From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Sat May 10 2003 - 06:06:30 MDT
Spudboy100@aol.com:
>Entropy, as one of the constants of the cosmos may indeed prove to
>be "adjustable" in the same sense as physicist Joao Magueijo,
>contends in his hypothesis.
If you accept his hypothesis.
Amara
NATURE| VOL 422 | 10 APRIL 2003
Faster Than the Speed of Light:
The Story of a Scientific Speculation
by Joćo Magueijo
William Heinemann/Perseus: 2003. 320 pp.
£16.99/$26
George Ellis
Joćo Magueijo is one of many who hope to see the epitaph 'Einstein
was wrong, I was right' on their gravestone. He is a cosmologist
who, one rainy morning in Cambridge, suddenly saw the possibility of
a varying speed of light (VSL) as an alternative to the
inflationary-theory paradigm that dominates present-day theoretical
cosmology. He knew from the start that it represented a fundamental
challenge to physics orthodoxy (it violates the foundations of
Einstein's special theory of relativity) and would not easily be
accepted, but he worked enthusiastically to develop the idea. He
found a collaborator who wavered but eventually completed a joint
paper with him on the topic. This was rejected by major journals but
was eventually accepted for publication after a long battle. He then
discovered that the idea had already been proposed, in a slightly
different form, by John Moffat. He found new collaborators and with
them developed variants of his theory.
Faster Than the Speed of Light is a lively book that captures the
excitement and frustrations of doing real-world science. Magueijo
relates interestingly how his VSL proposal might possibly be a way
out of some major puzzles facing cosmology, which he explains well.
There are irritating passages, however, where he makes extended use
of a metaphor involving farmers and cows in explaining relativity
theory. Magueijo states that this is based on a dream that Einstein
had as a boy - a fictional invention that displays such a cavalier
attitude to historical truth as to call into question his other
historical claims (and for the record, it was Richard Tolman, not
Yakov Zeldovich, who first investigated the thermodynamics of
bouncing universes). And at times Magueijo descends to an altogether
different space characterized by hostile ranting ("seem to fancy
themselves as scientific pimps") and crude language. In these
passages he expresses his profound dissatisfaction with how he has
been treated by the scientific world despite the recognition and
generous support he has received (he was awarded a Cambridge
fellowship and a Royal Society research fellowship, and is a reader
at Imperial College, London).
His papers on VSL have now been widely read and referred to. Why,
then, his major discontent? He has had no more difficulty than many
others who have presented challenges to orthodoxy. All major new
ideas have been resisted in their time: the expanding Universe,
continental drift, special relativity and quantum theory, for
example. Science is inherently conservative - it has to be so, given
the flood of speculative writing. It also has to be open, allowing
dissemination of unorthodox views, which does occur. It is resistive
but not impermeable, as is shown in his own case. There is a valid
complaint, nevertheless: the current use of refereeing as a defence
of the inflationary-theory orthodoxy in cosmology is indeed
regrettable.
Magueijo's dissatisfaction is wider than that, however. He
criticizes all university administration as parasitic and
unnecessary, throwing in gratuitous insults as he does so. He is
breathtakingly arrogant as regards funding - he seems to assume it
is his right to be funded for the work he is doing with no questions
asked. He gives no attention to the methods by which one can decide
how public funding should be dispensed in science, nor to why the
public should pay any money at all to people like him. Yes, there
are problems in university organization and the funding system;
constructive criticism is justifiable and indeed needed. But his
remarks are purely destructive.
What of the VSL theory itself? Is it the panacea he hopes for? No,
it is not. Einstein reflected deeply on the foundations of physics,
and that was the basis of his success. Magueijo has not gone back to
the foundations and sorted them out. Any theory of this kind needs,
first, a viable proposal for measuring both time and distance, as
velocity is based on this; second, a physical model that embodies
the results of these measurements in some well-defined mathematical
structure; and third, a theory of electromagnetism that predicts the
speed of light in relation to these measurement processes. He has
none of these, and without them he does not have the basis to put
his theory on a solid foundation.
Standard relativity theory deals with all these issues in depth. The
key point is that current ways of measuring distance precisely
incorporate the speed of light in their foundations. On large
scales, radar (with its variants such as the Global Positioning
System) is the only viable method. It is then not possible for the
speed of light to vary, because it is the very basis of measuring
distance; as emphasized by J. L. Synge, the natural units for
distance are light seconds or light years, rather than metres or
miles. Furthermore, this is then built into the foundations of the
theory through the space-time metric tensor and its interpretation
as determining proper time (time measured by an ideal clock along
its worldline), proper distance (measured by radar), and the null
cone (characterizing the path of light through space-time). Because
Magueijo and Moffat ignore this physical interpretation of the
metric, their so-called 'phase transition in the speed of light' is
just a jump in arbitrary units for time, unrelated to measurement
procedures. It is not a physical prediction.
Furthermore, the variation principles proposed as underlying the
physics involve the metric tensor in raising and lowering indices to
create scalars - and hence build into the foundations of the theory
the invariance of the speed of light (the metric determines the
speed of wave propagation). We are given no reason why any broken
symmetries associated with special solutions of the resulting
equations will give a causal explanation for a varying speed of
light - but this variation is the arbitrary postulate of VSL theory.
And apart from the part of the action determining variation of the
speed of light (independently of Maxwell's equations), the explicit
occurrence of the speed of light in the VSL variational principle
proposed is only in a ratio with the gravitational constant G- so
this is just a varying-Gtheory in disguise.
Developments that could make VSL viable, such as further
investigation of the time variation of the fine-structure constant,
of two-metric theories, of an altered version of the symmetry group
underlying relativity theory, or through a string-theory motivation
for varying 'constants', need to provide a clear relation to space
and time measurement, as well as a physical reason (based in some
version of Maxwell's equations) for the speed of light to vary. It
is a pity that Magueijo does not mention progress made in these
directions by workers other than himself and his own collaborators.
George Ellis is in the Department of Mathematics, University of Cape
Town, Rondebosch 7700,
-- ******************************************************************** Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/ ******************************************************************** "A million here, a million there, sooner or later it is real money." -- U.S. Senator Dirksen
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