🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep29.070639.25909@midway.uchicago.edu>, mfm0@midway.uchicago.edu writes...

>of a gravity well?  What do we know about the fundamantal constants
>outside of the earth's and sun's G field?  But questions like this are 
>simply a way of learning more about the universe, and getting some
>intelligent discourse going.

We know a surprising amount about questions of this sort, as the result
of astronomical observation of distant galaxies.  This allows us to 
sample atomic properties (which depend on the electron charge, mass, and
the speed of light) at large distances from us and in the distant past.

So far as we are able to measure, the speed of light is the same
everywhere, and has been for billions of years.  Ditto for the electron
mass and charge.  I apologize for the lack of hard numbers.  But my
personal library is at home, and I am posting from the office.  There
are too many unscrupulous grad students and post docs wandering about to 
keep my precious darlings on the office shelf.

Then there is the Dirac large numbers hypothesis, which implies that G
itself changes with time - for which there is no evidence other than the
(vaguely) theoretical arguments of Dirac.

-Scott
--------------------
Scott I. Chase			"The question seems to be of such a character
SICHASE@CSA2.LBL.GOV		that if I should come to life after my death
				and some mathematician were to tell me that it
				had been definitely settled, I think I would
				immediately drop dead again."      - Vandiver