Magueijo eventually fled the claustrophobic campus. He won a prestigious Royal Society Fellowship and moved to Imperial College in London, eventually earning tenure. He’s published numerous papers in scientific journals on the cosmic microwave radiation left over from the big bang–a perfectly respectable scientific topic. But what really gets Magueijo going is a pet theory he dreamed up one day while he was hanging out with some of those very same upper-class English twits he knew at–of all places–Cambridge.
Magueijo, a youthful 35-year-old with an antiauthoritarian streak, turns out to have had more in common with Cambridge eccentrics than he first thought. His theory questions the whole premise that the speed of light, the fastest thing in the universe, has always and everywhere been the same. That the speed of light is immutably constant is the bedrock assumption of present-day physics–it was, after all, Albert Einstein’s starting point when he brainstormed his way out of the Swiss Patent Office. Magueijo is proposing that light in the early universe, shortly after the big bang, was for a time faster–a lot faster–than it is now. The notion may very well prove to be wrong–at the moment, the smart money in science gives it pretty long odds. But if it turns out to be right, it will rock the world of physics. And the social environment at Cambridge–warped as it may be by vestiges of the English class system; marginalized, perhaps, by the American scientific juggernaut–will have played a pivotal role.
After that first difficult year, Magueijo began to realize that the hierarchy of English university life, in which college fellows dine on tables physically raised above the students’, came along with a tolerance for individual differences. “The overall feeling is of a benign madhouse,” he writes in “Faster Than the Speed of Light,” a memoir published last month. “You feel that you have not earned your place unless you come up with at least one crazy idea in total disagreement with everything else proposed before.”
It helped that Cambridge professors had planted themselves resolutely apart from the mainstream of cosmology–which is to say, the American mainstream. Throughout the 1990s, the Americans were riding high on the work of Alan Guth, a cosmologist from MIT. They were trying to explain why the early universe seemed to be homogenous–why everything everywhere attained about the same temperature and was distributed uniformly. Guth’s idea was that shortly after the big bang, the universe expanded very rapidly before slowing down to its present stately rate of growth. Happily, this early, rapid expansion preserved homogeneity. Scientists–in the United States at least–jumped on the “inflation theory” bandwagon.
In Cambridge, however, professors were skeptical. “I began to suspect that the Brits didn’t like inflation because their younger cousins across the pond had come up with it,” writes Magueijo. It didn’t seem fair to criticize the American theory without offering an alternative. He began to consider what such an alternative might be. One gray, damp winter morning in 1996, it came to him: if light traveled faster in the early universe, you wouldn’t need inflation at all. Superfast light would have raced around the universe, heating up the cool parts and cooling down the hot parts, making sure all was smooth and homogenous.
It took Magueijo years, and the help of several colleagues in the United States, Australia and Britain, to hammer out the superfast-light theory. They are hammering still, spinning out the implications and looking for a way to test it experimentally. The lack of evidence, of course, isn’t yet worrying. In cosmology, a theory first has to run a gantlet of mathematical and physical preconditions to be considered worthy of confirmation by experiment or observation. The inflation crowd has a decade on Magueijo, and they’re still building their case.
Magueijo thinks that high-energy cosmic rays, which from time to time shoot through the atmosphere from billions of light years away, may hold some clues that would either confirm or deny his theory. If so, evidence could be forthcoming in a few years. It would be subtle. But it would change the way scientists view not only the birth of the universe, but also some of the very laws of physics they’ve taken for granted for 100 years. Even if Magueijo doesn’t beat the odds, he will have reaffirmed that there’s a place in science for irrational pride and bloody-minded stubbornness.
