The Best Australian Science Writing 2012 by Elizabeth Finkel Read Free Book Online Page B

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.’
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    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 mailroom 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