
radio telescope in the Spanish Sierra Nevada. They have even used the Hubble
Space Telescope to look at white dwarf stars to see if environments with
10,000 times more gravity than earth would alter the mass ratio.
And… nada. ‘Null
result’ is one of the most common phrases in their papers. Which is good. Even
a small change of a few percent in the value of the ratio would mean a
different universe. A smaller mass ratio could mean a wimpier proton, and
possibly a weaker pull for the electrons orbiting the nucleus, leading to
different kind of matter.
While the world isn’t
very kind to research that doesn’t have anything new to offer, a null result
doesn’t mean the matter can be put to rest. Therein lies the quandary which
makes the VU team’s research feel like it is equal parts futile and important.
No theory in physics can explain the constant mass ratio, the steadfast
shepherd of science. It just is, shrug.
Of course, the VU team
is not alone in the search. As early as 1996, another team at the Ioffe
Physical Technical Research Institute in Russia analysed spectral
lines from outer space to gauge variations in the mass ratio. Scientists at Cambridgeand at the Swinburne University of Technology have looked for
drifts in the fine structure constant. But it is the VU group that has perhaps
been occupied with the mass ratio the most. Over more than a decade, this
preoccupation has produced one of the most comprehensive and intriguing bodies
of work. Year after year, across generations of
graduate students and post-docs, they have published a paper that gently picks
away at the question from different angles – a more distant spot in the
universe, a different gravitational environment, a new tool to measure an old
problem.
The aim for future
searches is to hunt further back in time and in different environments. Larger
telescopes like theEuropean Extremely Large Telescope will help in
gathering fainter signals from the universe. And despite the vast measurements,
many are in a very narrow slice of the sky. By broadening the field of view,
scientists can probe data from other parts of the universe.
The experimental
search for a varying constant will likely continue as long as there is no
theory to back its existence. A string of null results and small changes to the
constant variability helps plug loopholes. As the authors of the Reviews
of Modern Physics paper wrote, “Even incremental improvements setting boundaries on
drifting fundamental constants are worthwhile to pursue, given the importance
of this endeavour into the nature of physical law: Is it constant or not?” Each
piece of cosmic doubt is up for scrutiny, to either be nullified in a future
experiment or surface as evidence for the next investigator.
Originally
published by Scientific
American.
