What made you into a rebel?

Perhaps it was growing up in post-revolution Portugal. What happened after the 1974 revolution in Portugal was anarchy. I know it was labelled as communism, but it was complete anarchy.

And that informed your approach to science?

I think so. I was expelled from school, I was expelled from catechism, I got into trouble in the army, it was just a mess everywhere. Then I was in a Trotskyist group...

...and then you decided to overthrow Einstein?

I have a huge respect for the man: he's my hero. When I was eleven, my dad gave me a fascinating book by Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld. Infeld was a Polish scientist who worked with Einstein on various important problems in the 1930s. Einstein began to act as his mentor. When it became obvious that the Germans would invade Poland, naturally Einstein took it upon himself to try to save his friend. But by the late 1930s he had supported the immigration of so many Jewish families that his affidavits were essentially worthless in the eyes of the US authorities; they ignored his pleas on behalf of Infeld. Einstein tried to find him a professorship at a US university, but that failed too. Infeld's prospects looked very grim indeed. Out of desperation, Einstein hit upon the idea of writing a popular science book with Infeld. This was The Evolution of Physics - the book that many years later, with its unique beauty, would seduce me into becoming a physicist - written in great haste in just a couple of months to become a huge sensation, making Infeld suddenly desirable to the US authorities. Without this success, Infeld would most likely have gone up in smoke in some Nazi hell.

OK, so you have a huge respect for Einstein's earlier work, but you're not so keen on his later work?

You're right. His view that mathematical beauty is important is responsible for all the string theory crap about "elegant" theories. Einstein wasn't like that when he was young. And, anyway, string theory is one of the least elegant things on Earth. Those theorists are just banking on a huge inferiority complex by saying it's been blessed by God or something. I don't give a toss about elegance. You start with an experimental motivation, do something interesting, then you make a prediction that can be tested. That's fine. This elegance thing is total self-indulgence.

To do anything significant in science you have to follow your gut instincts. Is that what you believe?

The bandwagon is where someone important says you should do something, and everyone - old and young - jumps on the bandwagon. But yes, if you're going to do anything new, you really have to have the balls to jump.

Jumping off a bandwagon is risky - surely you could have committed career suicide by suggesting something as radical as a variable speed of light?

That's true. Maybe I wouldn't have been so carefree if I hadn't had this Royal Society fellowship: it gives a safety net for 10 years. You can go anywhere and do whatever you want as long as you're productive.

So you're free to be the angry young man of physics?

Maybe it comes across that I'm bitter and twisted, but if you're reading a book, the body language is lost. You're talking to me face to face: you can see I'm really playing with all this. I'm not an angry young man, I'm just being honest. There's no hard feelings. I may say offensive things, but everything is very good natured.

So why should the speed of light vary?

It's more useful to turn that round. The issue is more why should the speed of light be constant? The constancy of the speed of light is the central thing in relativity but we have lots of problems in theoretical physics, and these probably result from assuming that relativity works all the time. Relativity must collapse at some point, at the beginning of the Universe, for example.

How did you come up with this?

Walking across the playing fields at St John's on a rainy morning in Cambridge, it struck me that if we're tangled up because of relativity, a varying speed of light might be the answer. It was worth a try.

That was three years ago: has the theory got to the point where it's accepted?

It depends what you mean by accepted. I have been commissioned by a journal to write a big review article. And we have become respectable in the sense that there's a huge number of people working on it now. John Barrow has helped a lot, and Lee Smolin too, more recently. But I wouldn't say it's mainstream yet.

Should we take a varying speed of light seriously?

We don't know: that's still up in the air. The varying speed of light started off with just one idea and that wasn't particularly far-reaching, a solution to one cosmological problem - big deal. But it's fascinating that it's been branching off into quantum gravity. Initially, I didn't think that would be the case. No one can predict where VSL is going next. I'm very enthusiastic, but in the end the theory might be right, it might be wrong. This is in the hands of experimenters: it's up to nature in the end.

So you wouldn't be destroyed if VSL were proved wrong?

