2.5. Varying `constants'

Variation of the fundamental constants of nature over cosmological times is another possible enhancement of the standard cosmology. There is a long history of study of variation of the gravitational constant G, and more recently attention has been drawn to the possibility of small fractional variations in the fine-structure constant. There is presently no observational evidence for the former, which is tightly constrained by a variety of measurements. Evidence for the latter has been claimed from studies of spectral line shifts in quasar spectra at redshifts of order two [12], but this is presently controversial and in need of further observational study.