In a post to Randy you wrote:
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The concept of the Planck Era is not a theory, it is a fact. It has been
established by other models whose validity have been well proven. Tied into
this is the concept that the four fundamental forces were combined into one
force. In essence this is also a fact. If this is true, then the physical
constants were not fixed and could have been changing constantly, even
wildly. The theory you refer to would be The Theory of Everything, which
would combine relativity with quantum mechanics. That has not yet been
accomplished, but when it is it will tell us what happened during the Planck
Era, including the nature of the physical laws and constants.
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I called you on this earlier, and you replied that your notion of
changing fundamental constants during the early universe was sheer
speculation. I agree...and yet here you are trundling it out again!
This time you supplied a bit more in the way of your reasoning, and I
believe it is simply wrong. You seem to think that if the four
forces were unified at an earlier time, this implies that the constants
were not fixed. Why do you think this? Let's take a simple case which
*IS* well-understood at present: electro-weak unification. It is now
quite clear that the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces were at one
time in the early universe not distinct forces but were unified. The
mathematics of this is well-understood and has been confirmed in a limited
way by experiment. However, this unification does not imply that the value of
the fine-structure constant was somehow different before these forces
decoupled...it just isn't true!
One more time...any suggestion that physical constants had different values
in the early universe simply because the four forces were related and part of a
single interaction is without support. And the experimental evidence for the
temporal variation in the fine-structure constant that came out earlier
this year is quite preliminary. I'm not sure many people in the physics
community are convinced...yet.
So PLEASE drop your hand-waving speculations about this. You are entitled
to your own "opinions", as you reminded Randy, but this one has nothing to
do with science in its present state of knowledge. Let's not get these two
confused.
Stan Zygmunt