Faster than the Speed of Light? A New Theory Says, "Yes"

[Natorgator]

From The Daily Galaxy:

A brilliant young physicist João Magueijo asks the heretical question: What if the speed of light—now accepted as one of the unchanging foundations of modern physics—were not constant?

Magueijo, a 40-year old native of Portugal, puts forth the heretical idea that in the very early days of the universe light traveled faster—an idea that if proven could dethrone Einstein and forever change our understanding of the universe. He is a pioneer of the varying speed of light (VSL) theory of cosmology -an alternative to the more mainstream theory of cosmic inflation- which proposes that the speed of light in the early universe was of 60 orders of magnitude faster than its present value.

Solving the most intractable problems of cosmology in one brilliant leap, Magueijo’s varying-speed-of-light theory (VSL) would have stunning implications for space travel, black holes, time dilation, and string theory—and could help uncover the grand unified theory that ultimately eluded Einstein.

Joao Magueijo's radical ideas intend to turn that Einsteinian dogma on its head. Marueijo is trying to pick apart one of Einstein’s most impenetrable tenets, the constancy of the speed of light. This idea of a constant speed (about 3×106 meters/second) -is known as the universal speed limit. Nothing can, has, or ever will travel faster than light.

Magueijo -who received his doctorate from Cambridge, has been a faculty member at Princeton and Cambridge, and is currently a professor at Imperial College, London- says: not so. His VSL theory presupposes a speed of light that can be energy or time-space dependent.

In his fist book, Faster than the Speed of Light, Magueijo leads laymen readers into the abstract realm of theoretical physics, based on several well known, as well as obscure, thinkers. The VSL model was first proposed by John Moffat, a Canadian scientist, in 1992. Magueijo carefully builds the foundations for a discussion of Big Bang cosmology, and then segues into the second half of the book, which is devoted to VSL theory.

Like most radical, potentially seminal thinkers, Magueijo shakes the foundations of the physics community, while irritating off many of his fellow scientists. VSL purposes to solve the problems at which all cosmologists are forever scratching: those inscrutable conceptual puzzles that surround the Big Bang. Currently many of these problems have no widely accepted solutions.

Could Einstein be wrong and Magueijo right? Is he a gadfly or a true, seminal genius? Time will tell.

Leaving aside the media narrative of a loner going against the scientific community, does this idea have any credibility?

[Bilbo]

No way to know with just reading this article. It does not mention any of the math or anything else he has to support his theory. Basically the article says he went to school and he is part of a very small minority.

[General Zod]

Sounds like a lot of hype and buzz words. Where's the peer reviewed journals and studies?

[Count Chocula]

At the risk of this sounding like an OOMA reply, light is described as having properties of both waves and particles. As such, it would stand to reason that gravity, which is as far as we know a mass effect, can slow down photons. In fact, that is what's theorized for black holes - the gravity of the black hole is so high that light can not escape its pull.

Now, assuming the Big Bang theory is true, if you have a gargantuan but physically small mass suddenly exploding in all directions, it seems at first thought that momentum and inertia would rule physical effects, NOT gravity. And, since all the matter (including light) is being propelled together along an outward vector (into what? nothing? was there empty space before the Big Bang?) into what we can assume is a matter-free, frictionless medium, the only limitation on the speed of light would be the explosive force of the Bang that produced the photons.

Intellectually, I can understand his hypothesis. Heck, for all we know, the speed of light we accept as a constant may only apply for our little section of this little spiral of our little galaxy.

[Kanastrous]

I heard on some physics-for-dummies program that while there is a postulated limit to the speed with which light can travel, there is no such limitation upon how fast space can expand.

I don't think that the universe expanded 'into' any pre-existing medium; that presupposes the existence of a volume of space to contain that medium, which is problematic if space itself is what was expanding, to begin with.

I guess.

[Count Chocula]

Ahh, but what is space? What came first, the spermatazoa or the ovum?

