Richard Gauthier
Richard Gauthier | |
|---|---|
| Residence | Santa Rosa, CA, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology University of Illinois Stanford University |
| Known for | cosmology, dark matter, models of the electron and photon, Santa Rosa Junior College |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | Santa Rosa Junior College |
Richard Gauthier is an American physicist and physics instructor known for developing superluminal and transluminal quantum models of the electron and the photon, in which the electron is modeled as a helically circulating, electrically charged quantum of light.
Biography
Gauthier received a B.Sc. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967 and an M.Sc. in physics from the University of Illinois in 1971. He entered a doctoral program in high-energy physics at the University of Illinois and passed his qualifying examinations, but did not complete that degree; citing limited job prospects in physics at the time, he redirected his studies and earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Stanford University in 1977.
From 1967 to 1969 Gauthier served in the Peace Corps as a high school physics teacher at St. Peter's Secondary School in Ghana. He was a teaching assistant in introductory physics at the University of Illinois in 1969–1970, and later taught introductory psychology and statistics at San Jose State University from 1976 to 1978. During the 1980s and 1990s he taught yoga and meditation in Europe, a period in which he began modeling photons and electrons as composed of helically moving components. He subsequently returned to California, where he has taught physics as adjunct faculty in the Chemistry and Physics Department at Santa Rosa Junior College in Santa Rosa, California.
Work
Gauthier is known for a series of models in which fundamental particles are described as circulating quanta of light. In his Transluminal Energy Quantum (TEQ) model of the electron, a charged energy quantum carrying energy and momentum but no rest mass moves along a closed, double-looped helical trajectory whose length corresponds to one Compton wavelength. In later formulations he described the electron as a "spin-½ charged photon," a helically circulating charged quantum that moves forward at the electron's sub-light velocity while its internal motion is superluminal, and that he associated with the generation of the electron's spin, magnetic moment, de Broglie wavelength and rest mass.
Building on these ideas, Gauthier proposed relativistic quantum-vortex models of the electron and positron formed from a superluminal double-helix photon during electron–positron pair production. He presented this work in the peer-reviewed conference literature, including papers in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series, and reported his models at meetings of the American Physical Society between roughly 2003 and 2015. His work also draws on P. R. Sarkar's concept of microvita as a proposed basis for the components of particles.