New Alpha Number - Are the Laws of Physics Constant?

I decided this week that I needed an intellectual break from landscape issues so decided to buy myself a copy of The New Scientist, which by the way if you are interested at all in science is a jolly good read. The reason I bought this magazine and not National Geographic was the line on the froont of the mag.. 'Dawn of a New Physics: The cosmic number that changes everything.' Now this got the Lowestoft Lass a little excited in the magazine isle in Tesco's, but for good reason.

Basically, a nice chap named John Webb from the University of New South Wales has been looking out into space analysing the light emitted from Quasars from the Heck teleoscope in Hawaii and the Very Large Teleoscope in Chile, both pointing in very different directions out of the Earth.

Now light that was emitted from Quasars passes through certian elemental clouds in space, which absorbs some wavelenghts of light. These wavelengths are calculated using the Alpha number, which was thought to be constant across the entire universe, in line with Einstien's theory of Special Relativity. Only Mr Webb's data shows that the uptake of light by particals differs depending on where you are in the universe, with larger alpha values to the South and smaller ones to the North.

Now what has this got to do with us on Earth? The alpha value on Earth is not likely to change rapidly, the difference between the value from here to Alpha Centuri does not differ by our current techniques, and the observed Quasar from Keck was formed 12 billion years ago, but it poses the question, that if the alpha constant is NOT constant then what other laws are there that change? In the distant future will gravity on our planet still be the same?

So it looks like scientist's search for a unifying theory has either been put back decades or launched forward a giant leap. As this data seems to, in a round about way, support the idea of string theory, as the alpha number may be constant when viewed from all dimensions, rather than just our three or four.

More data needs to be collected before the scientific community runs about waving arms and shouting Eureka! but if correct our current models of the universe we inhabit will be grossly wrong. The artical headline was correct that a new 'breed' of physics would be born, one where the rules of constants are gone and unification could be one tiny step closer?

Please note I am not  qualified scientist, this is just a laymans interpretation of the newly found data and the literature published around the findings, please don't go around quoting me I could be very wrong, find a quote from an expert, or even drop Mr Webb a line, he might be busy, he might not.