Some physics reading and two records

 A few weeks ago, looking to make some inroads into the shelves of unread books around our house, I picked up Faster than the Speed of Light by João Magueijo. Published around 2003, this is a non-fiction, popular science account of a family of theories called VSL. These are theoretical models in which the speed of light is allowed to vary, particularly in the early universe, and for reasons that help resolve some of the nagging puzzles in canonical Big Bang cosmology, such as the "horizon" and "...