The Best Australian Science Writing 2012 (7 page)

The origin of the author was itself something of a mystery. No college or university was mentioned in his announcement but his letterhead carried the logo of the Absolute Motion
Institute, an organisation apparently located on the Green River Gorge Road in Enumclaw, Washington State. The theory had not been published before or ever presented to the public. It was, Carter stated with disarming honesty, the fruit of more than 25 years' solitary labour. For those wishing to acquaint themselves with this work a small yellow Order Form was included in the package. Interested parties were invited to tick a box and send in a cheque. $88 was the asking price for a ‘premier hard cover edition'; a paperback edition, for $44, was promised the following year. Yet it was three small boxes at the bottom of the form that most drew the attention of a careful reader. Here were offered the following options:

[*] ‘I'm very interested in this theory but at this time I am very short of cash. However, the enclosed letter expressing my response to the ideas of Circlon Synchronicity and Absolute Motion qualifies me to receive a free copy of the premier edition of
The Other Theory of Physics
on its publication date.'

[*] ‘The idea interests me! Please keep me on the Absolute Motion mailing list for the next free mailing.'

[*] ‘Your Gravity Theory Sucks!'

That final phrase catapulted Carter into a rare class: the man had a sense of humour. That is a quality almost categorically absent from the majority of ‘outsider theorists' whose packages arrive at the offices of professional physicists with rather more frequency than many scientists are comfortable admitting.

Being at the time short of cash myself, I sent off a letter with my response to the ideas of Circlon Synchronicity as I had dimly understood them from the materials Carter had provided.
Several weeks later I received in the mail a pre-press edition of his book. A densely packed assortment of theoretical speculations, empirical findings and graphical play, it was like no other science book I had seen. In addition to its bamboozling ideas, it was filled with diagrams and charts and doodles and equations, all of them clearly by Carter's hand. Whatever you could say about his physics, he had a marvellous visual style. Here was an entire phantasmagorical universe: atoms, stars and galaxies; the Moon, tides, spaceships and bumblebees. Scattered throughout the text were concepts both astounding and alarming: ‘negative matter' bodies, ‘seven dimensions of time', something Carter called ‘string demons' and an analysis of what might have happened to the
Titanic
if the great ship had been travelling at the speed of light.

By Carter's own assessment his theory reached its apogee in the claim that nature's most inexorable force was an illusion. To quote the book's stark denial, ‘Gravity does not exist.' In its place he proposed ‘infinitely expanding matter,' a wildly profligate inflation of each and every particle. According to him, everything that exists – you, me, the chair you are sitting on, the trees outside your window – is all constantly expanding. Every minute of every hour of every day. As a consequence, he claimed, the Earth itself doubles in size every 19 minutes. Hold a pencil in your hand and let it go – as Carter's theory tells it, the pencil doesn't
go
anywhere, rather the Earth rises up to meet it. Or as he would later tell me, ‘Gravity is not the result of things falling down but of the Earth falling up.'

* * * * *

In university physics departments there is a term for people like Jim Carter: they are generally known as ‘cranks', and the trajectories of their packages is typically short – straight from the mail
room into the bin. Secretaries of well-known physicists quickly learn to spot the tell-tale signs, for such manuscripts will usually announce themselves by obvious deviations from the standards of scientific practice. In all likelihood there will be an abundant use of CAPITAL LETTERS and Exclamation Points!!! Important sections will be underlined, or bolded, or ringed, for emphasis. Frequently the author will have seen fit to ease the professor's path towards understanding by writing helpful comments in the margins of the paper or by highlighting critical passages with brightly coloured felt-tip pens. All such marks will cause suspicion in the mind of a credentialled physicist, who can generally recognise a fringe theory by just looking at it, without even reading the text. The text itself will almost certainly herald its revolutionary nature in its opening paragraphs, claiming to reinvent if not the whole of physics, as in Carter's unusual case, then at least substantial parts of it. At a minimum, the author will be proposing something radically new, and as often as not will have harsh words for the twin pillars of 20th century physics – relativity and quantum theory. Typically he or she will be offering an ‘alternative', ‘simpler', ‘more comprehensible' explanation.

