‘Physics on the Fringe’ by Margaret Wertheim

BOOK REVIEW

December 26, 2011|By Jesse Singal

About five years is all that it takes for physics to morph from the concrete to the abstract. In ninth grade, students roll balls down incline planes to demonstrate Newton’s laws governing motion. By freshman year of college, those same young people are grappling with the insane-seeming mathematical implications of modern physics, with light acting as particle and wave simultaneously and with particles popping into existence and evaporating just as quickly.

The more physicists discover about our universe, the more esoteric it gets, and this tendency has bolstered the ranks of “outsider physicists’’ - people, mostly with no formal training in physics, who develop their own theories, only to see them languish in obscurity, ignored by the establishment.

In “Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything,’’ science writer Margaret Wertheim muses about what this all means and tells the story of James Carter, one of the more interesting outsiders she has encountered in her many years on the beat. Wertheim’s descriptions - of Carter and various other outsiders, both contemporary and past, and of their ideas and motivations - are much more gripping than her broader argument, making for an interesting but uneven book.

Wertheim’s story centers around the adventurous Carter, a Washington trailer-park owner who has been working on his theory, in which everything in the universe is composed of tiny ring-shaped particles, for decades. Carter is clearly brilliant in certain ways - he makes a comfortable living selling a device he invented to raise objects that have sunk underwater - but lacks formal training in physics and rejects the idea that it should be left only to those who can understand pages of hieroglyphic calculus.

Through Carter and others of his ilk, Wertheim muses about the prospect of physics becoming a more open endeavor, one in which the Carters of the world can participate.

Arguments about what it means to be an “expert,’’ about the “gatekeepers’’ of certain academic communities, are the stuff of endless hours of debate. Still, certain things should be clear by now, and Wertheim’s argument suffers from a fair bit of conflation.