Break all the rules. In the last year, researchers have begun to suspect that the speed of light has slowed since the big bang.

One argument in support of a changing light speed is the fact that temperature

and density are relatively uniform across the Universe. There’s no way such far-flung corners of space can be causally

connected unless light once travelled faster than it does now.

Now theoreticians argue that, if this is true, it requires that electric charge must have appeared out of nowhere.

…If the speed of light isn’t

constant, then charge conservation–another central tenet of physics–will be violated. One way to understand their proof is to think of

light as a wave of oscillating electromagnetic fields with an associated electric current shuttling charge back and forth. If the speed of

the wave falls, the associated current will deposit charge faster than it picks it up, resulting in a net creation of positive charge.

If the speed of light were falling gradually as the universe expands, we would expect to see evidence of the violation of charge conservation, which we don’t. But, if the decrease in the speed of light occurred rapidly in the first seconds after the big bang and has stayed constant since then, it might account for another vexing problem in cosmology — the apparent asymmetry the universe has in terms of favoring matter over antimatter. New Scientist