THERE'S GOTTA BE A DELTA TAU CHI IN THAT EQUATION:

Einstein's respectful heretic: João Magueijo says the speed of light isn't constant, but he's not trying to be rude (PETER CALAMAI, 11/27/06, Toronto Star)

Even when raising his voice above the din of Sunday brunch at a Queen West café, João Magueijo does not evoke the image of an angry man determined to challenge one of Albert Einstein's chief legacies, and perhaps pull down the edifice of modern physics.

Outspoken and outrageous, definitely — academic journals are useless, string theory is crap, science administrators are parasites — but those harsh words issue from a face that's nearly always smiling and often laughing.

The Portuguese-born theoretical physicist is a good-natured scientific revolutionary. He pretty much has to be, since questioning a central pillar of modern science inevitably draws a lot of flak. Notoriety has followed the 38-year-old during a sabbatical from his home in London, England, to the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto and his main gig at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo.

Magueijo's heresy is to contend that the speed of light is not the unvarying speed limit for the universe, as Einstein famously decreed in the special theory of relativity and enshrined in the world's best known equation, E = mc{+2}. Instead, he says, at the birth of the universe light travelled much faster than the supposed maximum speed and has been slowing down ever since.

The challenge to scientific orthodoxy doesn't end there. Magueijo is also active in a small group espousing something called Double Special Relativity, which says, among much else, that different colours of light travel at different speeds. [...]

Other theoretical physicists in Canada are following paths that lead beyond Einstein's universe, and two of the leaders are also at the Perimeter Institute: Lee Smolin and John Moffat.

The 73-year-old Moffat is an emeritus University of Toronto physics professor of near legendary status among theorists for his dogged non-conformity. He has challenged many of the most deeply rooted concepts in cosmology but always with an eye to how his ideas could be tested experimentally.

"You can speculate about theories of physics, but in the end the data are the driving force," Moffat says.

A similar desire for solid observational evidence drives Magueijo.

"I really like table-top experiments, or solar system experiments, which will decide between these things," he says about competing theories of gravity.

Yet something much more astonishing also links the not-so-angry young man and the ever-questioning older one: Moffat was the first scientist to suggest in modern times that the speed of light could vary.

In 1992, he submitted a paper outlining this idea to Physical Review D, a leading physics journal. After a year's battle with the editor, and an anonymous reviewer raising objection after objection, Moffat gave up and published instead in an obscure Italian journal.

So in 1998, when Magueijo and colleague Andy Albrecht sent their own paper about the varying speed of light to the very same Physical Review D, they didn't realize they were actually rediscovering the concept. But Moffat spotted an online abstract of the Magueijo-Albrecht paper and yelped. A last-minute note was added acknowledging his earlier work.

"There was zero reaction to my idea originally, but now it's become a famous paper with hundreds of citations," Moffat says.

The incident illustrates two truisms about frontier research, especially in areas such as cosmology and theoretical physics. First, someone is soon going to have the same brainstorm even if the first person gets clobbered by a bus before publishing (Einstein's general relativity might be the exception).

Second, the scientific establishment can be counted on to give a hard time to anyone trying to overthrow a paradigm.

Three: the paradigm is always wrong.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 5, 2006 11:53 PM