Posted on 02/28/2003 5:57:55 AM PST by Boot Hill
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Faster Than the Speed of Light:
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FASTER THAT THE SPEED OF LIGHT The story of a Scientific Speculation. By João Magueijo. Illustrated. 279pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing. $26. |
By GEORGE JOHNSON
NY Times
February 9, 2003
One of the curiosities of life on earth is the obsession to lay down grids of rigid constraints -- the rules of chess or baseball, the form of a sonnet, or the Internal Revenue Service code -- and then try to stretch them to the limit. Those who excel at pushing the envelope -- chess masters, Olympic athletes, Washington tax lawyers, everyone it seems but contemporary poets -- are generously rewarded with riches and sometimes even public esteem.
The most sophisticated of these sports is theoretical physics, and João Magueijo, a young Portuguese professor at Imperial College in London, has the markings of a champ. Judging from his new book, "Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation," this is an opinion with which he would readily agree.
In fact, if your reading list is already overpopulated, skip the book and cruise over to his Web page (http://theory.ic.ac.uk/~magueijo/) for a taste of the persona he presents to the world. As the page loads, a Java cartoon of a beer glass appears on the screen, emptying itself over and over as if the suds were being sucked up by a pulsating black hole. A photo of Magueijo "in action" shows him getting sloshed with some friends; there is a primer on cosmology, the study of the universe, and included on the site is a link to an Internet guide to the London rave scene.
This kind of thing is fairly commonplace. Theoretical physics is populated by some of the smartest people outside Wall Street, and it is de rigueur to show that you are fiercely independent and definitely not a nerd. Where Magueijo hopes to distinguish himself from his pack is by showing that the speed of light, long held as an inviolable entry in the cosmological rule book, is not sacrosanct after all. It has slowed as the universe has grown older. If this can be proved, Magueijo argues, then some of science's most vexing puzzles can be solved.
Consider the horizon problem, a staple of popular science books. Look out (with a suitably powerful telescope) at a galaxy 10 billion light-years away. According to the logic of the Big Bang theory, the light was emitted 10 billion years ago and is just now reaching this part of the universe.
Now turn around and look 10 billion light-years in the opposite direction. You have successfully observed two regions of the universe that themselves are 20 billion light-years apart. Since the whole universe is only 15 billion years old, they will never be able to see each other or (since nothing travels faster than light) interact in any way.
The weird implications of this become clearer if you imagine the earliest moments of the Big Bang. When the universe was a second old, and hence a light-second in radius, about 186,000 miles, opposite points on the circumference were twice that far apart, unbridgeable even by light. No matter how far back you go -- a millisecond, a microsecond -- the regions can never have been in contact. It is as if they exist as two separate universes.
The reason this bothers cosmologists is that, so far as they can tell, the universe in front of us and the universe behind us are pretty much the same. They differ in detail, of course -- this galaxy here, that constellation there -- but in the most general sense, creation appears to be homogeneous. Galaxies are distributed in a more or less uniform manner, and in whatever direction you point a thermometer, space is the same temperature. But if certain parts of the universe never interacted, then why is there so smooth a blend?
The favored explanation is a theory called cosmological inflation: suddenly for a few moments early in its history, the tiny universe began wildly expanding, far more rapidly than it does now. Those now isolated regions were originally close enough to touch.
Some theorists find this a bit contrived, and Magueijo is one of a handful proposing a different solution: if the speed of light used to be faster, then neighborhoods that now seem hopelessly far apart were originally together.
Those are the bare bones of the idea, which Magueijo elaborates throughout the book. Whether that notion is any less ad hoc than inflation is a matter of taste. Depending on how future experiments come out, his theory will one day be recorded as a stunning breakthrough or a forgettable detour down a cul-de-sac.
There is nothing wrong with writing about a work in progress. What better way to give readers a taste for the messiness of real science, before the story has been sanitized in the retelling? But whatever his gifts as a theorist, as an author Magueijo is only partly successful.
The curse of popular science writing is that almost nothing can be assumed. Here Magueijo rises to the task, using the first half of his book to lay out a nice refresher course. (A story about cows and electric fences makes the essence of special relativity about as clear as can be.) It's in Part 2, when he gets into the meat of the story, that the account becomes wearing.
