Jean de Climont

Jean de Climont
Jean de Climont
Residence	Paris region, France
Nationality	French
Known for	The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists; aether-based alternative to relativity and quantum mechanics
	Scientific career
Fields	Engineering; Physics; fluid mechanics; history and sociology of dissident science

Jean de Climont is a French engineer, author and publisher-associated researcher best known for compiling The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists, the most extensive directory of scientists, engineers, and physicians who dispute or propose alternatives to mainstream physics. The directory — which in its later editions holds several thousand names, each with contact details and a note on the person's ideas — is published by Christian Sutterlin's house Éditions d'Assailly (Assailly Publishing). Alongside the compilation work he has published a substantial body of his own critical and alternative physics, arguing that the relativity–quantum-mechanics paradigm is riddled with paradoxes and that an aether is both necessary and sufficient to account for gravitation and light.

Biography

De Climont is a French engineer based in the greater Paris region. He writes in both French and English, and his books are issued by Éditions d'Assailly (Assailly Publishing), the Paris house run by Christian Sutterlin, which has published his titles in repeated editions since at least 2009. He has also edited material connected with the French science-controversy magazine Controverses.

Beyond his books, de Climont has been a steady contributor to the General Science Journal, where he has posted papers continuously from 2014 through 2025 on magnetism, cosmology, aether and the foundations of physics. He has made his own works, including the dissident directory, freely available through Academia.edu and ResearchGate, and has permitted downloading of the directory for personal use.

The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists

De Climont's best-known work is The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists: Critics and Alternative Theories. Rather than write a polemic, he set out to answer an empirical question: how many qualified people actually disagree with the received framework of physics, and what do they propose instead? To do so he consolidated roughly forty pre-existing dissident lists from around the world into a single reference, recording for each person a name, a home page or contact address, and a short note on the ideas they advance.

The scope is deliberately broad. "Dissident" covers both those who work inside the relativity–quantum-mechanics framework while proposing ideas not yet accepted, and those who oppose parts of those theories outright; the subject matter is restricted to physics in the older sense of natural philosophy. People born before 1905 are excluded. More than half of those listed are qualified scientists, physicians or engineers, and well over a thousand distinct alternative theories are represented across the entries.

The list has grown through successive editions. The November 2015 edition was announced as holding nearly 8,000 names; the 2016 edition, issued under ISBN 978-2-9024-2517-4, is the one most widely cited; and later issues have been described as carrying some 9,000 and then about 9,700 names. The complete directory runs to 2,137 pages.

Its significance for this community is straightforward: it is the single best measure of the scale and international breadth of scientific dissent, demonstrating that opposition to established theory is not the work of a handful of isolated cranks but of a large, distributed, and largely credentialled body of people. Where the G O Mueller survey catalogues the critical literature, de Climont's directory catalogues the people.

Preserved on this wiki

Because the original publisher website (editionsassailly.com) is no longer active and the primary distribution channels have gone offline, the Natural Philosophy Wiki hosts a full preservation copy of the directory:

An alphabetical index of everyone catalogued in the directory is maintained at Index of the Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists — 7,614 indexed names, of which about 2,093 already have pages on this wiki (collected in Category:Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists) while the remainder stand as a worklist of pages still to be created. These are archival preservation copies; the work remains copyrighted by its author.

Scientific contributions

Criticism of the standard paradigm

In The Failure of Pure Science, reissued repeatedly between 2009 and 2023, de Climont sets out what he regards as the paradoxes, contradictions and failures of the official theoretical paradigm formed by the relativity theories together with quantum mechanics. The criticisms are organised under nine headings, among them the Michelson–Morley interferometer experiments, the Sagnac experiments, the relativist interpretation of the cosmological redshift, and the supposed absolute character of light. He treats these not as isolated anomalies but as symptoms of a paradigm that has been extended far beyond what the experimental record supports, and he pairs the critique with a companion treatment of the alternative theories on offer.

The magnetic field of currents and the case for an aether

De Climont's most distinctive technical claim concerns the topology of the electron's magnetic field. On the standard account, the magnetic field of an electric current is the summed effect of the dipole fields of moving electrons. De Climont argues that this has never been established experimentally, and that the electron's field in fact has the inverse topology — not a dipole structure but a rotational one. From that starting point he takes up the classic experiments on rotating conductors and the Rowland effect, Faraday's paradox and the unipolar generator, and the Barnett and Faraday effects, arguing that the observed magnetic behaviour of currents does not in fact follow from electron motion in the way the textbooks assert.

Because a rotational electron field requires a medium in which the rotation is defined, he concludes that an aether is necessary. In The Possibility of an Aether (2020) he develops a modern aether theory built on Cartesian foundations, in which the aether is simultaneously the support of gravitation and the medium of light. He makes two principal modifications to the Cartesian picture: a condensation of the aether within atomic nuclei, and the assignment of angular momentum to the aether corpuscles that fill space. The resulting model is required to comply with Hamilton's principle and with the equipartition of energy, and from it he claims to recover Newton's law of gravitation and the transverse character of light — the two things a mechanical aether has classically been asked to deliver at once.

Cosmology and astronomy

His later papers extend the same programme to astrophysics. He has applied Hamilton's principle to the galactic rotation curves in an attempt to account for them without invoking exotic matter, and argues instead that what is called dark matter is an aether. He has proposed an evolutionary rather than expansionary reading of the Hubble–Lemaître redshift relation, examined the zonal distribution of comets, revisited Maurice Allais's analysis of Dayton Miller's interferometer measurements, considered what a Michelson–Morley experiment performed in space would show, and questioned whether time belongs to the physical universe at all. A recurring theme is the conservation of angular momentum, which he treats as a constraint that general relativity fails to respect.

Discussed in CNPS talks

"Consideration of the views of Jean de Climont on 'Aether'" (24 June 2023) — an examination of de Climont's video presentations on the failure of Maxwell and Einstein and related topics.

Works

Books

The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists: Critics and Alternative Theories (Éditions d'Assailly; ISBN 978-2-9024-2517-4), also issued as The Worldwide List of Alternative Theories and Critics; successive editions from 2012 onward
The Failure of Pure Science (Éditions d'Assailly; editions 2009, 2010, 2016, 2020, 2023)
The Possibility of an Aether (Éditions d'Assailly, 2020; 67 pp.; ISBN 978-2-902425-47-1)
Physics and Astronomy (Éditions d'Assailly, 2014; 272 pp.; ISBN 978-2-902425-24-2)
Fluid Mechanics (Éditions d'Assailly; ISBN 978-2-902425-57-0)
Einstein and Maxwell Speculation (Éditions d'Assailly, 2023)
The Mysteries of the Shroud (Éditions d'Assailly)

Selected papers

Published in the General Science Journal:

"Dark Matter is an aether" (2025)
"Dark energy may evolve" (2025)
"Unresolved problems in physics" (2025)
"Time does not belong to the physical Universe" (2024)
"Hubble-Lemaître effect — Galaxies redshift evolutionary explanation" (2024)
"The Galaxy curves explained by implementation of Hamilton's principle" (2024)
"The origin of magnetic fields, Faraday's, Barnett's and Rowland's effects" (2024)
"Maxwell and the Faraday's paradox" (2024)
"The Zonal Distribution of Comets" (2024)
"Michelson and Morley's Experiment in Space" (2021)
"The General Relativity theory and the conservation of the angular momentum" (2021)
"Electron beams magnetic field is not a result of electron motion" (2014)
"Rotating Conductors and the Rowland Effect" (2016)

External links