John Moffat (physicist)

Kawarthas Landscape by John Moffat

Moffat was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, the son of a Scottish father, George Moffat, and Danish mother, Esther (née Winther). His father, a musician from Glasgow, was performing in a night club in Copenhagen when he met Esther, a dancer. They married three weeks later.

In 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, John's father moved the family to London, correctly predicting that Denmark would be invaded by Germany. In later 1939, during the Blitz, the 7-year-old John was evacuated to Glasgow to live with his grandparents. But he failed to thrive in Glasgow, struggling academically, so after a year he returned to his parents, and all three moved to Bristol, where his father got a job searching ships for German spies.

In Bristol, they lived close to the factory that manufactured the Bristol F2 Fighters. Air raids were frequent as the Battle of Britain intensified in 1940. One day, they went to the boardwalk at Weston-super-Mare to escape the raids in Bristol, only to have German planes appear overhead. As Moffat recalled in his memoir, Einstein Wrote Back:

"I heard the shriek of the whistling bombs as they fell, and then the hollow booms as they detonated deep inside the mud of the beach... The blast blew my parents and me across the road adjacent to the boardwalk. I landed in a garden on my back, opened my eyes and stared at the blue sky, and there was a loud ringing in my ears. The blood was pouring out of my nose, and I felt a terrible tightness and pain in my chest... In a daze, I got up, and soon discovered my parents in the same garden, on all fours, attempting to stand up, also suffering from nosebleeds and chest pains."

The trauma from the bombing and the air-raids stayed with him for a lifetime, Moffat wrote:

"At the time, I was somehow able to suppress the horror of our experiences during the war, and carry on day by day. However, about a year after the bombings in Bristol and Weston-super-Mare, I began suffering from what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. I began getting severe nightmares and panic attacks. Even today I still occasionally experience panic attacks, generally when I am visiting Europe."

When John was 7 or 8, his father took him to a psychiatrist in London because he insisted on reading sentences and clocks backward. The psychiatrist told his father that he was a genius. John, overhearing, did not think the word meant much for his future.

After the war, the family moved back to Denmark, where John's father started an import-export business. He contracted tuberculosis from one of his employees and became seriously ill for a year, and the family struggled to get by.

In 1992, John Moffat proposed that the speed of light was much larger in the early universe, in which the speed of light had a value of more than 10³⁰ km/s.[2] He published his "variable speed of light" (VSL) theory in two places—on the Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL) online archive, 16 Nov. 1992,[4] and in a 1993 edition of International Journal of Modern Physics D.[5][6]

The scientific community mostly ignored VSL theory[5] until in 2001, University of New South Wales astronomer John Webb and peers detected experimental evidence from telescopic observations that the cosmological fine-structure constant—which contains the speed of light—may have been different than its present value in the very early Universe.[7]

The observations supported Moffat's VSL theory—and started a race for primacy that began in 1998.

That year, five years after Moffat had published his VSL papers, João Magueijo of Imperial College in London, and collaborators Andreas Albrecht of the University of California at Davis and John D. Barrow of Cambridge University, published a strikingly similar idea in the more prestigious journal, Physical Review D, which had rejected Moffat's paper years earlier.[2]

Informed of the omission, Magueijo credited Moffat with an entire chapter in Magueijo's 2002 book, Faster Than the Speed of Light: The story of a scientific speculation.[2][8]

The controversy reignited, however, when during a worldwide publicity tour for Magueijo's book, the author neither credited Moffat nor corrected numerous erroneous press accounts—in such magazines as Discover,[9] Publishers Weekly,[10] Seed Magazine and the Christian Science Monitor.[11] In efforts to portray Magueijo as a "brash, young scientific upstart," dozens of publications attributed VSL theory entirely to Magueijo and his co-authors, leaving Moffat—in his late sixties by this time—out.[5][6] Moffat expressed displeasure about the re-emergent omissions, urging reporters to check their facts, but to no avail.[5][6]

Stories emerged about the book tour media omissions in March and July 2003, written by a science journalist, Michael Martin, who had earlier attributed VSL theory to Moffat in a 2001 UPI article about Webb's astronomical discoveries.[12] Discover Magazine writer Tim Folger acknowledged the omissions in his story and apologized. In response to a reader letter from Henry van Driel of the University of Toronto Department of Physics, Folger wrote, "Professor van Driel is absolutely right—John Moffat did develop a varying speed of light theory several years before João Magueijo, and I regret not including that information in my story."[13]

Months later, as other reports picked up on the reignited dispute,[14] Magueijo reiterated Moffat's primacy in VSL theory.[5][6] In September 2004, Discover Magazine's Tim Folger followed through on a promise he had made during the controversy to "write a story about John Moffat."[15]

The two physicists became friends, publishing a joint paper in 2007 in the journal General Relativity and Gravitation.[16]

Continuing Einstein's search for a unified field theory, Moffat proposed a nonsymmetric gravitational theory that, like Einstein's unified field, incorporated a symmetric field (gravity) and an antisymmetric field. Unlike Einstein, however, Moffat made no attempt to identify the latter with electromagnetism, instead proposing that the antisymmetric component is another manifestation of gravity. As investigation progressed, the theory evolved in a variety of ways; most notably, Moffat postulated that the antisymmetric field may be massive.

The current version of his modified gravity (MOG) theory, which grew out of this investigation, modifies Einstein's gravity with the addition of a vector field, while also promoting the constants of the theory to scalar fields. The combined effect of these fields modifies the strength of gravity at large distances when large masses are involved, successfully accounting for a range of astronomical and cosmological observations. The resulting theory describes well, without invoking dark matter, the rotation curves of galaxies[17] and the mass profiles of X-ray galaxy clusters.[18]

In 1990, Moffat proposed a finite, non-local quantum field theory. The theory was developed extensively by Evens, Moffat, Kleppe and Woodard in 1991. In subsequent work, Moffat proposed this theory as an alternative to the standard electroweak unification of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear interactions. Moffat's theory is a quantum field theory with a non-local term in the field Lagrangian. The theory is gauge invariant and it is finite to all orders of perturbation theory. For the standard model it can solve the Higgs boson mass hierarchy naturalness problem.[19] It also leads to a finite quantum gravity theory.

• List of University of Waterloo people
• Nonsymmetric gravitational theory
• Variable speed of light
• Scalar–tensor–vector gravity

Wikiquote has quotations related to John Moffat (physicist).

• Personal Website

University of Toronto press releases re Moffat:

• 1999
• 2003
• 2007
• Review of Reinventing Gravity at Amazon.com.
• John Moffat at the Mathematics Genealogy Project