Questions for the ages, indeed. I hope our technology and understanding improves enough in my lifetime that we can at least nail down whether light speed is variable or fixed.

[Formless]

When I read the title of the thread, I thought maybe this was about Heim Theory or something. But yeah, this article is really vague, even though the theory is comparatively mainstream. I don't need math (which I wouldn't really understand) but they can at least give some kind of explanation of the phenomina at work!

BTW, how exactly would you go about using this theory for space flight applications? Whereas with HT I have some grasp over how it would achieve FTL etc., I don't see how you would go about using Variable Speed of Light to get similar effects. Just because the speed of light can be changed does not mean that it can be arbitrarily changed by human interference for our convenience. If anyone knows more about this theory, could they explain that possibility for me?

[Feil]

Now, assuming the Big Bang theory is true, if you have a gargantuan but physically small mass suddenly exploding in all directions, it seems at first thought that momentum and inertia would rule physical effects, NOT gravity. And, since all the matter (including light) is being propelled together along an outward vector (into what? nothing? was there empty space before the Big Bang?) into what we can assume is a matter-free, frictionless medium, the only limitation on the speed of light would be the explosive force of the Bang that produced the photons.

Have you ever actually read anything resembling an explanation of the Big Bang Theory? Your understanding of it is totally wrong on all accounts. Your understanding of relativity, light, and gravity is similarly wrong.

To clarify one aspect of your misunderstanding, the Big Bang was not an explosion of anything into anything. It was an expansion of everything, and because location is a property that only has meaning "inside" the universe, what the universe is expanding into is a meaningless question.

[Count Chocula]

Yeh Feil, I have. I'm not near any references right now, though, and I'm working from old memories, which is why I included all the fudge words. A glance at a Wiki (yes I know, I'm not helping matters) article states that the theory has the universe expanding from "a primordial hot and dense state" - I equated "expansion" with "explosion" in my mind. Bang. Big Bang. Boom.

To clarify one aspect of your misunderstanding, the Big Bang was not an explosion of anything into anything. It was an expansion of everything, and because location is a property that only has meaning "inside" the universe, what the universe is expanding into is a meaningless question.

I'm still having trouble over the whole "expansion of everything" aspect. Would that imply that there is nothing outside our universe? Or is the phrase "nothing outside our universe" itself a meaningless concept. I'm not trying to be pedantic, it just seems that there needs to be room for expansion, implying space outside the universe we know. The idea of a Big Bang creating space just sounds a lot like the first part of Genesis.

[Feil]

Also, the speed of light is 3x10^8 m/s. Naturally, the sensationalist article writer who tried to turn "obscure physicist poses minor, speculative adjustment to Einsteinian Relativity" into "HERESY" and "SOLVING ALL THE PROBLEMS OF PHYSICS WITH ONE BRILLIANT LEAP" also didn't know enough about the material he was smearing bullshit all over to even get the most well known physical constant right.

[Feil]

I'm not trying to be pedantic, it just seems that there needs to be room for expansion, implying space outside the universe we know.

There doesn't. "Outside the universe" is a meaningless concept. The universe doesn't have to make sense. Our brains are very good at doing all the things an ape needs to do, and sense is what conforms to the expectations that are most useful in keeping apes from starving or getting eaten. It doesn't have any bearing on how reality actually works at a deeper level.

[petesampras]

Sounds like a lot of hype and buzz words. Where's the peer reviewed journals and studies?

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/people/j.mag ... blications

The guy is a physics professor at a good university - you don't get to that position with hype and buzz words.

[Ted C]

At the risk of this sounding like an OOMA reply, light is described as having properties of both waves and particles. As such, it would stand to reason that gravity, which is as far as we know a mass effect, can slow down photons. In fact, that is what's theorized for black holes - the gravity of the black hole is so high that light can not escape its pull.

My limited understanding:
Gravity does affect photons, and it does affect the velocity of light. It does not, however, affect the speed of light, only its direction. Something like a black hole simply keeps "bending" the light ray back into the hole, so it can't get out.