With a bit of patience one can keep up with the gist of his idea, called V.S.L. for "varying speed of light." But what is apparently meant to be an enlightening account of a theory-in-the-making is blackened again and again by a bristly protagonist who, at least as he depicts himself, is very difficult to like.
Everywhere he turns, Magueijo tells us, he finds himself surrounded by stupidity. He refuses to submit papers to the journal Nature (the staff there is surely heartbroken) until the cosmology editor is castrated. (João the Iconoclast puts this in cruder terms.) The timid souls who fail to appreciate the daring of his speculations are likewise reviled. "Clearly something as wild as V.S.L. is an affront to their self-respect; so they need to see it fail." Or maybe they just think he's wrong.
Even his sympathizers come in for ridicule if their support is not avid enough. When an older colleague decides that, on second thought, he doesn't want to collaborate on a paper about V.S.L., this can only be because he is suffering from a midlife crisis (he just turned 40).
Magueijo is so openly contemptuous of the people who finance his intellectual recreations that he seems to be daring them to ground him for a week -- or cut off his allowance. "Personally, I would fire them all and give them a long prison sentence," he writes, "but you already know my thoughts on the matter." Yes, we know. This statement is near the end of the book, and we have been told many times.
This kind of material is probably meant to be described in a review or jacket blurb as "irreverent." But at least since James Watson's "Double Helix," the fact that scientists have rivalries, opinions and even personal lives is hardly surprising. Though we get some glimpses here of theorists grappling with an elusive idea, too much of the story comes off as puerile.
In the end, Magueijo assures us that, win or lose, it is he who will get the last laugh. If the theory is right his doubters will rush to claim credit, for "they are bandwagon passengers, those who play safe and lead an easy life." And if the theory is wrong? He'll burn that bridge when he comes to it.
George Johnson's book "A Shortcut Through Time: The Path to the Quantum Computer" will be published next month.
--Boot Hill
uh nope. if you beleive this then you beleive that by "looking the other way(direction)" we can see 10 million years into the future. if we look at another galaxy 10 million light years away, it still is in the past, which would put it as a contemporary of the first galaxy.
if all the logic in this story is this shoddy, then methinks he hath consumed too many wee cups.
camle: "if you beleive this then you beleive..."
Not so quick. Think about it again. No presumption of "seeing into the future". The author has a valid point.
--Boot Hill
If you can look 10 billion light years in one direction, and 10 billion in the other, and the Universe is SUPPOSEDLY only 15 billion years old, then the two galaxies at either end would have still been 5 billion light years apart when the Big Bang supposedly went off.
Got it?
All he is saying is that two galaxies are separated by a distance of 20E6 ly in a universe only 15E6 ly old. Really not illogical when you consider that the two masses started traveling at high speed in opposite directions at the very beginning.
His conclusion, that those two galaxies will never be able to see each other or react with them in any way, is equally valid.
Boot
Or are astronomers going to claim they have found the exact center of everything? If they are now making such a claim, it'd be the first time I've ever heard it. ;-)
Ernst Mach might quibble a bit.
Of course it's the absolute center. Everywhere is the absolute center. Also the absolute edge.
I don't think you need to make that presumption, just the observation of two galaxies, each 10E9 ly distant and both in opposite directions.
I guess what I'm missing is how we can view the light from any galaxy that is 10E9 ly distant in a universe only 15E9 years old. Even if that galaxy was moving at c, the age (since the big bang) would have to be twice that value or 20E9 years (time for the galaxy to arrive at that distant point, plus the time for the light to return to us).
--Boot Hill
What I meant from my comments is that you never here astronomers saying "we can look 12 billion light years THAT way, but we can only see 3 billion light years in the other direction. This leads us to believe that the universe is only 15 billion years old."
From all the stories out there, it SEEMs like they looked in one direction 15E9 ly and said, "Well. I guess the universe is only 15E9 years old."
And yes, I fully realize that this probably isn't the case and that it probably reflects more on the piss poor nature of a reporters talents than it does on the hard science behind it.
Well, friend, the big deal is that it took 15E9 years to get that galaxy to that distant point and another 10E9 years for the light to get back to us and that is a total of 25E9 years in a universe only 15E9 years old!
Whooops!
--Boot Hill
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