Angels and Demons

Of the major camps in the String Wars, the condensed matter physicists have always seemed far more sensible than the rest. But in my experience, they too have been quick to dismiss a sensible cosmology on the dubious grounds that it is too simple. Now on campus once again, I have the opportunity to use the library and so I thought I would catch up on emergence theory a la the book The Universe in a Helium Droplet by Volovik. And I got all the way to page $6$ before getting annoyed! The offending paragraph, in the introduction on Anti-GUT theory, goes:

The analogy between the quantum vacuum and condensed matter could give an insight into the trans-Planckian physics since it provides examples of the physically imposed deviations from Lorentz and other invariances at higher energy. This is important in many different areas of high energy physics and cosmology, including possible CPT violation and black holes, where the infinite red shift at the horizon opens a route to trans-Planckian physics.

So the whole book advocates symmetry emergence in the local world of quasiparticles in the system, but they won't consider the varying speed of light cosmology? Why? Because some relativist told them it was naughty? Section $4.3.3$ bears the title is the speed of light a fundamental constant, but for some reason the cosmology is skipped in this section and we learn only that 3He-A for an external observer (meaning in the laboratory) has an analogue speed of light ranging from $0.03$ to $100$ $ms^{-1}$. Then again, the book does have some nice sections on vortices, and one has to admire the fluency with which Volovik switches between his external and internal viewpoints.