[General Zod]

Sounds like a lot of hype and buzz words. Where's the peer reviewed journals and studies?

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/people/j.mag ... blications

The guy is a physics professor at a good university - you don't get to that position with hype and buzz words.

Probably not, but the way the article is phrased certainly doesn't help the impression it gives of him. It sounds more like a sales pitch for a book than a legitimate article on science.

[Surlethe]

I'm still having trouble over the whole "expansion of everything" aspect. Would that imply that there is nothing outside our universe?

No.

Or is the phrase "nothing outside our universe" itself a meaningless concept.

Bingo.

I'm not trying to be pedantic, it just seems that there needs to be room for expansion, implying space outside the universe we know. The idea of a Big Bang creating space just sounds a lot like the first part of Genesis.

There was no creation of spacetime; you just need to take a more geometric view of the universe. "Expansion" just means that the distance between points increases as the time coordinate increases. For instance, consider a sphere. Identify latitude with time and longitude with distance, so the north pole corresponds to our big bang and the south pole corresponds to a hypothetical "big crunch". The spatial universe is a ring of constant latitude, and distance is measured as distance along the circle between two points of constant longitude. Now, this universe has a constant amount of energy (see: conservation of energy), distributed at every latitude along the spatial-universe ring. So as we tend up toward the north pole, the energy density grows until at the north pole it's infinitely hot and dense. That's the "big bang". What is the universe expanding into? Nothing -- on the surface, "up" and "down" have no meaning (c.f. your question above). What came before the big bang? Nothing -- what's north of the north pole? Was the universe created? Almost certainly not, because nothing came before it.

This is a simplistic example, since it doesn't take into account neat things like energy density affecting curvature, etc., but it should give you some idea of the sort of geometric thinking that is required in this circumstance. You can't give in to attractive Newtonian concepts; when you're dealing with large-scale, high-density situations, they're wrong. Instead, relativity has its own beauty.

My limited understanding:Gravity does affect photons, and it does affect the velocity of light. It does not, however, affect the speed of light, only its direction. Something like a black hole simply keeps "bending" the light ray back into the hole, so it can't get out.

Good thought, but actually gravity does not affect photons; the velocity of light is constant. Light always follows geodesics, which are straight lines. It's just that gravity is the curvature of space, which makes it look like light bends.

[Steel]

At the risk of this sounding like an OOMA reply, light is described as having properties of both waves and particles. As such, it would stand to reason that gravity, which is as far as we know a mass effect, can slow down photons. In fact, that is what's theorized for black holes - the gravity of the black hole is so high that light can not escape its pull.

My limited understanding:
Gravity does affect photons, and it does affect the velocity of light. It does not, however, affect the speed of light, only its direction. Something like a black hole simply keeps "bending" the light ray back into the hole, so it can't get out.

No, gravity can "slow down" light. If you point your torch at the roof it will take longer to arrive there compared to if you pointed it at the floor. This is because as of the strong equivalence principle you are in an accelerating frame.

If you were in an accelerating spaceship, light would take longer to travel from the back to the front than from front to back. The same is true on the surface of the earth, only you are accelerating due to the gravitational field not your spaceships engines.

[Ford Prefect]

What if the speed of light—now accepted as one of the unchanging foundations of modern physics—were not constant?

Can anyone else remember reading an article featuring the same thing from last year? This feels very familiar.

[Surlethe]

No, gravity can "slow down" light. If you point your torch at the roof it will take longer to arrive there compared to if you pointed it at the floor. This is because as of the strong equivalence principle you are in an accelerating frame.

Semantics point: if I understand correctly, this is because time dilates instead of light slowing down. That is, gravity fucks with time, not light.

[Count Chocula]

DARN you, Surlethe! Now I'm trying to think in six dimensions, and flashing back to Heinlein's The Number of the Beast [/sarcasm].

This will take some pondering for, I'm sure, an ultimately futile attempt by me to understand.

