Quasar Absorption Measurements of the Fine-Structure Constant and the Claimed Spatial Dipole: A Frame Comparison

Absorption lines in quasar spectra probe the fine-structure constant in gas clouds billions of light-years away. The Keck telescope sample reports a mean fractional offset of -5.70e-06 and the Very Large Telescope sample 2.40e-06; the two differ by 8.10e-06, about 5.0 times their combined uncertainty, and a combined analysis has been fitted with a spatial dipole of amplitude 9.70e-06 (Webb et al. 2011). A frame in which alpha responds to local torsional density rather than to position in the universe predicts no direction-dependent dipole of this size, and the claimed amplitude exceeds the room left by the Oklo record, 81-fold, for variation at low redshift. The comparison does not settle whether the absorber signal is systematic or physical; it states what the frame requires if the signal is physical. Computed from published values, not measured.