Maverick physicist John Moffat VSL bi-metric gravity theory

[jbone at place.org]

I've been tracking the "variable speed of light" story for a couple of 
years now, think I posted to FoRK ages ago about it.  The practical 
problem with this story is that the folks that have propagated it have 
tended to be --- frankly --- somewhat on the nutty fringe, a weird 
conglomeration of "creation science / intelligent design" advocates, 
UFO nuts, and other weird characters.  But as always, the lack of 
credibility in the story-teller doesn't imply lack of credibility in 
the story.

Here's some interesting traction on thus front, with a somewhat more 
credible story-teller.  Again via >Htech:

--
Begin forwarded message:

From: "oxyryxo" <oxyryxo at yahoo.com>
Date: Sat Nov 8, 2003  20:17:44 US/Central
To: transhumantech at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [>Htech] Maverick physicist John Moffat VSL bi-metric gravity 
theory
Reply-To: transhumantech at yahoogroups.com


Maverick physicist

John Moffat, who corresponded with Einstein, has always been a non-
conformist. While at U of T, he came up with the idea that the speed
of light has varied over time. DAN FALK reports on a career spanning
half a century

By DAN FALK
Saturday, November 8, 2003 - Page F10

John Moffat does not look particularly threatening. With his white
hair and vaguely European accent, the mild-mannered physicist can
walk unnoticed along the streets of Waterloo, Ont., where he has
worked for the past three years.

However, when it comes to explaining the structure of the universe,
Dr. Moffat -- or at least his ideas -- are closer to the edge. For
every seemingly established idea in physics, from Albert Einstein's
theory of gravity, to string theory, to cosmic inflation, he has an
alternative approach. His non-conformity has won him both friends and
enemies over the years in a career that has spanned more than half a
century (he recently celebrated his 70th birthday).

"John is a bit of an iconoclast," says Clifford Will, a leading
gravity expert at Washington University in St. Louis. "His approach
has always been a bit perpendicular to what everyone else is doing."

Physics was not Dr. Moffat's first career choice. Born in Denmark, he
turned to painting at an early age. He dropped out of school to
pursue the artist's life in Paris, where his abstract paintings were
displayed alongside those of Russian master Serge Polyakoff. (Dr.
Moffat still paints; he had a display at the Lindsay Gallery in
Lindsay, Ont., northwest of Toronto, last spring.)

However, when he ran short of funds, Dr. Moffat returned to
Copenhagen, where he soon discovered a second skill. Poring over
physics books in the public library, he found that he had a knack for
relativity and quantum theory, right down to their thorny
mathematical innards. He started writing scientific papers, and sent
a couple of them to Albert Einstein, who, to his surprise, seemed
genuinely interested in his work. The two men corresponded for
several years, until Einstein's death in 1955.

Over the next few years, Dr. Moffat rubbed shoulders with Europe's
top physicists, including Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrodinger, of
quantum-theory fame, and Abdus Salam, who would later win a Nobel
Prize for his work in particle physics. With the help of Dennis
Sciama, a physicist who also mentored Stephen Hawking, Dr. Moffat
entered Trinity College at Cambridge. He became the first student in
the college's history to be admitted to a PhD program without an
undergraduate degree.

By this time, Dr. Moffat was already establishing himself as a
maverick. In his first two years at Cambridge, he wrote papers on
differential geometry and on modifications to Einstein's theory of
gravity, known as general relativity.

He also worked on "unified field theories." Considered unpopular at
the time, this was the attempt to merge general relativity with
electromagnetism; it was this quest that had obsessed (and ultimately
frustrated) Einstein in the final decades of his life.

Dr. Moffat later turned to particle physics and quantum field theory,
an outgrowth of quantum mechanics that attempts to describe the
universe in terms of particles and fields.

After a few years in the United States, Dr. Moffat was offered a job
at the University of Toronto in 1963, and became a tenured professor
one year later. It would be his home for the next three decades.

At U of T, his unorthodox approach to physics continued. In the 1970s
and 1980s, he further explored modifications to general relativity,
including a "non-symmetric gravitational theory," in which extra
terms are added to Einstein's equations (think of it as giving space
a "twist" in addition to being curved).

But it was in the early 1990s that he came up with the idea that
would eventually make him -- sort of -- famous.

According to special relativity, the first part of Einstein's
revolutionary theory, nothing can travel faster than light. But
suppose that the speed of light has varied over time, Dr. Moffat
suggested.

If light had travelled faster billions of years ago, he argued, it
might help to explain some of the strange properties the universe has
today. For example, astronomers wonder why distant parts of the
universe seem so much alike: No matter where they aim their
telescopes, they see the same kinds of galaxies distributed with
roughly the same density across the sky.