Follow-on confirmation: red shift and blue shift of light are caused, as far as we know, entirely by our frame of reference and relative velocity to the light source, right?

[Feil]

Follow-on confirmation: red shift and blue shift of light are caused, as far as we know, entirely by our frame of reference and relative velocity to the light source, right?

Yes. Because c is the same for all observers, an observer at the source of a light wave may observe the wave a some wavelenth L, that is, the light moves L meters between peaks on the waveform. But if another observer, moving towards the source of the light wave at 0.5c, measures the same wave, he will see that its wavelength is 0.5L, because from his point of observation the distance between peaks is (c-0.5c)/c L.

I don't know if relativistic time effects would come into play here. If they do, my numbers are off by some amount, but the lorentz factor for .5c is small, so they're probably not off by much.

[Stark]

If you ever needed a confirmation someone knows nothing about relativity, that's it. Ha!

Anyway, this article doesn't really have anything to support it. He's a VSL advocate, so obviously he advocates a VSL, and says that VSL solves problems... somehow, by doing something. Totally worthless - although I'm sure his actual work is far more informative.

[PeZook]

That article is complete and utter trash. Not only did they manage to get the speed of light wrong (jesus christ, how hard could it be to google it?), but this bit:

Like most radical, potentially seminal thinkers, Magueijo shakes the foundations of the physics community, while irritating off many of his fellow scientists.

Shows he doesn't know shit. "Shake the foundations of science"? Yeah, it will totally invalidate all calculations we do for such minor things like, say, landing a probe on fucking mars. At best, what this will mean that Einstein's equations work just as well as they did before, except we now know lightspeed is not forever constant - just like Newton's equations work just fine for lower speeds and masses.

Furthermore, Magueijo isn't a kook and understands quite well that his theory is so far unconfirmed. He said as much on a Discovery Channel show he hosts, that he needs observations to prove his model. It may just as well "irritate" fellow scientists, but this by itself is no reason to scream "brilliant heretic put down by Big Science!!!".

[VT-16]

On the universe thing, if the distance between points is expanding, and nothing is "outside" the universe, does that not lead to the possibility that the universe itself is infinite in size, only the distances between each point is expanding and the invisible universe is only that because it is too far away for light to reach us and will continue to be that way due to the expansion being more rapid than the speed of the photons from those areas?

[Oskuro]

If there is something hard to understand for these media types is not relativity, but the scientific method itself.

The way the article is written, it makes you feel like there's animosity towards Einstein, and suggests that this new theory would imply that his work was worthless, and his name would be stricken from the annals of history. Because, you know, it's happened before! Who's heard of Isaac Newton's incorrect calculations nowadays? Since he wasn't absolutely right, all his work was meaningless! </sarcasm>


Also, I'd like to make sure everyone is on the same page here. Light can move at less than c, all you need is to make it move through a different medium (like air). The thing is that it has a tendency to move at the fastest speed possible, and in the absolute vaccum of space, that speed is c, thus c is the fastest speed possible in the universe, and since light is the only thing we know moves that fast, is hence referred to as the speed of light.

I heard on some physics-for-dummies program that while there is a postulated limit to the speed with which light can travel, there is no such limitation upon how fast space can expand.

There is: c


Also, about the article, the whole VSL Theory (or is it Hypothesis at this point?) reminds me too much of some crackpot Creationist theories I've read about. I was half expecting the article to announce that this new theory might prove the Universe to be younger than currently estimated.

[PeZook]

Also, about the article, the whole VSL Theory (or is it Hypothesis at this point?) reminds me too much of some crackpot Creationist theories I've read about. I was half expecting the article to announce that this new theory might prove the Universe to be younger than currently estimated.

...and they'd be contradicting the theory's proponent, since Magueijo never claimed anything of the sort

Really, it's just another model,to be debated and finally confirmed/denied. Of course, that won't stop non-scientists and complete ignoramuses from claiming it supports their particular brand of idiocy. I've already seen one try, in fact.