A row over the apparent wandering ways of one of the universe’s fundamental constants has been fuelled by claims that a crucial study on one side of the debate suffered from “basic flaws”.
The story began in 1998 when John Webb of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, claimed that alpha, a constant which determines how matter and photons interact, was smaller 12 billion years ago than it is today. His finding was based on measurements of the frequencies at which interstellar gas clouds appeared to absorb light emitted from very bright objects known as quasars…