The academic science world can be harsh on men like Jim Carter and I use the male noun here specifically, for virtually all outsider physics theorists are men. Insider physics remains the most male-dominated of the academic sciences, and its outsider equivalents are almost always male. When credentialled physicists choose to comment on such theories at all, their remarks tend to be derisive, or at best dismissive. Most often, from the outsiders' perspective, there will be something far worse: silence. Jim Carter bears such oversight stoically – so convinced is he that history will eventually side with his ideas – but for many outsider theorists the academic world's dismissal of their work is infuriating and heart-breaking. In all sincerity these men believe they have found ‘the secrets of the universe', to use one of Jim's
favourite terms, and they are eager to share their insights with the rest of us. Like insiders, they too want to illuminate the void of ignorance and expand the domain of scientific knowledge for all human beings. To a man, they believe they have discovered profound and simple truths essential to the workings of nature that mainstream physicists have missed.

* * * * *

For the past 15 years I have been collecting the work of ‘outsider physicists', as I have come to fondly think of these people, and I now have on my shelves around 100 such theories. Some of them are entire books, some are lengthy articles. Some are brief sketches for a theory while others are fully fleshed out. Some have been professionally printed, some are typewritten, and some, which I especially value, are handwritten, and in a few cases also hand-illustrated. My collecting has not been systematic or comprehensive in any way. I have pretty much taken what I have stumbled upon or what has come to me via the post or the internet through no particular solicitation on my part. Over the years I have been amazed at how much
has
come my way, for I am not a famous physicist. While it is true that I trained as a physicist and originally thought this would be my profession, after university I decided to become a science writer and have been working at that vocation my entire professional life. As I am not based at a university and work from home, I cannot be all that easy to find, yet over the years a steady stream of unorthodox theories has found its way to my door. I have kept them, chuckled at them, been simultaneously delighted and exasperated by them. Sometimes, as in Jim's case, I have been enchanted by them. Slowly, as they massed on a shelf in my office, I found I could not ignore them: what did this collective outpouring of human effort represent?

* * * * *

In 1995, about 18 months after I received Carter's announcement, I decided to take a trip to meet the man himself. As a science journalist, I thought he might be an interesting subject for an article and I did not then imagine writing a book. I had been invited to give a lecture at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington State, and after the talk I rented a car and drove out to Enumclaw, about 48km away. I had no idea what to expect and whatever I might have expected I think it's safe to say I would have been wrong. Carter lived in a trailer park on a spectacular piece of land nestled in a forest on the lip of the aptly named Green River Gorge. It turned out that he owned the land and had built the trailer park himself. On his front lawn he had a collection of huge vintage Chryslers and Cadillacs rusting in picturesque heaps. There was a pet swan that followed him around like a dog. He also had two actual dogs, plus a wife and two young sons, and the swan must have understood something about his affection for his family, because every time his wife came near it, it hissed and spat and tried to bite her. Soon after I met Jim the swan disappeared – a gang of local trailer park dogs was suspected of the crime. I kept going back, and over the years my encounter with him has grown into one of the strangest and most challenging relationships of my life. Quietly and inexorably, as I sought to understand what makes Jim tick I began to realise that I had to reassess what makes the science of physics itself tick.

As I intersected with Carter's life and work I began to wonder what exactly is the role of theoretical physics in the collective life of our society? What functions does it serve?

For whom? And how? And why?

* * * * *

Jim Carter is a small man, about 175 cm and wiry framed. He is one of those men whose hair began to recede early, giving his head a high, domed, sage-like appearance. At 66 he wears his age lightly and his eyes, now deeply creased, are prone to twinkle in a face that often lights up with amusement. As a well-broughtup country boy Jim is too polite to laugh outright at his fellow human beings, but his wide mouth frequently lurches into a smirk as if he is enjoying some private joke. What hair he does have is now grey and he wears it at a medium length cut evenly round the bottom like the fringe hanging off a lampshade. In his youth the hair was long and sun-bleached and in photos from the 1960s he exudes a cheeky larrikin charm.

