John Moffat
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John Moffat is a Professor Emeritus in physics at the University of Toronto. He is also an adjunct Professor in physics at the University of Waterloo and a resident affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is best known for his work on a Variable speed of light approach to cosmological problems, which posits that the speed of light may have been much faster in early moments of the Big Bang. He has also recently published a new modified gravity (MOG) theory that describes well the rotation curves of galaxies and the mass profiles of x-ray galaxy clusters without dark matter. The theory postulates that a field that occurs in the action principle, called the "phion" field, can generate a Bose-Einstein condensate superfluid at large cosmological scales which together with visible baryonic matter and photons can fit the latest cosmic microwave background (CMB) data. In addition, he has recently published papers on inhomogeneous cosmological models that purport to explain certain anomalous effects in the CMB data and account for the observed acceleration of the expansion of the universe.
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[edit] Path to a Physics Career was more unusual than Einstein’s
John Moffat started out his professional life as a struggling artist but this came to an end after living for a time in Paris with no income. Upon returning to Copenhagen, Denmark, he became interested in the cosmos so started teaching himself mathematics and physics. He made such quick progress that within a year he began working on problems of general relativity and unified field theory. In 2005 I heard him tell this story at a lecture at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics:
"When I was about 20, I wrote a letter to Albert Einstein telling him that I was working on one of his theories. In 1953 Einstein sent me a reply, from Princeton, New Jersey, but it was written in German. So I ran down to my barber shop (in Copenhagen) to have my barber translate it for me. Through that summer and fall, we exchanged about a half dozen letters. The local press picked up on these stories which then caught the attention of physicist Neils Bohr and others. Suddenly doors of opportunity were swinging open for me".
In 1958, he became the only Trinity College, Cambridge student to be awarded a Ph.D. without a first degree. (He was supervised by Fred Hoyle and Abdus Salam)
"Dear Professor . . . I would be eternally indebted if you could find time to read my work," he began.
“Most honorable Mr. Moffat: Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open, and we try hard to discuss what is inside and what is not.” Einstein replied.
[edit] Most Recent Work
In the early 1990s Moffat proposed a radical alternative theory: that the speed of light was as much as 30 times of magnitude faster than its present value just following the big bang. He published a paper on the variable speed of light theory in the early 1990s but his work was essentially ignored. A few years later, Joao Magueijo, based at Imperial College in London, and his collaborator, Andrew Albrecht of the University of California at Davis, published a paper with a similar idea. Their paper made it into the more prestigious journal, Physical Review D, which had rejected Moffat's paper years earlier. When Moffat saw this, he was upset and contacted Magueijo. But after Magueijo realized what had happened, he was quick to give Moffat due credit for having first proposed the idea. In fact, Moffat and Magueijo became friends, and Magueijo even devoted a whole chapter to Moffat in his 2002 book titled “Faster Than the Speed of Light”. After that, the number of physicists citing Moffat's work in academic journals skyrocketed.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Moffat, John; "Superluminary Universe: A Possible Solution to the Initial Value Problem in Cosmology" [1]
