João Magueijo

João Magueijo
Born	1967 Évora, Portugal
Citizenship	Portuguese
Fields	Physicist
Institutions	Imperial College
Alma mater	University of Lisbon, Cambridge University
Doctoral students	Carlo Contaldi, Rachel Bean, Kate Land

João Magueijo at the journée de la Science at the EPFL, 11 November 2005.

João Magueijo (born Évora, 1967) is a Portuguese cosmologist and professor in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London. He is a pioneer of the varying speed of light (VSL) theory.

Career

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 has been a faculty member at Princeton and Cambridge, and is currently a professor at Imperial College London where he teaches undergraduates "General Relativity" and postgraduates "Advanced General Relativity".

In 1998, Magueijo teamed with Andreas Albrecht to work on 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. This would explain the horizon problem (since distant regions of the expanding universe would have had time to interact and homogenize their properties), and is presented as an alternative to the more mainstream theory of cosmic inflation.

Magueijo discusses his personal struggles pursuing VSL in his 2003 book, Faster Than The Speed of Light, The Story of a Scientific Speculation. He was also the host of the Science Channel special, João Magueijo's Big Bang, which premiered on May 13, 2008.

In 2009, he published A Brilliant Darkness, an account of the life and science of vanished physicist Ettore Majorana.

Axis of Evil

The term 'Axis of Evil' has become associated with João Magueijo. Professor Speransky of Lomonosov State University in Moscow states:

It is he who first found out that the 'cold' and 'warm' areas of the metagalaxy happened to be lying in the sky in a somewhat organized way. A computer simulation proved that the above distribution of fluctuations could occur only in case of a considerably smaller-sized universe.

See also

• Doubly special relativity

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
• J Magueijo. A Brilliant Darkness. New York City, Basic Books. 2009. ISBN 978-0-465-00903-9

External links

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