John W. Moffat (born 24 May 1932) is a Danish-born Canadian physicist. He is currently professor emeritus of physics at the University of Toronto and is also an adjunct professor of 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 15 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 F.2 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 PhD without a first degree at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was supervised by Fred Hoyle and Abdus Salam.
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