I finished reading Joao Magueijo's steamy piece of science-porn, FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT. The first half is fairly straight, describing in a colloquial and sometimes cutesy manner how relativity works. That's part 1. Then you get to part 2, which is his highly personal (TOO personal!) account of how he and some of his colleagues in England and elsewhere put together what could be (or could have been?) a revolutionary theory about the origin of the Universe. What if, in the very earliest mini-moments of our Universe, light had gone far faster than it does now? The reason they came up with this possibility is that according to some cosmologists, the pattern formed in the nascent universe, which eventually developed into the patterns of galaxies we now see through our telescopes and mapping satellites, could not have been imprinted into the whole thing by light going at "ordinary" speed. Information, or patterns, can travel at most at the speed of light, but in this model there just was too much universe for it to cover, even in the earliest subseconds. Therefore light must have been faster at the moment of initiation, in order to make things look the way they look now; it would have only settled down to the "conventional" speed once matter had condensed and things "froze" into what would evolve into our universe as we perceive it.

From there Magueijo and his collaborators figure out lots of different ramifications of this theory, and attempt to get it published, or at least heard by the mainstream scientific community. Naturally, the mainstream doesn't want to hear about it, or brings up objections which enrage Magueijo and send him off into splenetic and profane rants about the prejudice and incompetence of older scientists and the scientific "establishment." This is great stuff to read, as long as I'm not involved in the process; it's like reading the stories of composers and music critics and conductors, all at odds with each other. Sometimes it's funny, but more often, there's a lot of bitterness to it.

Magueijo, in telling the story of how the "variable speed of light" theory came about, is refreshingly honest about the struggles, setbacks, confusion, and blundering about that happens when theoretical physics is done. He doesn't portray it with the smooth triumphalism that you find in some of the other books. His experience of science is pervaded with high emotion: frustration and despair when things are not working out right, and elation and euphoria when they do. Many of us science consumers still have that old media-fed notion that scientists take everything in life with pure dispassionate unemotional analysis. Instead, Magueijo recounts (on page 217) Saint Einstein taking a violent tantrum when one of his papers was rejected by an important physics journal.

Magueijo is at his best when talking about these personal aspects of science. His portraits of people he works with are vivid, especially that of John Moffat, who actually had the variable speed of light idea before Magueijo did. Moffat is particularly interesting to me because according to Magueijo, John Moffat started out as a professional artist, and switched to physics in mid-career! So there is at least one physicist on this planet who was originally an artist! Other fascinating folk include physicist John Barrow, author of the excellent and fact-packed book THE ARTFUL UNIVERSE (Oxford, 1995). Magueijo even devotes some pages to Lee Smolin, the quantum gravity expert whom you have met before in this journal, at the Perimeter Institute near Ottawa, Canada.

But there are some unpleasant aspects to this book, as well. The main problem is Magueijo's attitude, which pervades the book, sometimes to the point of obnoxiousness. Perhaps this is a standard attitude for young male physicists full of the juice to buck the establishment, and only M. has the openness to show it. But this also results in cranky comments and plenty of profanity and vulgar language which will offend more sensitive readers. With this writing and attitude, I wonder whether anyone in the field will take him seriously in the future.

The most disheartening thing for me about this book is that it still portrays the world of physics as an almost exclusively male world. This is not the 1930s, it's the late 20th and early 21st century, and even now Magueijo moves in a world as male as a Masonic lodge. True, he spends some time talking about his girlfriend Kim, who was also a physicist, but after experiences of harassment and prejudice she drops out of high-level research altogether and settles for a job teaching physics in a girls' high school. Her photo appears in the book; she's wearing a low-cut tight shirt showing lots of cleavage. The male physicists pictured in the book are just modest faces. Even when M. is supposedly lamenting the problems of women in physics, he's totally immersed in the "laddie" atmosphere that continues to pervade that world, where men meet to talk physics, in rough language, late into the night in bars and clubs and gentlemen's hangouts. At one point (page 236), describing the ideological battles between different schools of thought, he calls a (presumably) female string theorist a "stringy little bitch" for making a snarky comment. What does that make snarky Joao?

Ultimately, this whole variable speed of light theory is vaporware unless it can be proven by some form of experiment or observation, and Magueijo is again honest enough to admit this. So far, neither string theory, quantum gravity, variable speed of light, multiple universes, or any other of these trendy wild ideas in physics has yet attained any definite experimental proof. So Magueijo and his boys are still playing with ideas which sound real cool but are at least for now, architecture in the clouds.

I must admit, that while reading some of this book I was filled with intense emotion. Granted that I did my reading at around 4 AM when even a night creature like me is not at my best, but even so I was overcome with yearning and jealousy, longing to somehow be part of that world (I wanna be a SUPERMODEL!) talking physics with them on their level, sharing their macho-intellectual collaborations and combat (I wanna be a FIGHTER PILOT!) and their science and travel adventures, and filling blackboards and bar napkins with arcane mathematical graffiti (I wanna be a SECRET AGENT!). Here I am, reading about cosmological commandos when I am still dragging my way through high school trigonometry. Twenty years to go, eh? And by that time, the universe might well have ended! I think it's time for me to read something else than science porn. Maybe Harry Potter.

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