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:
|
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.
There's no denying that Newton was a real prick. But he could still get his ideas accepted by people (some slower than others, of course). That's different from the cranks who can't find *any* professional acceptance for their ideas and then go on rants about how they're being "kept down by the Man", so to speak.
Let's keep this our little secret, but I still consider this ["before the BB"] to be a very open question. As a practical matter (whatever that may mean in this context) Physicist's answer is quite sufficient. But at some level, which is probably more psychological than cosmological, it fails to satisfy.
They can't. They probably never will. The Universe isn't "closed" and it will never expand to a point where everything becomes a uniform level soup after the black holes all evaporate. Things will continue to recycle.
Oh, I quite agree. If I understand things correctly, we are not privy to any evidence about the state of things prior to the BB. I personally believe that any theory we come up with is equally likely as any other answer, and that's where faith steps in to lend a hand.
But as far as we puny humans are concerned, natural history started at the Big Bang.
LOL, oh sure, real clear, right up until that moment one of your damn pigeons crapped on my glasses!
Your balloon-pigeon analogy, like all analogies are only an image of reality, and at some point breaks down into meaninglessness. Take for instance the presumption(?) that all the matter expanded at the same rate from the moment of the BB (i.e., all matter was on the surface of the balloon). To use your balloon analogy, I would expect the balloon to have and infinite number of concentric inner layers, all having some amount of the matter on each of those balloon surfaces.
--Boot Hill
You mean like his ideas on alchemy? (You do recall what they found inside his body when they exhumed him, don't you?)
Ichneumon: "That's different from the cranks..."
If I got excited every time I ran into a "cranky" PhD, I'd have had to change professions decades ago. I both expect and ignore their "eccentricities" and that is how I view João. Maybe he has something to offer, maybe he doesn't, or maybe all he can do is to stimulate my thoughts down avenues he never intended. But I'll read him before I make that judgment.
--Boot Hill
When you are standing at the North Pole no matter which way you face you are always looking south. Therefore this begs the question; Is the Earth at the North Pole of the Universe?.
LOL!
I prefer the short version:
First there was nothing...
Then it exploded.
Hmmmmm
Umm, you're neglecting the important point that both galaxies are moving away from the focal point in opposite directions. There's no discrepancy there. In 10 billion years, they can get 20 billion light years apart (travelling at the speed of light), since each travelled 10 billion LY from the focus.
That would have been a "paradox" even one second into the universe.
The one second travel time away from the center + the one second of time if took for the light to get back to the center = 2 seconds, which is > the one second that was the age of the universe at that time.
Instant paradox!
In our hypothetical, either the age of the universe number is off, the distance to the outer edge is off, or the speed of light is off... this is where the interesting speculation comes in.... which one is off any why?
Or a fourth possibility: We are off!
Ichneumon seems to think so. Check his post 40
--Boot Hill
--Boot Hill
Well, sure. But parts of it serve as aids to mental visualization of how observations in an expanding universe will nessecarily differ from those in a "flat", non-expanding one.
Take for instance the presumption(?) that all the matter expanded at the same rate from the moment of the BB (i.e., all matter was on the surface of the balloon).
That's not an assumption, that's a given. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear enough (and perhaps there's some confusion caused by cross-over concepts with the earlier "raisin loaf" example, is not directly comparable).
A curved 2D universe would be like the surface (and *only* the surface) of the balloon. Any points inside or outside the surface of the balloon itself wouldn't even be *in* the universe as anything observable by inhabitants of that 2D universe. They and all the contents of their universe would exist and interact *only* within the curved surface of the balloon.
Similarly, although our 3D universe has curvature, it's through a direction/dimension that is beyond the constraints of our own 3D existence. All objects and all expansion takes place entirely within our 3D realm. In the balloon analogy, all objects are on the surface of the balloon, any moving object (including photons) travels along/around the surface of the balloon, and can not "shortcut" through the air-filled area in the middle. If they could, they would be seen vanishing from the "ballooniverse" and then suddenly reappearing elsewhere after an inferred "faster than light" travel through a wormhole (since light itself in the "ballooniverse" is constrained to traveling along the curving surface of the balloon.
To use your balloon analogy, I would expect the balloon to have and infinite number of concentric inner layers, all having some amount of the matter on each of those balloon surfaces.
This is not the "raisin bread" example. As the balloon expands, all points and objects on its surface expand outward with that surface. None are "left behind" inside the balloon, and none were inside the balloon to start with even when the balloon was not so much inflated.
For that matter, the same issues apply to a flat rubber sheet that is being stretched outward in all directions, which helps avoid the distraction of the "inside" of the balloon, but a balloon being blown up is more familiar and easier to visualize.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.