Faster Than the Speed of Light: E = mc², Except When It Doesn't

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.

But at some level, which is probably more psychological than cosmological, it fails to satisfy.

It's unsatisfying for a deeper reason. The South Pole isn't a real singularity but the Big Bang is I think. Suppose you've a 1d space plus time with a BB. Draw a cirle in the spacetime around the BB. Time will be pointing "out" all around the circle and space pointing in one direction around (e.g. counterclockwise). You can't extend this to a continuous, non-vanishing coordinate system within the circle.

I don't see an out with higher dimensional spaces but perhaps there would be if the space weren't orientable or were multiply connected or something like that.

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.

Ancient Jewish theological pondering drew this same conclusion from the shape of the first letter in the Torah, the "bet" in "b'reishit" - it is closed off to the right, and open to the left, the direction of the rest of the text:

The first letter is in the upper-right corner, and is read from right to left.

The distance from Earth is liner to each of the galaxies in question, but not necessarily are the Earth and each galaxy colinear. could be a triangle formation, which is my point.

Presumably when they made these observations at the antipodes of the celestial equivalent of latitude and longitude, the azimuth and elevation. For example, the vicinity of Polaris vs. the vicinity of the Southern Cross constellation could be considered to form a line with the Earth at its center.

Ancient Jewish theological pondering drew this same conclusion from the shape of the first letter in the Torah

Another group of theologians have divined the truth of Genesis from the shape of the letter "A", which indicates the influence of Providence originating in Heaven and spreading out in a downward direction over the Earth. (The crossbar in the letter "A" is believed to symbolize a luggage rack.)

Hey, but everyone knows Science has it all figured out.

Since when? Do you understand what science is?

Multiple Big Bangs

I've got a layman's theory that there may have been other "Big Bangs" in the universe, but that they are farther than 15 Billion Light Years away, so we haven't detected them yet.

I've got a layman's theory that there may have been other "Big Bangs" in the universe ...

This notion has been around. But as you point out, even if they exist, we can't detect such distant objects. There being no evidence to support their existence, there is no reason for scientists to pay attention to them, or even to apply the term "theory" to the idea of their existence. "Conjecture" seems more appropriate.

Creationist whine by post #2! Is that a record?

No -- several threads *start* with a pre-emptive creationist whine.

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