A.I. Shlyakhter is a Russian physicist who noted that the existence of the natural nuclear fission reactor at Oklo in Gabon gave evidence that the physical fine-structure constant α has changed less than 10−17 per year over the last two billion years.
For over three decades since the discovery of the Oklo natural nuclear fission reactor in 1972, even more stringent constraints, placed by the study of certain isotopic abundances determined to be the products of a (estimated) 2 billion year-old fission reaction, seemed to indicate no variation was present.
Oklo |