[betty boop]

IF the speed of light works as a clocking mechanism, what does it mean that the speed of light is slowing down?

For openers, thank you so very much for sending me the Barry Setterfield materials, in which he argues that C — the speed of light — is not a universal constant, but has actually been slowing down in recent "dynamic time." I've only skimmed his paper so far. There is much of interest here.

But there is a nagging question that still remains, and it goes right down to the ground: How does a human mind detect a slowing down, or decaying, of C, when the human observer is ineluctably, completely a part of the system in which C is decaying, and therefore is completely implicated, embroiled in the process of C decay, which is presumed to be universal?

If the value of C is not constant, then how can it act as a "clocking mechanism" in the first place?

Are other universal constants subject to such variability? If so, how can we regard them as constants?

I'm just wondering here....

[MHGinTN]

As I understand it, the speed of light slows as the dark energy accelerates the expansion of spacetime. Since our observed Universe exists on the 4D surface of the greater dimensional Universe, as the entire Universe (much like a 2D bubble surface) is expanding, stretching the distances spatially And Temporally, the speed at which light traverses the expanse is slowed relative to all matter on the surface of the 4D 'plane'. The analogy would be measuring the train travel time between two towns. It will appear to take longer to get from one to the other if an earthquake (for instance) pushes the towns apart while the tracks stretch to accommodate the separation factor. The stretching track is the clocking relationship of the speed of light.

A clock runs faster or slower when deeper in a gravity well than it does outside the gravity well? Think about it. Dark energy is stretching the gravity well from the top down, so to speak, as if dropping a pebble into the well increases the amount of time needed to get to the bottom of the well because the bottom and top are moving away from each other.

A photon entering the event horizon of a black hole takes infinitely longer to 'fall to the center of the black hole' because of the gravity well increase the further toward the center one goes. It is as if the center is receding faster than the speed at which the light is traveling, netting the effect of the light speed slowing to near zero. Dark energy is stretching the surface of the bubble ever faster, taking objects further from each other, relatively speaking.

IIRC, this effect was noticed while studying Quasars.

That may all be a complete jumble, given the distractions around me, so take it with a grain of ... salt?

[TXnMA]

bb, Dear Sister, I agree with you that, if our" yardstick" ("C") was changing dimensionally (and we were changing along with it) -- how could we even detect that?

IMHO, MHGinTN pointed out that we have lots of "wiggle room", when he ended with, "relatively speaking"... '-)