Moffat has proposed a new nonlocal variant of quantum field theory, that is finite at all orders and hence[citation needed] dispenses with renormalization.

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.

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.

"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 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.

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.

[2] He published his "variable speed of light" (VSL) theory in two places—on the Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL) online archive, 16 Nov. 1992,[4] and in a 1993 edition of International Journal of Modern Physics D.[5][6] The scientific community mostly ignored VSL theory[5] until in 2001, University of New South Wales astronomer John Webb and peers detected experimental evidence from telescopic observations that the cosmological fine-structure constant—which contains the speed of light—may have been different than its present value in the very early Universe.

[5][6] Stories emerged about the book tour media omissions in March and July 2003, written by a science journalist, Michael Martin, who had earlier attributed VSL theory to Moffat in a 2001 UPI article about Webb's astronomical discoveries.

In response to a reader letter from Henry van Driel of the University of Toronto Department of Physics, Folger wrote, "Professor van Driel is absolutely right—John Moffat did develop a varying speed of light theory several years before João Magueijo, and I regret not including that information in my story.

"[13] Months later, as other reports picked up on the reignited dispute,[14] Magueijo reiterated Moffat's primacy in VSL theory.

[5][6] In September 2004, Discover Magazine's Tim Folger followed through on a promise he had made during the controversy to "write a story about John Moffat.

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.

In subsequent work, Moffat proposed this theory as an alternative to the standard electroweak unification of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear interactions.

According to Moffat, for the standard model it can solve the Higgs boson mass hierarchy naturalness problem,[19] and leads to a finite quantum gravity theory.