For several decades now I am having a running battle with the present scientific establishment about the validity of constants in the natural sciences. In mathematics, yes, there are - and will always be - certain numbers that are unchangeable, like pi (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius), or phi (the Golden Ratio, known to painters for many centuries now as pleasing to the eye and derived from numbers often occurring in nature), or e (the base of the natural or Napierian logarithms). But mathematics is only a theoretical tool developed by humans in order to better measure and understand the much more complex natural sciences and thus it is even required to be "constant" in its approach.
However, the natural sciences in their variety, where masses are in constant motion, do not allow to have such a simplistic methodology. The motion is there - even if we can't see it because it's either too fast or too slow to be recognized as such by our human eyes - and it distorts the results of our measurements. Besides, isn't it quite pretentious of us insignificant creatures to assume that whatever we measured here on the surface of the Earth is valid throughout the whole of the Universe?
I am talking here specifically about the gravitational "constant" G that Newton postulated and Einstein dutifully accepted as such. We all did as we all didn't dare question the authorities in school. G is supposed to be, after all, the most important "fundamental physical constant" in the physical sciences and all other "physical constants" that we use in our present calculations depend in one way or another on its value. However, after studying for half a century the most profound of the physical sciences (namely geology, which is the only one that also gives us so much evidence in the time dimension over millions and even billions of years), I have come to the conclusion that the presently accepted "Standard Model" is hopelessly outdated and, if we ever want to develop a more plausible cosmology than we have now, desperately needs to be replaced with a different concept of gravitation that contains a variable G.
That's why I have this running battle with the scientific establishment. If you want to watch it on Youtube to the tune of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, click:
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEhF-7suDsM )
Spiral Path