Physics, Fast and Furious

João Magueijo's work has ended up in the toilet, and he's

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not ashamed. Well, maybe a bit. When the subject comes up, he laughs and tugs at his bangs, wondering aloud how people have found out.

Such a messy end wasn't in his plans when this physicist and scientific hooligan wrote a book challenging Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity. In 1905, the 26-year-old Einstein developed the idea that the speed of light is a constant for all observers, and that theory has helped lay the foundation of modern physics. But 90 years later, after a night of heavy partying, a hung-over Mr. Magueijo stumbled across the idea that an inconstant speed of light could solve some major problems for cosmologists.

Mr. Magueijo, a 35-year-old professor at the Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine, in London, calls the notion "heretical," relishing the thought of challenging authority. "It's been called anarchist physics. We are the Sex Pistols of physics," he says.

In Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation (Perseus Books), Mr. Magueijo describes how he developed the variable-light theory with a succession of collaborators and how he battled the scientific community to take it seriously. Along the way, he ridicules much of modern physics and snipes at many establishment scientists, including administrators at his own university.

At one point, he calls an editor of Nature magazine a "first-class moron" and a "failed scientist" with penis envy, statements that the leaders of that British journal did not find so droll. Under threat of a libel lawsuit, Random House, the publisher of the British edition of Mr. Magueijo's book, destroyed the copies already printed, turning them into pulp paper that -- through the wonders of recycling -- might find their way back to him.

"The next time I go to the supermarket and buy toilet tissue, I'll know that my work is there," he says. A new British version of the book comes out this month, "with small but substantive changes to the text," says a Random House representative. An American edition, benefiting from the different libel laws here, arrived in bookstores in January, complete with the insults.

If Mr. Magueijo seems unfazed by the affair, it may be because his idea is finally enjoying some success. After years of dueling reviewers and journal editors, he has finally managed to attract a wider crowd to consider the possibility of not-so-constant light.

His first paper on the topic has racked up 120 citations in a database of physics publications, enough to qualify it as a "famous" paper. Researchers are seeking him out to explore new theories and to find proof that light has a varying speed. And Nature even highlighted some of his work in a commentary commissioned by the editor whom Mr. Magueijo savaged in his book.

But the book's take-no-prisoners approach has irked some scientists, as does the dust-jacket copy, which compares Mr. Magueijo to Richard Feynman, the late Nobel laureate and best-selling author. "I don't think so," says one cosmologist, laughing over the comparison. "Richard Feynman didn't go around telling people, 'I'm the next Einstein.'"

Quest for a Kooky Idea

Although Mr. Magueijo's prose lacks mercy, the physicist appears far more mellow in person. He has an open face, dark eyes, and black hair cropped short, Caligula-style. He is fluent in English, but his voice still rides the inflections of his native Portugal, and he speaks so softly at times that words often evaporate into the din of New York.

Mr. Magueijo is braving the 20-degree weather here in January to launch his book's publicity tour, which will start with an evening talk at the Hayden Planetarium. His schedule goes glitzy the following night with a cocktail party at Harvard University held by SEED magazine, which recently ran a 10-page article on the handsome physicist, showing him in various stages of posed contemplation. For the Hayden lecture, Mr. Magueijo wears Nikes, jeans, a black T-shirt, and a thin leather jacket, looking like a refugee from a springtime fashion shoot.

It is a long way across time and space from the University of Cambridge, where he took a fateful groggy stroll one morning and wondered whether light had varied its speed in the past. At the time, Mr. Magueijo was a postdoctoral fellow seeking an alternative to the reigning theory of cosmology -- a concept known as inflation.

The quest for nutty ideas was de rigueur at Cambridge, and the physicists in England had a special bias against inflation, says Mr. Magueijo. "We really thought inflation wasn't the final answer for all the problems in cosmology. ... At the same time, though, I recognized that the English didn't have any counterpart theory to offer."

British cosmologists, he says, regarded the inflation theory with suspicion in part because it was an American import, manufactured in 1980 by a young physicist named Alan H. Guth, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In order to solve a cosmological problem, Mr. Guth developed what seemed at the time an absurd notion about the infant universe. He posited that an antigravity type of force had caused space itself to stretch extremely rapidly. A patch measuring 10^-30 centimeter in size (that is, 0.000000000000000000000000000001 cm across) ballooned up to a centimeter in just 10^-40 second. Since then, the universe has continued to expand, but at the leisurely pace described by the Big Bang theory and observed by astronomers.

Within two years of its birth, inflation had captured the hearts and minds of many physicists because it seemed to solve some of cosmology's most nettlesome puzzles, including something called the horizon problem. When astronomers look into space in any direction, they see a horizon of faint radiation that comes from the most distant parts of the visible universe. Light from those realms has been traversing the cosmos for the full age of the universe -- 15 billion years -- and is only now reaching us.