Dr. Moffat's paper on the subject, published in the International
Journal of Modern Physics, was more or less ignored. Then, in 1998, a
Portuguese-born physicist named Joao Magueijo, based at Imperial
College in London, came up with the same idea. Dr. Magueijo, with
collaborator Andrew Albrecht of the University of California at
Davis, published his own speed-of-light paper in Physical Review, a
journal that had earlier rejected Dr. Moffat's paper on the same
subject.

This time, people did take notice. The Sunday Times of London wrote
about Dr. Magueijo's work; Britain's Channel 4 made him the focus of
a documentary; the glossy magazine SEED splashed his photo across its
pages. None mentioned Dr. Moffat.

Even the Canadian media gave Dr. Moffat short shrift, rarely
mentioning his contribution. Perhaps the fact that Dr. Magueijo is
half Dr. Moffat's age, and could pass for a rock star, is a factor.

"He's a younger physicist, and very photogenic; I'm an older
physicist and not as photogenic," Dr. Moffat concedes, laughing
softly. He says he doesn't dwell on the matter, but adds: "You don't
have that many significant ideas in your life as a physicist --
they're like your children; you don't want them taken away from you."

Dr. Moffat doesn't blame Dr. Magueijo for any of the speed-of-light
fallout. He found out about his paper before it was published, just
in time to get Physical Review to add a footnote acknowledging Dr.
Moffat's priority. And Dr. Magueijo's book, Faster than the Speed of
Light, devotes a dozen pages or so to Dr. Moffat and his work, and
praises him as a pioneer in the field (albeit more than 200 pages
into the book). The two men have become friends.

Meanwhile, the notion of a variable speed of light ("VSL" to
insiders) -- and, in general, the notion of physical "constants" that
can vary over time -- has taken off. Not quite mainstream, perhaps,
but the idea is certainly more plausible than it was just a few years
ago.

Some of the evidence comes from observations of the "fine-structure
constant," a measure of the strength of the electromagnetic force
that is linked not only to the charge of an electron but also to the
speed of light and to Planck's constant, the fundamental constant of
quantum theory. There are hints that the fine-structure constant may
have changed very slightly over the eons, in turn suggesting that one
of the parameters it is linked to -- perhaps the speed of light --
has also changed.

Dr. Moffat's original paper has now been cited more than 100 times in
the scientific literature.

The VSL affair may have been the most dramatic episode in recent
Moffat history, but, from a broader perspective, it's not that
unusual in the rarefied world of theoretical physics. After all, this
is a discipline that can be fiercely competitive: There's a
potentially enormous payoff for whoever makes the next major
breakthrough -- yet such advances occur only a few times per century.
Challenging accepted paradigms is rarely rewarded.

Pekka Sinervo, who served as chairman of the U of T physics
department in the late 1990s, says Dr. Moffat's ideas "have been
unorthodox and, in various ways, quite creative. The fact that he
hasn't stumbled upon a revolutionary concept that clearly 'works
better' doesn't take away from the impact his ideas have had. He has
shown that many things that looked promising don't work. This has
been hard work, and he hasn't received, in my opinion, the
appropriate recognition for it."

In 2000, facing mandatory retirement from U of T, Dr. Moffat took a
position at the privately run Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. The
institute, housed in a heritage brownstone building nicknamed Space-
Time Square, seems to invite unconventional thinking. Its second-
floor lounge features plush sofas, games of chess and Go, a billiards
table, plenty of chalkboards -- and a bar.

Here -- where everybody seems to have an unorthodox idea about the
nature of the universe -- Dr. Moffat seems to fit right in. And he is
as busy as ever.

He is trying to understand why two-thirds of the universe is made
of "dark energy," a mysterious substance that seems to counteract
gravity. He has even proposed a test to see if dark energy "falls" at
the same rate as ordinary matter.

He is also trying to figure out how general relativity, which governs
the behaviour of large objects, can be made compatible with quantum
mechanics, which explains how matter and energy behave on the atomic
and subatomic scale. That, in the minds of many researchers, is the
outstanding issue in physics today. Of those who are currently trying
to resolve the impasse, most are turning to string theory, a late-
20th-century spinoff of particle physics, in which the most
fundamental constituents of matter are not point-like particles but
rather tiny, vibrating strings.

But Dr. Moffat -- no surprise -- has his own ideas. He has been
developing what he calls "bi-metric gravity theory," an extension of
the VSL scenario that tries to embrace both quantum mechanics and the
geometry of space-time. It's a counterintuitive approach, but then,
the universe, as physicists have discovered, is a very weird place
that rarely shows any respect for human intuition.

As always, the physics community is divided between those who respect
Dr. Moffat for his vision and hard work, and those who think he is
tilting at windmills. And that, he says, is hardly surprising.
Paradigm shifts, by their very nature, are few and far between.

"Physics is moved by ideas," he says. "But when you have new ideas,
people get uncomfortable -- as they should, because you don't want to
change a paradigm unless there's a really good reason to do so."

Dan Falk is a science journalist based in Toronto.

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20031108/M
OFFAT08/TPScience/



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