John Moffat (physicist) - Variable Speed of Light: Theory and Controversy

Variable Speed of Light: Theory and Controversy

In 1992, John Moffat proposed that the speed of light was much larger in the early universe, in which the speed of light was 1030 times faster than its current value. He published his "variable speed of light" (VSL) theory in two places—on the Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL) online archive, Nov. 16, 1992, and in a 1993 edition of International Journal of Modern Physics D.

The scientific community mostly ignored VSL theory until in 2001, University of New South Wales astronomer John Webb and peers detected experimental evidence from telescopic observations that the cosmological fine structure constant -- which contains the speed of light—may have been different than its present value in the very early Universe.

The observations supported Moffat's VSL theory—and started a race for primacy that began in 1998.

That year, five years after Moffat had published his VSL papers, João Magueijo of Imperial College in London, and collaborators Andrew Albrecht of the University of California at Davis and John D. Barrow of Cambridge University, published a strikingly similar idea in the more prestigious journal, Physical Review D, which had rejected Moffat's paper years earlier.

Moffat considered legal action to prevent Magueijo, et al. from publishing the theory without himself being credited. Informed of the omission, Magueijo credited Moffat with an entire chapter in Magueijo's 2002 book, Faster Than the Speed of Light: The story of a scientific speculation.

The controversy reignited, however, when during a worldwide publicity tour for Magueijo's book, the author neither credited Moffat nor corrected numerous erroneous press accounts—in such magazines as Discover Publisher's Weekly Seed Magazine and the Christian Science Monitor. In efforts to portray Magueijo as a "brash, young scientific upstart," dozens of publications attributed VSL theory entirely to Magueijo and his co-authors, leaving Moffat—in his late sixties by this time—out. Moffat expressed displeasure about the re-emergent omissions, urging reporters to check their facts, but to no avail.

Stories emerged about the book tour media omissions in March and July 2003, written by a science journalist, Michael Martin, who had earlier attributed VSL theory to Moffat in a 2001 UPI article about Webb's astronomical discoveries. Discover Magazine writer Tim Folger acknowledged the omissions in his story and apologized. In response to a reader letter from Henry van Driel of the University of Toronto Department of Physics, Folger wrote, "Professor van Driel is absolutely right—John Moffat did develop a varying speed of light theory several years before João Magueijo, and I regret not including that information in my story."

Months later, as other reports picked up on the reignited dispute, Magueijo reiterated Moffat's primacy in VSL theory. In September 2004, Discover Magazine's Tim Folger followed through on a promise he had made during the controversy to "write a story about John Moffat.".

The two physicists eventually settled their differences and became friends, publishing a joint paper in 2007 in the journal General Relativity and Gravitation.

French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Petit, a senior researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research, published an earlier 1988 theory involving variable speed of light in the journal Modern Physics Letters A.