Starting around 14:48 in the video, he says, "I myself think the constants may vary, quite considerably, well, within narrow limits, but they may all be varying. And I think the day will come when the scientific journals, like Nature, have a weekly report on the constants, like the stock market reports in newspapers. 'This week big G was slightly up, the charge on the electron was down, the speed of light held steady,' and so on."
If Sheldrake expects the journal Nature to eventually publish weekly reports on the current value of the speed of light, that's a pretty clear statement that he thinks the speed of light isn't constant. And making that claim is pretty convincing evidence that Sheldrake doesn't understand the physics that he's so upset about. If he actually understood what is meant by "we've now defined the speed of light to be a constant", he would phrase his argument in different terms. (It would still have a lot of major flaws, from the sound of it, but at least he wouldn't be immediately showing that he doesn't know what he's talking about.)
But even leaving aside that specific error, I still disagree with his premise. I work in high energy physics, and it's routine to see people discussing frameworks where our measured fundamental constants could change. Practically any mention of a "multiverse" in physics or cosmology draws on that idea, for instance. If there's a scientific dogma that's supposed to make us blindly reject those possibilities, it seems to be remarkably ineffective.
If Sheldrake expects the journal Nature to eventually publish weekly reports on the current value of the speed of light, that's a pretty clear statement that he thinks the speed of light isn't constant. And making that claim is pretty convincing evidence that Sheldrake doesn't understand the physics that he's so upset about. If he actually understood what is meant by "we've now defined the speed of light to be a constant", he would phrase his argument in different terms. (It would still have a lot of major flaws, from the sound of it, but at least he wouldn't be immediately showing that he doesn't know what he's talking about.)
But even leaving aside that specific error, I still disagree with his premise. I work in high energy physics, and it's routine to see people discussing frameworks where our measured fundamental constants could change. Practically any mention of a "multiverse" in physics or cosmology draws on that idea, for instance. If there's a scientific dogma that's supposed to make us blindly reject those possibilities, it seems to be remarkably ineffective.