John W. Moffat (born 24 May 1932) is a Danish-born
British-Canadian physicist.
He is currently Professor Emeritus in physics
at the University of Toronto and is also an
adjunct Professor in physics at the University
of Waterloo and a resident affiliate member
of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical
Physics.
Moffat is best known for his work on gravity
and cosmology, culminating in his nonsymmetric
gravitational theory and scalar–tensor–vector
gravity (now called MOG), and summarized in
his 2008 book for general readers, Reinventing
Gravity.
His theory explains galactic rotation curves
without invoking dark matter.
He proposes a variable speed of light approach
to cosmological problems.
The speed of light c may have been more than
30 orders of magnitude higher during the early
moments of the Big Bang.
His recent work on inhomogeneous cosmological
models purports to explain certain anomalous
effects in the CMB data, and to account for
the recently discovered acceleration of the
expansion of the universe.
Moffat has proposed a new nonlocal variant
of quantum field theory, that is finite at
all orders and hence dispenses with renormalization.
It also generates mass without a Higgs mechanism.
== Early life and education ==
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.
=== Interest in physics ===
As a teenager, Moffat quit school at 16 to
become an artist.
He gave up after living for a time in Paris
with no income.
Upon returning to Copenhagen, he became interested
in the cosmos and began teaching himself mathematics
and physics.
The University of Copenhagen allowed anyone
to check out books from its libraries, and
he made such quick progress that within a
year he began working on problems of general
relativity and unified field theory.
When Moffat was about 20 years old, he wrote
a letter to Albert Einstein, informing the
great physicist that he was working on one
of his theories.
"Dear Professor . . . I would be eternally
indebted if you could find time to read my
work," he began.
"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)
Einstein's initial reply:
"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.
Moffat's correspondence with Einstein and
meeting with Bohr drew the attention of officials
at the British consulate in Copenhagen, and
he was invited to study at Cambridge.
In 1958, he was awarded a Ph.D. without a
first degree at Trinity College, Cambridge.
He was supervised by Fred Hoyle and Abdus
Salam.
== Variable speed of light: theory and controversy
==
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.
He published his "variable speed of light"
(VSL) theory in two places—on the Los Alamos
National Laboratory's (LANL) online archive,
Nov. 16, 1992, and in a 1993 edition of International
Journal of Modern Physics D.The scientific
community mostly ignored VSL theory 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.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 Andrew
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.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.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, Publisher's Weekly,
Seed Magazine and the Christian Science Monitor.
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.
Moffat expressed displeasure about the re-emergent
omissions, urging reporters to check their
facts, but to no avail.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.
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."Months later,
as other reports picked up on the reignited
dispute, Magueijo reiterated Moffat's primacy
in VSL theory.
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."The two physicists became
friends, publishing a joint paper in 2007
in the journal General Relativity and Gravitation.
== Modified gravity theory ==
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 and the mass profiles of X-ray
galaxy clusters.
== 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 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.
It also leads to a finite quantum gravity
theory.
== Publications ==
=== 
Books ===
Reinventing Gravity.
HarperCollins.
2008.
ISBN 0-06-117088-7.
Einstein Wrote Back.
Thomas Allen Publishers.
2010.
ISBN 978-0-88762-615-9.
Cracking the Particle Code of the Universe:
The Hunt for the Higgs Boson.
Oxford University Press.
2014.
ISBN 978-0-19-991552-1.
=== Selected articles ===
(1990) "Finite nonlocal gauge field theory,"
Phys.
Rev. D 41: 1177-1184.
(1993) "Superluminary Universe: A Possible
Solution to the Initial Value Problem in Cosmology,"
Int.
Jour.
Mod.
Phys.
D2: 351-366.
(1995) "Nonsymmetric Gravitational Theory,"
Phys.
Lett.
B 355: 447-452.
(2006) "Scalar-Tensor-Vector Gravity Theory,"
JCAP 0603: 004.
== See also ==
Nonsymmetric gravitational theory
Variable speed of light
Scalar-tensor-vector gravity
