Abstract
As early as 1916, Eddington proclaimed that the stars obey the same laws of physics as we discover in the laboratory. The known universe was small in those days, but today we can observe much further away and look back many more millions of years in time. The obvious question to ask is: were the laws of physics in general, and spectroscopy in particular, valid, say, 5 billion years ago? How confident can we be in the derived abundances of the elements, in objects that are ten billion light years away, using the physical laws we find today?
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Notes
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This kind of reaction is reminiscent of a Jewish tradition of Gimatria, wherein each letter has a numerical value associated with it, so that every word corresponds to a numerical value given by the sum of the values of all its letters. In this way numerology enters Jewish mysticism like Kabbalah. If two words have the same numerical value, this must imply ‘something’. For example, the words ‘wine’ and ‘secret’ have the same numerical value, viz., 70. Hence the proverb: When wine enters, the secrets come out, or In vino veritas. By the way, the numerical value of the Hebrew word Kabbalah is 137!
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Two properties make white dwarfs ideal for this problem. First, the only energy available for these stars is the internal energy of the ions and gravitational energy. So when the white dwarfs cool, only these two sources of energy play a role. Second, the radius of the white dwarfs is very small, about 1/100 the radius of the Sun. Consequently, the gravitational energy given by \(GM^2/r\) is very large. So if \(G\) changes in time, the change in the gravitational energy is very large, and so hopefully might be detected by changes in the cooling rate.
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Shaviv, G. (2012). Is Physics the Same Everywhere?. In: The Synthesis of the Elements. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 387. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28385-7_4
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