João Magueijo

João Magueijo (born Évora, 1967) is a Portuguese cosmologist and professor in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London. João Magueijo studied physics at the University of Lisbon. He undertook graduate work and Ph.D. at Cambridge University. He was awarded a research fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge, the same fellowship previously held by Paul Dirac and Abdus Salam. He is a pioneer of the varying speed of light (VSL) theory of cosmology, which proposes that the speed of light was much higher in the early universe, of 60 orders of magnitude faster than its present value. It is presented as an alternative to the more mainstream theory of cosmic inflation. The model was first proposed by John Moffat, a Canadian scientist, in 1992.

Magueijo discusses his personal struggles pursuing VSL in his 2003 book, Faster Than The Speed of Light, The Story of a Scientific Speculation.

Magueijo is the host of the Science Channel series, João Magueijo's Big Bang, which premiered on May 13, 2008.

References

• Magueijo, João; Faster Than The Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation. Basic Books. ISBN 0-7382-0525-7.
• Albrecht and Magueijo; "A time varying speed of light as a solution to cosmological puzzles" http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9811018
• Magueijo and Smolin; "Lorentz invariance with an invariant energy scale" http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0112090v2
• Magueijo, João, "New varying speed of light theories", Reports on the Progress of Physics, 66 (2003) 2025 (abstract: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0305457 ) -- Good readable review of VSL theories

External links

• João Magueijo's Big Bang on the Science Channel
• New theory on light weighs heavily on scientists on The Christian Science Monitor