João Magueijo

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

João Magueijo at the journée de la Science at the EPFL, on the 11th of November 2005

João Magueijo is a cosmologist and professor in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London.

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.

[edit] Biography

He was born in 1967 in Évora, Portugal. He undertook graduate work and Ph.D. at Cambridge. He was awarded a research fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge, the same fellowship previously held by Paul Dirac and Abdus Salam.

[edit] 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/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0112/0112090v2.pdf