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Originally Posted by Jaymoss
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With scientific papers (especially reports on early pre-peer reviewed papers), it’s always best check the updated source material - for instance, the pre-release paper quoted in the first two articles never went to publication because they couldn’t duplicate the results (the basis of Science being that things are observable, measurable, and repeatable).
https://arxiv.org/abs/1008.3907# (updated paper a year after the initial paper).
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We previously reported Keck telescope observations suggesting a smaller value of the fine structure constant, alpha, at high redshift. New Very Large Telescope (VLT) data, probing a different direction in the universe, shows an inverse evolution; alpha increases at high redshift. Although the pattern could be due to as yet undetected systematic effects, with the systematics as presently understood the combined dataset fits a spatial dipole, significant at the 4.2-sigma level, in the direction right ascension 17.5 +/- 0.9 hours, declination -58 +/- 9 degrees. The independent VLT and Keck samples give consistent dipole directions and amplitudes, as do high and low redshift samples. A search for systematics, using observations duplicated at both telescopes, reveals none so far which emulate this result.
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The third link was referring to this paper from last year
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay9672
The scientist quoted said "may have been smaller", not "were smaller’
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“We found that a certain physical constant – so-called fine-structure constant (alpha) – may have been smaller in that period than it is now,”
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The joy of Science is that if it finds something that doesn’t fit with previous findings, it’s announced, investigated, and peer-reviewed - the first two examples you provided couldn’t be validated, and the third has found a single source anomaly which is being investigated further; the third paper doesn’t say "the laws of physics can vary", it states
"we find a spatial variation is preferred over a no-variation model at the 3.9σ level.."
Here’s the layman’s version of that third paper.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020...stant-in-time/
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Frustratingly constant constants
The result? The fine structure constant has not changed in time. The researchers then combined their results with all the previous studies. The resulting 320 measurements, spanning from a billion years in the past to around 12 billion years in the past—a good chunk of the life of the Universe—showed that the fine structure constant is constant.
They then looked at how their results fit with more recent findings: that the fine structure constant varies with direction. Earlier results have shown that the fine structure is slightly different along a specific axis of the Universe, called a dipole. Now, the latest result is from a single light source along a specific direction, so it's not definitive on its own. Yet the result fits with the previous data. (I guess, given the paucity of data, it is better to say that it doesn’t contradict the previous measurements.)
Here, I think we should be cautious. The paper that found spatial variation is from the same research group (this doesn’t make it bad). As far as I can tell, there have been a few followup studies, but these studies also appear to involve overlapping authors. In principle, this is OK, but the danger is that any inadvertent analysis bias will be replicated rather than eliminated.
I get the feeling that many of the scientists who are interested in this topic are pinning their hopes on new instrumentation. The echelle spectrograph for rocky exoplanets and stable spectroscopic observations (ESPRESSO) is an excellent tool to make these observations. However, it only came online in 2019, so we will have to be patient.
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tl:dr - something that differed from previous findings has occurred, more investigations needed.
btw, you keep bringing up the fact that your father is a physicist - may I ask which branch of physics he specialises in, as Physics is an enormous field (for example, my God-son has a Degree and a Masters in Astrophysics, but I wouldn’t expect him to be an expert or to keep up to date with advances in Nuclear Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Fluid Mechanics, Geophysics, or any of the other complex areas of Physics).