Science cops an attitude

Duane Davis, Special To The News

Friday, February 14, 2003

Any writer who has the nerve to begin his book with the sentence "I am by profession a theoretical physicist" is clearly someone who courts danger, the risk being that 99.9 percent of readers will doze off before the end of the first page. Joao Magueijo, Portuguese by birth, physicist and lecturer at prestigious Imperial College in London, accepts this challenge with a pugnacious brio that's by turns engaging and puzzling, fascinating and irritating.

It's possible I should have foreseen this turn in science writing, from lucid neutrality to Gen-X aggressiveness, in 1999 when Stephen Hawking guest-starred on an episode of The Simpsons. It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before we saw an effort at popularizing science that pushed the envelope not just of theory but of attitude. And thus we come to Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation, a book that reads, at times, as if it were Jackass Physics: The X-treme Theory of Light.

Missing for the most part from these pages is the calm, urbane, evenhanded prose of Hawking's careful explanations of how our universe operates in a work like A Brief History of Time. Nor is Magueijo in any way to be confused with our most recent cultural image of scientific genius, the tortured yet sensitive John Nash as portrayed in the film and book A Beautiful Mind.

Magueijo is breezy, rude, brash and alarmingly frank, in the manner of someone you meet over pitchers of beer and with whom you're soon spilling not only Bud down your shoes but also your guts in late-night revelations sure to embarrass everyone the next day. Only this is a new generation, and no one, it seems, is ever embarrassed.

Throughout the book, Magueijo tries valiantly to give the feel of a contact sport to the everday humdrum of workaday science. He writes of a conference organizer trying to set up controversy because he "wanted to see blood on the floor." He's scornful of his elders in the science game, noting, "As a rule of thumb, one should always assume that such people are senile." These relics of the "intellectual scrap yard" add insult to injury by actually requiring the youngsters to jump through hoops and justify their expenditures by filling out endless grant proposals (which Ma- gueijo refers to as "old- fart certificates") or even, horror of horrors, forcing the free-spirited lads to submit to the degradation of actually having to document for a whole week what they're doing. Ever the rebel, Our Hero snickers here in a footnote, "I included a very graphic description of all my trips to the toilet."

Well, boys will be boys, whether clad in short pants and armed with sticks or wearing lab coats and wielding slide rules.

In between all-night gripe sessions in London pubs and all- night rave dances in Goa, Magueijo does work in a fair amount of theoretical physics for the reader. Most of us will breathe a sigh of relief when we discover that there's little in the way of math in the book (and there will be none at all in this review, this writer being one who prefers science to be followed by fiction).

Without getting into the more recondite difficulties of, say, magnetic monopoles, loop quantum gravity or Planck energy, Magueijo's "scientific speculation" of the title has to do with two basic problems that result from accepting the idea of a big bang as the beginning of our universe, an idea commonly agreed on in the scientific community.

Because of the speed at which the original primordial mass of the big bang expanded in the first milliseconds of its existence, scientists cannot easily account for how consistent the matter and energy of the universe is now, 15 billion years later.

In addition, calculations indicate that a big bang would probably lead to anything but the stability we seem to have in the universe - which is neither collapsing in on itself nor evaporating into nothingness.

Magueijo's solution to these basic problems is to postulate a varying speed of light, a notion that flies in the face of Einstein's special theory of relativity, the cornerstone of modern physics. How this works, I'll have to defer to the book. Magueijo mentions working some of this out in a 30-page calculation - if this is a bit of nerd scientist bragging, I will readily stipulate that his calculation is longer than mine!

In sum, this is not a book to every taste. It's an odd combination of Weird Science and petulant self-centeredness; intelligent, finely drawn scientific speculation and a sophomoric desire to shock - one chapter is titled "God on Amphetamines," and near the end of the book he writes, "I like to picture God wetting his (or her!) pants in hysterical laughter while contemplating all the crap we have come up with as theories of quantum gravity."

This obviously goes a bit further than being simply Hawking with four-letter words. Magueijo's home page on the Web features a graphic of a glass of beer emptying and filling over and over as well as a play on words with lecturer and letcher.

My own preference would be for him to leave the pranks on the Web and try for a little more class on the written page.

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.