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James Carter

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James Carter
James Carter
ResidenceEnumclaw, WA, United States
NationalityUSA
Known forCirclon theory, Gravitational Expansion, Electron Transformation, the Living Universe cosmology, Nuclear Structure, Toroidal Ring
Scientific career
FieldsPhysics, Cosmology, Gravity

James Carter (also known as Jim Carter) is an American self-taught physicist and inventor from Enumclaw, Washington, who has spent more than half a century building a complete mechanical alternative to modern theoretical physics. He is best known for circlon theory, in which all matter is made of ring- or toroid-shaped mechanical particles rather than fields; for the principle of Gravitational Expansion, which treats gravity as the upward acceleration of expanding matter rather than as an attractive force; and for the Living Universe, an evolutionary cosmology that replaces the Big Bang. Working entirely outside the academic system — and funding his own research from a lift-bag manufacturing business — he is the central figure of Margaret Wertheim's 2011 book Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything and of her 2001 documentary about his work.

Biography

Carter began thinking about and developing alternative theories of physics as a teenager. His working life has been resolutely practical rather than academic: during the 1970s he worked as an abalone diver off the southern California coast, and he later prospected for gold. He invented and manufactured Carter Lift Bags — underwater flotation devices used to raise heavy objects from the sea floor — and the success of that business gave him the financial independence to pursue his physics full time. He has long lived in Enumclaw, Washington, where he owns a trailer park and where his research, printing and experimental work have been carried out.

According to his own account, the germ of circlon theory came to him underwater. While diving, he noticed that the exhaust from his breathing apparatus rose as perfect rings of air bubbles — stable, self-sustaining ring vortices. That observation of a ring that holds itself together while moving became the physical image at the heart of everything he built afterwards.

Rather than seek publication in mainstream journals, Carter has published his work himself, in a long series of books, revised editions and large-format wall charts, and more recently through his website living-universe.com. He has also been a regular contributor to conferences of the Natural Philosophy Alliance and the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society (CNPS), presenting papers there from the mid-1990s onward.

Scientific contributions

Carter's project is unified by a single conviction: that physics took a wrong turn when it replaced mechanical explanation with mathematical fields. In his account, forces such as gravity and electromagnetism are not invisible influences reaching across empty space, but the direct mechanical consequences of the shapes and motions of real material objects. His work is therefore best read as a systematic attempt to rebuild physics on purely mechanical foundations.

Circlon theory

The circlon is Carter's fundamental particle: not a point, but a ring — a closed, spinning, torus-shaped mechanical structure. Circlons carry their properties in their geometry and motion rather than in surrounding fields, and they interact by physically interlocking. Carter has described the elements as being assembled from these rings much like interlocking building blocks, each nucleus being a definite, drawable mechanical arrangement of protons and neutrons rather than a probability distribution.

This work culminated in the 1977 publication of Periodic Table of the Circlon Elements, a wall chart that detailed circlon theory and included diagrams showing the placement of the protons and neutrons within the nuclear structure of each of the 104 elements known at the time. A revised full-colour version was later printed. In circlon theory the photon, too, is a mechanical object rather than an excitation of a field, and the structure of the hydrogen atom and its radiation are given a concrete mechanical description.

Carter did not treat these ideas as purely speculative. In his own backyard he built apparatus from garbage cans and a disco fog machine to generate large, long-lived smoke rings, using them to study how ring vortices form, travel, collide and interact. He regarded these rings as physical analogues of circlons — a way of watching, at human scale, the behaviour he attributes to matter at the subatomic scale. Reviewers have noted the historical resonance of this: William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and Peter Guthrie Tait performed smoke-ring experiments of their own some 130 years earlier in support of their vortex theory of atoms.

Gravitational Expansion

Around 1968 Carter formulated the principle of Gravitational Expansion, which he presents as the opposite of Einstein's General Relativity. In this view there is no attractive gravitational force and no curvature of spacetime pulling objects downward. Instead, matter is continuously expanding, and what we experience as weight is the upward acceleration of the Earth's surface against our feet. A falling object is not being pulled; the ground is rising to meet it.

