Revolutionary Science

Bob Colwell in his At Random column writes:

The Speed of Light

What better way to increase the overall quantum connectedness of all things than to speed up light? It's way overdue for improvement, after all. Computers have gotten faster, highway speed limits are increasing to previous levels (evidently to compensate for the increasing effectiveness of safety devices), the overall pace of life has gone from busy to frenetic, and Internet bandwidth is improving. But the speed of light had been a constant for approximately 5.5 billion years, and nobody had done a darned thing about it.Well, now, somebody has. In Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation (Perseus Books Group, 2003) physicist Joao Magueijo provides a captivating look over his shoulder as he tries to push science ahead by taking a clear-eyed inventory of what is working and not working about the best available theories in cosmology. How many physics books have back-cover reviews with words like "racy," "irreverent," or "vicarious thrills" in them? Those descriptions, as it turns out, are quite accurate. This book is a page-turner.Magueijo's exposition of the Big Bang theory, its connections to Einstein's general theory of relativity, and the holes in today's "inflationary model" is lucid, immediate, and enthralling. He proposes that, regardless of the overwhelming general acceptance of a constant speed of light, if that constant were allowed to vary, it would nicely explain many of the outstanding conundrums of cosmology.

Incremental or revolutionary?

There is also a story-within-the-story. What happens to scientists who propose something revolutionary? The scientific establishment is prewired to encourage certain behavior patterns and discourage others. If you want to get a paper published in a peer-reviewed conference or journal, there are two principal avenues. The first, and by far most common, is to propose an incremental improvement to an existing idea; the second is to propose a revolutionary idea that almost always refutes something that the rest of the field has accepted as doctrine.How does a researcher convince the field that a new idea is a winner, given the implication that they must all do some uncomfortable neural rewiring to accommodate it? New ideas seldom come with compelling proof and usually appear to be somewhat unlikely. They often originate with one person, which gives them an idiosyncratic and generally shaky appearance; there is little substantive data with which to justify them; and the person proposing the idea is seldom one of the field's trusted authorities. Instead, the revolutionary is often an unknown with no track record.

Finding funding

And then there's the funding "big hammer." Most science requires money, and some science requires large amounts of it. The people at the agencies who control these disbursements are in their positions because they are technically skilled enough to identify promising ideas. But that very skill means they are themselves predisposed to incremental science.Competently plying her trade, a funding agent will solicit peer reviews, and at least one of those reviews will come back in the form of "This proposal has no investigators with any track record. It makes claims that can't be confirmed from the current state of the art, and there's no compelling data to justify the extrapolated conclusions proffered. All things considered, this proposal doesn't look substantially different from one that might come from a complete crackpot." The funding person could then reject the proposal with high confidence. This process leaves such would-be revolutionaries on their own. All Things Are Rejected.

Challenging the establishment

Following Magueijo's struggle, based on the idea that essentially begins with "Einstein was wrong, the speed of light has not always been a constant," is an incredible ride. It's clear that at some rational level, Magueijo fully understands what he's up against. He says, "Every new idea is gibberish until it survives ruthless challenge. After all, what had motivated my idea [of a varying-speed-of-light, VSL] was precisely my questioning the validity of inflation." Inflation was a theory that tried to "fix" the Big Bang's problems of dark matter and uniformity.Don't be fooled. While his rational mind understands, Magueijo is human, and he's not afraid to show that side as well. Maybe he's a little too unafraid. But this is ultimately what makes his book compelling. He talks about schools, school administrations, friends, colleagues, English society, girlfriends, conferences, Berkeley ("semi- deranged people constantly sniping at each other"), journals, and many other things, in language you might hear only from a vice president on the Senate floor.

Right or wrong?

Is Magueijo's theory right? Nobody knows yet. This book lays out his rationale and context for it, and Magueijo argues as strongly as possible (in a popular-science style book: no math allowed) that it's plausible. But he stops short of claiming victory. He prefers to predict the reactions of his colleagues: If the theory turns out to be right, he says they will "twist history to claim priority;" if it turns out to be wrong, well, some of them are "desperate to see VSL fall on its face." Welcome to big science.

He says, "Every new idea is gibberish until it survives ruthless challenge. ..."

jar writes:IMHO definitely science. One quote from the article is significant:
He says, "Every new idea is gibberish until it survives ruthless challenge. ..."
Survive a ruthless challenge.
This is the difference.
Young Earth falls at the first glimpse of a starry sky.

Just being a bit of a devil's advocate here, but I don't quite see it the way you do. If he is right and the speed of light isn't a constant doesn't that throw off all of our calculations about the age of the earth? Maybe it is only 6000 years old.

Exceprted review writes:Competently plying her trade, a funding agent will solicit peer reviews, and at least one of those reviews will come back in the form of "This proposal has no investigators with any track record. It makes claims that can't be confirmed from the current state of the art, and there's no compelling data to justify the extrapolated conclusions proffered. All things considered, this proposal doesn't look substantially different from one that might come from a complete crackpot." The funding person could then reject the proposal with high confidence. This process leaves such would-be revolutionaries on their own. All Things Are Rejected.

Just being a bit of a devil's advocate here, but I don't quite see it the way you do. If he is right and the speed of light isn't a constant doesn't that throw off all of our calculations about the age of the earth? Maybe it is only 6000 years old.

jar writes:Not at all. If the speed of light is faster then the universe is even bigger than we now think.

my question is--how do you detect the speed of light coming from other stars?