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Einstein May Have Been Wrong! - 26 March, 2003

Albert Einstein was a normal human and did perhaps make a few mistakes. Today, some physicists are becoming increasingly skeptical about Einstein’s theories of relativity and light. Joao Magueijo of London University, England, has formulated a theory that states that at times in the past, the speed of light may have been different. This theory, he believes, may solve some the mysteries that have been plaguing physicists for years. Joao Magueijo began formulating his theory when he noticed that the theory of inflation, which states that the universe expanded from a subatomic particle to something with the diameter of a grapefruit in less than a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, had some serious flaws to it. It seemed to him unlikely that this could have occurred; this theory also depends on strange particles and fields that have never been detected. Cosmologists today state that it is because of inflation that the universe looks the same from virtually any view in the sky; everywhere you look, it is uniform. Magueijo at first began to work on cosmic strings, trying to look for a non-inflationary explanation for the uniformity, but could not find one. The theory of a varying speed of light seemed appealing to Joao Magueijo, because if light had traveled more quickly in the primordial universe, it would explain that gravity and heat, which travel at the speed of light, could interact with the opposite sides of the cosmos, balancing everything out and creating an unvarying view. In other words, if light, gravity and heat all traveled much more quickly in the beginning of time, than inflation would not be needed to explain the universe’s appearance because these three elements would accomplish the same task that inflation would. This theory, however, contradicts Einstein’s constant speed of light, and this is the problem Magueijo is facing today. Joao Magueijo is receiving a lot of criticism for his work, but more and more physicists are becoming interested in his studies. Perhaps in a few years, when more facts have been gathered, something new may come out of all of this.