Канадалық физик Джон У. Моффаттың ғылыми еңбектері

Canadian physicist
the Canadian physicist

John W. Moffat (born 24 May 1932) is a 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.

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. According to Moffat the resulting theory describes well, without invoking dark matter, the rotation curves of galaxies and the mass profiles of X ray galaxy clusters.

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. According to Moffat, for the standard model it can solve the Higgs boson mass hierarchy naturalness problem, and leads to a finite quantum gravity theory.

(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.