John Moffat (physicist)

Infobox Scientist
name = John Moffat

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image_width = 220px
caption = Moffat in 2007
birth_date = 1932
birth_place = Copenhagen, Denmark
death_date =
death_place =
residence = Denmark, United Kingdom, Canada
citizenship =
ethnicity =
field = Physics
work_institutions = University of Toronto
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo
alma_mater = Trinity College, Cambridge
doctoral_advisor = Fred Hoyle and Abdus Salam
known_for = Gravitation
Quantum field theory
Variable speed of light
prizes =

John Moffat is a Professor Emeritus in physics at the University of Toronto.He is also an adjunct Professor in physics at the University of Waterloo and a resident affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is best known for his work on Nonsymmetric Gravitational Theory. He also proposed a Variable speed of light approach to cosmological problems, which posits that the speed of light may have been much faster in early moments of the Big Bang. In addition, he has recently published papers on inhomogeneous cosmological models that purport to explain certain anomalous effects in the CMB data and account for the observed acceleration of the expansion of the universe.

An unusual start to a physics career

John Moffat started out his professional life as a struggling artist but this came to an end after living for a time in Paris with no income. Upon returning to Copenhagen, Denmark, he became interested in the cosmos so started teaching himself mathematics and physics. He made such quick progress that within a year he began working on problems of general relativity and unified field theory.

"When I was about 20, I wrote a letter to Albert Einstein telling him that I was working on one of his theories. In 1953 Einstein sent me a reply, from Princeton, New Jersey, but it was written in German. So I ran down to my barber shop (in Copenhagen) to have my barber translate it for me. Through that summer and fall, we exchanged about a half dozen letters. The local press picked up on these stories which then caught the attention of physicist Niels Bohr and others. Suddenly doors of opportunity were swinging open for me". (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, 2005)

In 1958, he became the only Trinity College, Cambridge student to be awarded a Ph.D. without a first degree. (He was supervised by Fred Hoyle and Abdus Salam)

"Dear Professor . . . I would be eternally indebted if you could find time to read my work," he began.
“Most honorable Mr. Moffat: Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open, and we try hard to discuss what is inside and what is not.” Einstein replied.

During a career that spans over five decades, Moffat worked on a variety of subjects in Theoretical Physics. These include particle physics, quantum field theory, quantum gravity and cosmology.

Variable Speed of Light

In the early 1990s Moffat proposed a radical alternative theory: that the speed of light was as much as 30 orders of magnitude faster than its present value just following the big bang. He published a paper on the variable speed of light theory in the early 1990s but his work was essentially ignored. A few years later, João Magueijo, based at Imperial College in London, and his collaborator, Andrew Albrecht of the University of California at Davis, published a paper with a similar idea. Their paper made it into the more prestigious journal, Physical Review D, which had rejected Moffat's paper years earlier. When Moffat saw this, he was upset and contacted Magueijo. But after Magueijo realized what had happened, he was quick to give Moffat due credit for having first proposed the idea. In fact, Moffat and Magueijo became friends, and Magueijo even devoted a whole chapter to Moffat in his 2002 book titled “Faster Than the Speed of Light”. After that, the number of physicists citing Moffat's work in academic journals increased significantly. Recently, Moffat and Maguieijo published a joint paper on this topic.

Non-local Quantum Field Theory

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 unification theory of the electromagnetic and weak nuclear interactions.

Moffat's theory is a quantum field theory with a non-local term in the field Lagrangian. Despite the non-local term the theory does not violate causality. The theory is finite to all orders, requiring no renormalization, and it provides a mechanism to give mass to elementary particles without having to postulate the Higgs boson. The theory's predictions may soon be verified or falsified by results from the Large Hadron Collider.

Modified Gravity Theory

Continuing the program initiated by Einstein in search of 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 he proposed 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 the rotation curves of galaxies and the mass profiles of X-ray galaxy clusters without dark matter.

ee also

*Nonsymmetric gravitational theory
*Variable speed of light
*Scalar-tensor-vector gravity

References

* Moffat, John; "Finite nonlocal gauge field theory" [http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v41/i4/p1177_1]
* Moffat, John; "Superluminary Universe: A Possible Solution to the Initial Value Problem in Cosmology" [http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9211020]
* Moffat, John; "Nonsymmetric Gravitational Theory" [http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9411006]

External links

* [http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bin/19991025g.asp Press release on Moffat from 1999]
* [http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bin4/030224d.asp Press release on Moffat from 2003]
* [http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/index.phpindex.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=30&Itemid=7&view_directory=1&pi=1027 Press release on Moffat from 2007]