Ive always had a passing interest in physics, so I like to keep up with whats going on in general. Found the following link on Digg and I think it does a good job of summarising efforts to find a Unified Theory, thought some of you may find it interesting.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0585.html

Interesting reply Steve, trouble is for every question they answer they usually find there are two more produced from it. Theories are also an issue, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of competing theories. Latest one I heard of is Liquid string net but the point is they are gradually getting even more unbelievable.

TBH while there is no concrete evidence for one (or more) god(s) its much more believable that there is one - if so they designed the universe to give us ever increasing levels of difficulty...  :hunf:  

The speed of light was almost certainly constant up to 18 billion years ago at least since you can observe objects that far away using Hubble.  If the speed of light varied then the wavelength of the light coming from those objects would shift and youd get weird compressions and expansions of the universe.  Its possible that the universe is compressing and the speed of light isnt constant back in time and that simply gives us a wrong answer for the size/age/whatever of the universe but every experiment so far gives us the speed of light as a constant.

The link you posted about the experiment by Webb et al. that brought up the supposed variation in the speed of light from phase shifts has got the references that show they got their maths wrong right after it.  Several groups repeated their work to test it and saw they simplly worked it out wrong.

As this 18 billion years time scale pretty much brings us back to the big bang era it will be hard to see much further back in time as light wont have existed as it is no far beyonnd that point and the universe would have been so dense that the light couldnt actually escape anyway.

I personally dont believe they will find the graviton as a mass particle.  that particle has to instantly interact with every other particle in the universe which would be unlike anything else weve seen so far.  More likely mass will wnd up being a dimensional effect which warps all of space and time around it and the LHC will reveal more fundamental effects where this graviton piece should have fit.  If mass was a dimensional effect it would help to explain where the other 90% of the mass of the universe is since light and every other bit of the universe could have mass associated with it but simply not be active in ours.  Unfortunately on these scales and on past experience common sense ideas from our day to day lives bear no relation whatsoever on what happens so pretty much anything could turn out to be the cause of mass.  The LHC will at least get us another step closer.  There cant be much closer to get as were getting very close to the point of setting off another big bang/pulling other dimensions into this universe with these colliders.