The problem arises because, whichever direction an astronomer looks, the sky appears uniform, with exactly the same temperature and consistency. It's as if a cosmic blender had homogenized the entire universe early in its history.

Before Mr. Guth's theory, scientists had no idea why the universe should be so uniform -- the opposite sides of the cosmos are simply too far apart. At every stage of the universe's life, even when it was just a trillionth of a second old, light from one end of the sky did not have enough time to reach the other end, so there was no way to equilibrate conditions, no way that physical forces could equalize temperatures or mix the cosmos.

The inflation theory neatly solved that problem. If a minuscule, homogeneous patch of space had been stretched almost instantly during the first fraction of a second, then all parts of the visible universe would forever after look the same because they would all have descended from that small space.

Mr. Magueijo, however, conceived another way to solve the horizon problem. What if light had moved much faster just after the universe was born? Then energy from far distant regions could zip across space, equalizing the temperature and homogenizing the universe.

"The idea was beautifully simple, simpler than inflation, but immediately I felt uneasy about offering it as an explanation," he recounts in his book. "It involved something that for a trained scientist approached madness. It challenged perhaps the most fundamental rule of modern physics: that the speed of light is constant."

Taking a Pin to Inflation

When Mr. Magueijo mentioned his idea to friends, he says, they would greet him with silence or conversation-ending comments like "Oh, I don't know anything about that." He christened his idea "VSL," for "Variable-Speed-of-Light" theory, but someone suggested that it stood for "Very Silly."

Still, Mr. Magueijo quietly explored what it might mean if light had moved much faster early in the universe. To his delight, the concept seemed to offer solutions to some of the other cosmological problems that inflation had solved. With so much going for it, he wondered, why couldn't his idea contend with inflation? Mr. Magueijo felt that VSL held promise, if only he could find a colleague to help him break through some of the barriers in developing the theory.

By coincidence, at about the same time, one of the fathers of the inflation theory was looking for an alternative to his progeny. Andreas Albrecht had been a graduate student in 1981, when he and his adviser, Paul J. Steinhardt of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a seminal paper fixing some critical problems in Mr. Guth's version of the theory. That paper helped solidify Mr. Albrecht's career. But by the mid-1990s, he had grown to question inflation and was one of the few people who didn't recoil in horror when told about the VSL idea, recalls Mr. Magueijo.

Armed with a new fellowship in mid-1996, Mr. Magueijo left Cambridge for Imperial College, where Mr. Albrecht was a tenured professor. The two conspired behind closed doors, wiping equations off the blackboard each night to prevent others from stealing their ideas.

Over several months, the two transformed Mr. Magueijo's hazy musings into firm mathematics, working out how much light must have changed over the history of the universe. These days, light travels at 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum. According to Einstein, that rate is an absolute. The notion is built into much of the mathematical language of modern physics. But according to the VSL theory, light must have moved faster, by at least a factor of 10³², in the earliest sliver of the first second, when the universe was an inferno. Then, as the infant cosmos cooled and expanded within that first second, the speed of light would have dropped close to the value observed today.

The two wrote an extended abstract and e-mailed it to the cosmology editor of Nature, Leslie Sage, to see whether he would find a paper on the topic appealing. They received a reply saying that Nature would not publish the paper unless the authors could make a case that their new theory was the best one, not just another way of solving a problem. The reasoning outraged Mr. Magueijo and prompted him to insult the Nature editor (without naming him) in the new book.

Mr. Sage, who has never met or spoken to Mr. Magueijo, says "we stand by our judgment that the work was not appropriate for Nature. This is not a comment on the quality of the work, but rather an assessment of whether the paper satisfies our normal editorial criteria. ... We regret that Dr. Magueijo has resorted to unprofessional language without attempting a friendly discourse with the editorial staff."

The rejection spurred Mr. Magueijo's interest in VSL, but it pitched Mr. Albrecht into a bout of self-doubt. He got cold feet about publishing a paper on the hypothesis and worried that such work would harm his career. "These are very speculative ideas indeed, and not the sort of thing I want to have my name mixed up in," Mr. Magueijo remembers him saying. (Mr. Albrecht, now at the University of California at San Diego, declined to return telephone calls or respond to an e-mail message from The Chronicle.)

Eventually, though, the two resumed their collaboration and submitted a paper to Physical Review D, a well-respected journal that had published Mr. Guth's first paper on inflation. It took a year of battling with reviewers and the journal's editor, but the paper finally appeared in 1999.