In 1976, when the Carters took over the property, Jim was returning to live in the country that was in his blood. He had grown up in Buckley, a tiny hamlet just down the road from Enumclaw that stands within view of Mount Rainier. Though he had been born in Seattle, when he was five years old his family had moved to Buckley and a 16 hectare farm. In addition to farming, his father held a full-time job as a handyman at a local school for the disabled; farming was a supplement and a means of survival. His mother, Phyllis, kept an enormous vegetable garden that went a long way towards feeding the family. Jim and his brother John grew up milking cows, mowing hay, repairing tractors and knowing what it meant to be self-sufficient.

Even as a child, Phyllis now recalls, Jim insisted ‘on taking things apart and putting them back together again'. Whenever he was given a new toy, the first thing he would do was to pull it apart to see what was happening inside. Like the young Isaac Newton, who spent his youth building wooden windmills and other mechanical contrivances, Jim came into the world with an inherent love of machines. He would never tolerate anyone else explaining how something might function. As Phyllis tells the story, Jim was a headstrong child, always determined to do
things in his own way. Today, at 97, Phyllis herself is a force, a minute birdlike woman in full command of her faculties and with no tolerance for ‘nonsense'. A churchgoing teetotaller, she has spent her long life working hard, living quietly and staying home. ‘What would you want to do that for?' is one of her frequent phrases, and it seems more than possible that her son's adventurous nature is at least in part a reaction to his mother's awareness of limits.

It was the farm rather than school that got Jim thinking about science. With ‘the push and pull reality of a farm boy', he says, he ‘began to understand, little by little, how the world must work'. Using levers and pulleys and gears he learned how to control power and enough about electricity and magnetism to build his own electric motors. Hammering nails, drilling holes, welding metal and shooting guns, he began to contemplate the forces holding the universe together. When he starting attending White River High School he learned that this was called ‘physics', and he began to engage with the subject in a theoretical fashion.

At 14 Jim acquired his first car, and while still a teenager he began to pride himself on his ability to look under the hood of any car and figure out how to fix it. Today the only car the Carters own that Jim cannot entirely repair is a 1996 Cadillac that Linda inherited from her father: ‘You lift up the hood, and you barely recognise the engine,' he says, so loaded is it ‘with microchips and black-box controls'. Whatever machinery came his way Jim would turn his hand to getting it running smoothly. ‘It's just been something I've been forced to do by necessity,' he says. ‘When something breaks down you fix it. Every machine is a little bit different and you have to figure out each one for itself, but you can figure out any machine.'

In his late teens Jim set out to build a car from scratch, a project that pushed the boundaries of the DIY ethos far beyond the norms of usual rev-head passion and would prove to be a
harbinger of things to come, hinting at the directions in which he would later go with his physics. Jim wasn't content to simply
make
a car; his vision was to
design
one from first principles, and to that end he set himself the challenge of constructing a steam-powered automobile. For a teenager the goal proved impossible, but in his twenties Jim realised a part of this plan when he was granted a patent for a steam engine. He called it the INCOBO, for Internal Combustion Boiler, and its design is incredibly simple, having only two moving parts. Unlike other steam engines on the market, in which you have to wait for half an hour after turning them on while the water heats up before you can use them, the INCOBO would ‘be on all the time'. According to Jim it would be not only convenient but extremely efficient, so from the point of view of fuel economy the INCOBO would be good for the planet. Jim didn't have the funds to build his engine, so instead he built a cardboard model that he animated and filmed. His aim was to show the film to investors whom he hoped might finance the project. As Jim saw it, funders would be getting in on the ground floor of the next automotive revolution.