Would you really characterize this Wilczynska, Webb, King et al. paper as an argument that there is &quot;growing evidence&quot;, rather than (say) that it&#x27;s a number-crunching argument that the small amount of observations that suggested a dipole variation to Webb et al. (and King et al.) show a \Delta\alpha &#x2F; \alpha that&#x27;s close enough to unity that one can cherry pick and say &quot;oh yes, there&#x27;s a (small) dipole variation&quot; or &quot;oh no, the data is consistent with no variation&quot; ?<p>I prefer their earlier slide deck for gory details (it&#x27;s mostly based on King et al 2012).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eso.org&#x2F;sci&#x2F;meetings&#x2F;2012&#x2F;ESOat50&#x2F;Presentations&#x2F;Day5&#x2F;Murphy.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eso.org&#x2F;sci&#x2F;meetings&#x2F;2012&#x2F;ESOat50&#x2F;Presentations&#x2F;...</a><p>See especially the &quot;Really?&quot; slide (p 27).<p>(The previous &quot;What if it&#x27;s correct?&quot; slide undersells the impact to the standard cosmology of a violation of isotropy and the consequent erosion of the &quot;must be homogenous at scales &gt; 250 Mly&quot; part of the cosmological principle.  Also, &quot;what if atomic physics is really obviously different only very slightly outside the horizon?&quot; feels like a declaration of war against the Copernican principle with precious little evidence, and against pretty good theory that has other lines of evidence backing it (cf. Carroll @ <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.preposterousuniverse.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2010&#x2F;10&#x2F;18&#x2F;the-fine-structure-constant-is-probably-constant&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.preposterousuniverse.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2010&#x2F;10&#x2F;18&#x2F;the-fine...</a> who points to Banks, Dine &amp; Douglas @ <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;hep-ph&#x2F;0112059" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;hep-ph&#x2F;0112059</a> who in turn point to other work that shows that you probably can&#x27;t vary \alpha without varying other constants like the m_e and QCD coupling).