'Faster Than the Speed of Light'

I enjoyed reading this book by one of the inventors of VSL (Variable Speed of Light) Theory. The author, João Magueijo, has tossed in much amusing commentary on his time in England, the U.S.A., Portugal and Australia while developing the theory in the late 1990s and early part of this milennium as well as the effort to get in published. The idea that the speed of light might change is a somewhat heretical notion to the traditional physics community since Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity became the standard model.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%A3o_Magueijo

VSL theory as presented is available in many models and colors, yet they seem to have the speed of light being different in just the first 10 the the 43rd power of the time of the existence of the expansion of the Universe (a small fraction of a second). Light could have had a different, faster speed then in relation to space because it may have traveled a straighter course through the dimensions of space, so actually it wasn't the speed of light that changed but the distance light needed to travel through space.

With the speed of light being faster in the first fraction of time it isn't necessary to have a mysterious inflaton to balance the size and horizon problems of the history of the Universe, and the values of conservation of energy constants changes too.

All massless particles travel at the same speed of light. Mass is a resting condition of energy evidently and time occurs just to things with mass as they wait possibly forever to get up to speed.

João Magueijo brings many fascinating ideas about gravity and cosmology within an amusing and constructive form. Modified Gravity theory and VSL have the same grounding in the Plank era (and even another physicist John Moffat discovered his own VSL and Modified Gravity theories as early as 1994-different approaches than João Magueijo's yet worthwhile-the two ended up sharing some ideas and work) and are capable of describing the accelerating expansion of space.

While VSL may not be the final description of the cosmological structure of the Universe its approach helpfully provides another way to regard the constants of nature as variables in order to further investigation their origin and relation to materially evident data observed by astrophysicists.

It is a reminder that the observable Universe is just a small area of an immensely larger area that grew greatly in size perhaps 13.7 billion years ago. The Universe is not just 45 billion light years in size-it may be trillions of light years in size, and the the expansion of that all just one cycle of a waveform of uncertain nature. I would personally find that consistent with God's infinite and eternal, nature.