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http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/030526/26beyond.htm
"Even if Joao Magueijo had not advocated castrating an editor at a
prestigious science journal, and even if he hadn't suggested that
rival physicists, ostensibly brilliant like Magueijo, were just
posers--in short, even if Magueijo were a less colorful rebel, his
ideas would have attracted attention. After all, he is taking on
Einstein, and ever since we placed Einstein on a pedestal, we have
been titillated by the idea of knocking him off. Magazine editors know
that putting the antic-haired genius on the cover, perhaps over the
words Faster Than the Speed of Light --the somewhat misleading title
of Magueijo's recent book--all but guarantees sales. And yet Magueijo,
a physicist at Imperial College, London, is for real, and he is not
alone. As we near the end of our first century in a relative universe,
challenges to Einstein's theory are in the air. They are respectful
challenges; even Magueijo isn't proposing to throw relativity out the
window, any more than Einstein junked Newton. "We get E-mail and
letters all the time from amateurs who think they have found a mistake
in Einstein's theory," says Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter
Institute in Waterloo, Ontario. "That's not what is going on here." If
relativity is wrong, it is wrong by such tiny amounts or in such
particular circumstances that you have to go to great lengths to find
the error......They may have to bend his best-known principle: the one
that says the speed of light is an absolute, always and everywhere the
same, and faster than anything else.....Second, he said that c, the
speed of light, will appear exactly the same to every observer, in
every frame of reference. A century later, that second postulate still
defies common sense. It says that if you're driving down the highway
at a quarter the speed of light, you'll still see the photons from
your headlights racing ahead of you at light speed--not three-quarters
light speed. If I'm coming from the opposite direction at half light
speed, I'll still see your photons approaching at c--not 1.5 times
c......It might be a relief to learn that physicists were talking
about chucking this deeply strange theory. But just as Einstein made
only minute corrections to Newton in everyday life--to really feel the
effects of special relativity, you have to move at a large fraction of
light speed--the proposed changes to relativity would have only
subtle, hard-to-detect effects. Yet the stakes are big......Physicists
are taking many paths to this "quantum gravity" grail, but in all of
them spacetime itself, instead of being continuous, is made of quantum
bits.....That minimum length comes at a cost, however: The speed of
light would no longer be a constant."

Pentcho Valev
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