Charge of the Light Brigade

In his book, Mr. Magueijo is careful to point out that he has not worked in a vacuum. Other scientists, including Einstein himself, have proposed that light may not be constant, although the theory's early versions were far different than Mr. Magueijo's.

John W. Moffat, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and a member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Waterloo, Ontario, described a modern version of VSL in 1992 that was even more complete than the one proposed by Mr. Albrecht and Mr. Magueijo several years later. But Mr. Moffat's paper was rejected by Physical Review D, and he published the work in a more obscure journal.

Even now, Mr. Moffat's "original version of VSL is still so far the most consistent, the most complete," says Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute who is working with Mr. Magueijo on other aspects of the VSL theory.

"It's disturbing in a way," says Mr. Moffat. Nobody took notice of his detailed theory for six years, until others happened along a similar path. "For some reason, the media just didn't catch on," he says. "I'm not a very good entrepreneur about my work. The problem is I'm working on several projects at once. I'm too lost in what I'm doing."

Mr. Magueijo, by contrast, has a gregarious personality and has always sought collaborators. He and Mr. Albrecht drew support from each other, and together they battled to get their paper into a widely read journal, which announced it with a press release. That led to newspaper articles and even an appearance on British television.

But VSL would not have captured as much attention from scientists without the work of other theorists, who arrived at the possibility of inconstant light from completely different angles. One of those researchers, Giovanni Amelino-Camelia of the University of Rome La Sapienza, works on linking the two foundations of modern physics, quantum theory and gravitational theory, which so far have remained incompatible. His theory, called doubly special relativity, postulates that extremely energetic light should travel faster than normal and that researchers might detect the change by studying high-energy cosmic rays.

Mr. Magueijo is thrilled that others are pushing on Einstein's ideas, looking for subtle inconsistencies that signal the possibility of some new physics. He and colleagues find VSL particularly attractive because there are ways to test the theory. That makes it far different, he says, than other leading physics theories, such as string theory, which are largely divorced from experiments.

Scientists stand a chance of detecting light's inconstancy because more recent versions of VSL postulate that the speed of light changes extremely slowly over time. So experiments might seek signs of the variation by peering at distant stars that emitted their light billions of years ago. Some theories also suggest that light moves more slowly in the vicinity of black holes, another sign that astronomers might be able to glimpse, says Mr. Magueijo.

Still, "it wouldn't be a big tragedy if it turned out to be wrong," he says. "I work on other things. That's the scientific process, trying out new ideas and testing them."

Scientific 'Pimps' and 'Whores'

While the chance of experimental evidence for VSL fires his imagination, Mr. Magueijo has grown bitter over the years about how the scientific establishment treats people and ideas. Nature, he decided, publishes only cosmology papers that are "totally irrelevant." And his interactions with Physical Review D and other journals disillusioned him about the peer-review process in general. "Some of the refereeing is atrocious," he says. "It's done for personal reasons. People don't actually read the paper, and they let their own egos get in the way."

Imperial College, which has treated him well, has failed in other respects, he says, by driving away one talented scientist after another, mostly because the institution pays professors poorly and does not give them respect. Soon after the first VSL paper came out, Mr. Albrecht left Imperial for the United States. Mr. Magueijo then began working with another Imperial colleague, Mr. Smolin, who says he moved to the Perimeter Institute in part for financial reasons.

"To be brutal," Mr. Magueijo writes, "Imperial's leaders tend to fancy themselves as scientific pimps, in a scenario where the scientists are forced to play the whores." Imperial declines to respond to Mr. Magueijo's comments.

In another episode that drew his ire, Mr. Magueijo's girlfriend, also a physicist, decided to leave science entirely, partly because of the sexism in her university's physics department, a problem endemic in England, he says. Her departure from research stoked Mr. Magueijo's fury. "VSL's developments," he writes, "were shaped in part by a physical need to insult the hypocrisy and corruption of the scientific establishment."

The current crusade against authority is nothing new for Mr. Magueijo. He proudly describes how he was expelled from school for a year at the age of 15 for writing a disparaging essay about the headmistress. "This was the best period of my life," he says. "I probably would not be here if I hadn't had this period out of school. You need to take these unconventional ways around school sometimes to be able to develop properly."

Since then, Mr. Magueijo has carried on a crusade for free speech, no matter how brutal. "People all the time are so worried about what might happen to them, they stop voicing their views and that's really sad," he says.

Mr. Smolin says that the young physicist deserves some credit for pointing out problems in the system: "He's been very well treated, but he's unhappy about the treatment of people he respects."

A Black Hole of Modesty

But what Mr. Magueijo calls honesty other scientists consider hubris. Conversations with astronomers and physicists about Mr. Magueijo often evoke comments like "arrogant" or "not as smart as he thinks he is."

