Non-fiction 30 Nov 2005 10:26 am
Faster than the Speed of Light
Faster than the Speed of Light
João Magueijo
If this book were a TV documentary, it would come with a MA 15+ rating (”contains strong language, sexual references, drug references and adult themes”). Seriously, I had never seen so much profanity in a science book before. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but it adds some weird “colour” to the content.
Aside from that, it’s a very interesting book. It’s not a “hard core” scientific book: less time is spent describing actual science than the bureaucratic process behind how science is practised nowadays.
The story is centred around Magueijo’s theory of a varying speed of light (VSL) as a solution to the problems that plague our current understanding of how the big bang happened. While it is accepted that the universe we know was created in a gigantic explosion billions of years ago, several details regarding how things managed to evolve in exactly the kind of universe we have today are not well understood.
Inflation theory is one possible solution to a few of the problems, but it introduces others. The VSL theory (set of theories, actually) potentially solves all of the problems while making predictions that might conceivably be confirmed, but it comes with a price: it violates Einstein’s general and special relativity. And that is a major sin.
A very large part of the book is dedicated to the reaction of the “scientific establishment” to such a radical theory, with no lack of insults flying around (directed at journal referees, university administrators, old scientists and so on). This is entertaining and eye-opening, even though not quite what I was expecting from the book.
Still, it’s a very good book, and it includes a very good primer on the theory of relativity (in order to overthrow it later on, of course). Scientific ideas, when they are mentioned, are explained in a good level of detail well suited to non-physicists.