The initial idea is never the final form of the idea: it's still a work-in-progress. There was a big hole in the theory: VSL didn't work as a theory that could describe fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation. But in the last few months we have overcome that. When I started it was just a small thing - maybe 20 per cent of my work. At the moment I'm working full time on it. I have no problems going to work on something else, though: it's not a religion, it's not a political party.

Like string theory, you mean? In your book you were very rude about string theorists...

No, I wasn't!

But you refer to the strings of their Universe as "cosmic pubes". You suggest that the "M" in theory, the overarching string theory, stands for masturbation. What have they ever done to you?

I think string theory is really over-hyped. It is possible that the final answer has something to do with string theory, but it certainly doesn't look that way if you just look at what they've achieved so far. String theory is so far removed from experiment, from anything that can be tested, that it isn't really a scientific theory the way it is.

There are some very good ideas that have come out of it, but they are really like toy models, fine ideas - they are not physical theories. That's OK, I would not have said what I said if they were happy just playing their game. But string theorists dress the whole idea up as if it were the final answer to everything. They think that nothing else should be done. And so I think they should get some stick. I work in string theory myself, but I just think it wrong to put all your shares into string theory because it's very unlikely to be the final answer.

While we're on the subject of rudeness, why are you so scathing about academic journals?

I don't think there's any future for journals. They're just a waste of time. I haven't read a journal in years. The future is the Web: the Web archive doesn't filter out the good stuff, and the bad stuff is there just as much as it is in the journals. I think in the future people will just publish in the Web archives.

Surely that will change the way we are able to judge science. What about peer review?

Peer review doesn't mean anything. The system has been disintegrating for years: you should see what passes for refereeing reports. It boils down to personal reactions to papers. Either referees know you and like you, or they know you and don't like you. If they don't know you, then it depends which institution you're at. It has become really corrupt in this respect. The refereeing process is collapsing anyway - they're having trouble finding people to do it. I now refuse to referee quite often. Sometimes I am sent three or four papers a week to referee. That is ridiculous. There is no way that you can do a proper job. I probably shouldn't say this, but, since papers should be in the archives anyway, sometimes I just accept everything. I don't see why you should reject a paper unless it is very obviously bad science.

How are we to know what's good science and what's not?

As a scientist, it's obvious. You read the abstract and you know immediately what's going on, whether the paper is worth reading or not. You do not need a referee to tell you. In most cases you just get some really conservative person who rejects everything.

But in some positive reports I have seen, it's clear the referee has not read the paper. In fact, I prefer the rejections - at least I know they have read my paper.

But how should others - funding agencies, for example - discern good science?

That's more tricky. They could ask someone in the know. But I think if the money went straight to scientists and not through funding agencies, there'd be less waste anyway. You could toss a coin rather than have endless committees deciding who gets what.

Yes, it is clear from your book that you're no fan of science bureaucracy. You talk about the administrators at Imperial College exploiting their scientists . . . are you going to have a job after this book is published?

According to the British publisher's lawyers, yes. But I said what needed to be said. There are lots of problems not just with Imperial, but generally with academia in Britain, about the way in which people are treated. Management consultancy rules in science. Certainly at Imperial College, there has been an explosion in the number of administrative levels. People are leaving because of this. It doesn't need to be the case: the new Perimeter Institute in Ontario, where Lee Smolin works, is trying to run itself differently, with as few managers as possible. I don't know if this will work, these things are always a bit idealistic, but I'm glad that someone's trying.

So you think the British "brain drain" is caused by bureaucracy?

It's certainly not just about money. Britain is great, very open and tolerant, and it has a great scientific atmosphere. People still stay here, even though you could treble your salary if you crossed the Atlantic. If only you could get rid of the administrators, it would be perfect.

What are you going to do next?

One of the points I make in Faster Than the Speed of Light is that you stop doing good science after a certain age. One of the big questions for me is what happens when I grow old and stop doing good science. I wouldn't mind becoming a writer, quite frankly. I don't mean popular science, I'd like to write novels and stuff. It's a bit crazy, a long shot, but I'm certainly not going to become a bureaucrat of science.

Source: This interview was first published in New Scientist print edition, subscribe here