Michael S. Turner, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, says he enjoyed the "enthusiastic fresh voice" in Mr. Magueijo's book. But "there's also naiveté," Mr. Turner says. "He thinks just because everybody doesn't rush to his ideas, they're against them. That's a lot of what the book is about: The world is out to get him."

Erick J. Weinberg, a professor of physics at Columbia University, is the editor of Physical Review D and accepted Mr. Magueijo's first paper on VSL. Mr. Weinberg says some of Mr. Magueijo's complaints about the review process lack substance and echo the familiar carping of authors, particularly young ones.

The editor takes particular offense at a remark in the book about Andrei Linde, a professor at Stanford University and a developer of the inflation theory. Without naming the celebrated researcher, Mr. Magueijo writes that "he gets so ballistic when he is not cited by name that I can't help not citing him here."

"That remark is simply uncalled for," says Mr. Weinberg. "To refuse to mention Linde in that context is absolutely outrageous."

And then there is Nature. Scientists familiar with the dispute say that the journal has vetted the book's new British edition and that its text may include substantial changes, not just in the sections about Nature.

As for the science itself, many cosmologists and physicists remain hesitant at best, even some who have worked on VSL. Mr. Albrecht has divorced himself from the theory, say colleagues.

"I don't think it's very well formulated yet," says Mr. Turner of the VSL idea. "There is no such thing as the variable-speed-of-light theory. It's a loose collection of ideas."

Scientists, he says, are notoriously bad at predicting paradigm shifts, so it makes no sense to write off the concept. But he thinks VSL researchers should do more work before even talking about a revolution. "This is an idea that has been a little overexposed," he says. "It needs some time for closet work. Sometimes, you just have to roll up your sleeves and work quietly in the closet and then come back and say, 'Look at what I've done,' as opposed to saying, 'Look at what I'm going to do.'"

In fact, few physicists find the VSL notion as blasphemous as Mr. Magueijo or his publisher like to suggest. Taking on conventional wisdom is part of a theoretical physicist's job description. "Many physicists, the bulk of string theorists in fact, every single day are challenging Einstein," says Brian Greene, a professor of mathematics and physics at Columbia. "That's really not heretical. That's bread-and-butter physics. ... Finding the correct modification -- that's the art."

It's the art of glimpsing nature's true laws, and it fills the walls of an exhibit on Einstein at the American Museum of Natural History. Mr. Magueijo wanders among the memorabilia there before his planetarium talk. He peers at a copy of Einstein's 1905 paper describing what would later become known as special relativity, an idea so radical that even 16 years later the Nobel Prize committee chose to honor him for a far-less-revolutionary paper. Several rooms further into the exhibit, a pad of white paper contains line after line of mathematical notation -- work that Einstein jotted down as he lay dying in a hospital bed in Princeton, N.J. To the end, the physicist was venturing far beyond the edge of established theory, trying to catch another look at the laws of the cosmos.

Later in the evening, when Mr. Magueijo announces to an audience of astronomy enthusiasts that "I'm going to talk about something that's blasphemous," the threat has a hollow ring. The planetarium crowd -- mostly men, 50 and up -- listens intently, with several scribbling notes. Then as the talk wears on in the dim light, some eyelids flutter shut in the rear rows while VSL's leading pitchman peddles his theory.

• On string theory, an attempt to join gravitational theory with quantum mechanics: "Stringy people have achieved nothing with a theory that doesn't exist. They are excruciatingly pretentious in their claims for beauty; indeed, we are all assured that we live in an elegant universe, by the grace of stringy gods."
  
  
• On M-theory, a variant of string theory: "To add to its mystique, the cult leader who coined the term never explained what the M stood for, and M-theorists heatedly debated this important issue. M for mother? M for membrane? M for masturbation seems so much more befitting to me."
  
  
• On Nature magazine: "In my field (although no one dares to say this publicly) there is a consensus: They have employed a first-class moron as an editor ... . We are obviously talking about a failed scientist -- envy of the penis springs to mind." (Nature responded by saying, "We regret that Dr. Magueijo has resorted to unprofessional language without attempting a friendly discourse with the editorial staff.")
  
  
• On the administration building at the Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine, in London, where he is a tenured professor: "It absorbs large sums of money and generates tons of useless paperwork ... . I have at times considered launching a devastating terrorist strike against staff and building." (Imperial College did not respond to an inquiry about Mr. Magueijo's statements.)
  
  
• On grant-making administrators: "I like to call grant-proposal forms 'old-fart certificates of existence,' since as far as I can see their only purpose is to create a supposed necessity for these parasites. Why doesn't someone just set up a geriatric house for scientists who have stopped doing good science?"