He first presented this idea in 1970 in a small book, Gravity Does Not Exist, and expanded the argument through further editions during the 1970s under the title Gravitation Does Not Exist. From this principle he has drawn a series of consequences that he treats as testable rather than merely philosophical: a re-derivation of the gravitational constant, a distinction between gravitational time and inertial time, an analysis of the differing behaviour of orbiting and falling clocks, and a proposed experiment intended either to establish or to negate the existence of dark matter by testing the equivalence principle directly.

Electron Transformation and the Living Universe

Through the 1980s Carter continued to develop his non-field mechanical account of matter, space, time, energy and gravity, and began applying it to cosmology. Around 1990 he arrived at the principle of Electron Transformation: the mass of the electron is not a constant but gradually decreases over the course of cosmological time. Because so much of observational cosmology is calibrated against atomic and electronic processes, a slowly changing electron mass would, on his account, change the meaning of the evidence — most importantly the cosmological redshift, which he explains without an expanding-space Big Bang, and which he has also discussed in terms of a cosmological blue shift.

Using this principle, Carter replaced the Big Bang with an evolutionary model of matter he calls the Living Universe: a universe that was not created in a single explosive event but has continuously evolved, matter itself changing in character over cosmological time. He has summarised the alternative starting point in the title of one of his papers, arguing that the universe began as "a great fire, not a Big Bang." He has likewise argued against the conversion of mass into energy implied by E = mc², and defended a form of absolute motion detectable through its combined effect with gravity on the rate of clocks.

In 1993 he combined all of his theories into the book The Other Theory of Physics and a wall chart, The Creation of the Universe in Eight Days, alongside the revised colour Periodic Table of the Circlon Elements. From then to the present he has issued many new and revised versions of that book, and more recently a new book, The Living Universe.

Portrayal in Physics on the Fringe

Carter's work came to wide public attention through the Australian-born science writer Margaret Wertheim. In 2001, Wertheim and Cameron Allan produced a documentary film about his life and theories, released as It's Jim's World ... We Just Live in It and generally referred to as Jim's World. His charts and models were subsequently exhibited at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2002 and at the Institute For Figuring gallery in Los Angeles in 2011.

In 2011 Wertheim published Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything (Walker & Company), which features Carter's life and theories and is also a broader history of the many alternative and underground scientific theories that have developed parallel to, but outside of, mainstream science. Wertheim presents Carter sympathetically as a genuine home-grown experimentalist — a man who, in her description, perfected his concepts in experiments performed in his own backyard using garbage cans and a fog machine to make giant smoke rings — and uses his story to ask what role, if any, an amateur can play in relation to modern science.

The book drew substantial mainstream attention. Reviewing it in The New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson observed that Carter was unlike the stereotype of the fringe theorist in that he was a capable engineer who did real experiments, drew the parallel with Thomson and Tait's vortex atoms, and argued that imagination of Carter's kind has value even where it does not succeed as accepted science.

Reception among dissident researchers

Within the dissident-science community itself, Wertheim's book has been received with mixed feelings — not over Carter, whose independence and experimental ingenuity are widely admired, but over the choice to make him the book's representative figure.

David de Hilster, founder and organiser of the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society, takes that view. In de Hilster's view, Jim Carter was a "safe" choice for Wertheim's book: "fun", but someone who posed no credible threat to mainstream physics. The criticism is directed at Wertheim's editorial selection rather than at Carter himself — the concern being that a book presenting outsider physics to a general readership passed over dissident researchers whose challenges to orthodoxy would have been harder for the mainstream to set aside.

De Hilster further contends that Wertheim did not treat the dissident scientists with respect, and that this was because she did not want to lose her access to mainstream science. De Hilster, who attended a panel at a book fair at UCLA at which Wertheim appeared, recalls that she was asked whether anything would ever come out of the NPA or the CNPS — the Natural Philosophy Alliance and the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society — and that she answered: no. These are de Hilster's own recollections and opinions, offered here as such; they are not the finding of any published account.

Abstracts

Books

External links

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