On Monday UC Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Labs will announce that early results from the ambitious DEEP2 extragalactic survey taking place here at Keck Observatory show that no evolution in the fine constant structure appears to exist from z~0 to z~0.7. The fine structure constant is a critical number in the Universe. It governs the electromagnetic force which holds all atoms and molecules together. This constant seems to be tuned to allow life to exist. If the value was slightly different, life could not exist. Astronomers generally believe that the constant is the same today as its always been.

However, speaking at the Institute of Physics conference Physics 2005, another astronomer using Keck data -- Dr. Michael Murphy of Cambridge University -- used data from distant quasars to propose that the fine structure constant might not be constant after all. By comparing spectra from billions and billions of years ago to spectra obtained in experiments on Earth, Dr. Murphy concludes that the constant (referred to as "alpha") has changed by about one part in two-hundred-thousand during the last 10 billion years. In a press release issued by the Institute of Physics, Dr. Murphy was careful not to claim that the case is closed, and he says that nobody can really say that alpha varies until another type of experiment has confirmed it. "We are claiming something extraordinary here," he said. "And the evidence, though strong, is not yet extraordinary enough."