Paul A LaViolette
Paul A. LaViolette | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | November 8, 1947 Schenectady, New York, United States |
| Died | December 19, 2022 (aged 75) Greece |
| Residence | Niskayuna, New York, United States; Athens, Greece |
| Nationality | USA |
| Alma mater | Johns Hopkins University; University of Chicago; Portland State University |
| Known for | Subquantum Kinetics, Galactic superwaves, Antigravity and electrogravitics, New Energy, Cosmology |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Systems science, Physics, Astronomy, Climatology |
| Institutions | The Starburst Foundation |
Paul Alex LaViolette (8 November 1947 – 19 December 2022) was an American systems scientist, physicist and author, and president of the Starburst Foundation, an interdisciplinary research institute. He worked across an unusually wide span of subjects — physics, astronomy, climatology, systems theory, psychology and ancient mythology — and is best known for Subquantum Kinetics, a unified field theory in which matter and energy arise as self-organising patterns in a continuously transmuting ether.
His work is unified less by a single subject than by a single conviction: that the universe is an open system in which matter and energy are continuously created, rather than a closed one wound up once at a beginning and running down ever since. From that premise follow his cosmology, his account of stellar energy, and his rejection of the Big Bang.
Education and career
LaViolette was from Schenectady, New York. He took his B.A. in physics at Johns Hopkins University in 1969 and an M.B.A. at the University of Chicago in 1973, and worked for a period at the Harvard School of Public Health. He completed his Ph.D. in general systems science at Portland State University in 1983; his dissertation, on galactic superwaves and their impact on the Earth, set the direction of much of his later research.
An early interest in solar energy led him into alternative energy more broadly, and his period as a patent examiner exposed him to a wide range of unconventional invention — background that informed his later work on electrogravitics and propulsion. He served as president of the Starburst Foundation, under whose auspices he conducted and published most of his research.
Subquantum kinetics
Main article: Subquantum Kinetics
LaViolette's central theoretical contribution treats the vacuum not as emptiness but as a transmuting ether: a nonequilibrium medium of subphysical units he called etherons, engaged in ongoing reaction and diffusion. Subatomic particles are not things in the medium but self-organising wave patterns within it — Turing patterns of the kind seen in the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction — sustained by the underlying flux rather than by being built from smaller pieces.
Because etherons continually transmute into and out of ether states, the physical universe is an open system, and matter can be created continuously. Among the theory's stated predictions are that photons blueshift in regions of high gravitational potential, that genic energy is generated continuously within celestial bodies, and that cosmological redshift is a tired-light effect in a cosmologically stationary universe. He argued that the last of these fits the angular-size–redshift, Tolman surface-brightness, Hubble-diagram, galaxy-number-count and supernova data better than the expanding-universe model. See Redshift and Tired Light.
Galactic superwaves
LaViolette's doctoral work proposed that the core of the Galaxy episodically emits galactic superwaves — intense bursts of cosmic rays travelling outward at close to light speed. He argued that such an event reached the solar system at the end of the last ice age, and that its effects are recorded both in the geological and ice-core record and in ancient myth and monument. The argument is developed at length in Earth Under Fire: Humanity's Survival of the Ice Age (2005), and its mythological dimension in Beyond the Big Bang: Ancient Myth and the Science of Continuous Creation (1995), later reissued as Genesis of the Cosmos.
Electrogravitics and antigravity
A second strand of LaViolette's work concerns electrogravitics — the claim that electric fields can produce a propulsive or gravity-like effect, associated historically with Thomas Townsend Brown. He wrote both technical and historical treatments, including A Theory of Electrogravitics, Electrogravitics: Back to the Future and A Homemade Power Supply for Electrogravitics Experiments, and the book Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion: Tesla, UFOs, and Classified Aerospace Technology (2008), which argues that such technology was developed within classified aerospace programmes. This places part of his work within the New Energy literature documented on this wiki, and connects it to Nikola Tesla.
Decoding the message of the pulsars
In Decoding the Message of the Pulsars: Intelligent Communication from the Galaxy (2006) LaViolette argued that the distribution and timing characteristics of certain pulsars are better explained as deliberate signals than as natural beacons — proposing that they mark, among other things, a warning about galactic superwaves. It is the most speculative of his positions and the one most often cited against him.
Reception
LaViolette published largely outside the mainstream journal system, through the Starburst Foundation and trade publishers, and his conclusions are not accepted by academic physics or astronomy. Critics regard subquantum kinetics as unconstrained — a framework flexible enough to accommodate results after the fact — and the pulsar-signal thesis as unfounded.
His defenders point out that he stated predictions in advance and in print, notably on brown-dwarf luminosities and on the tired-light fits to supernova and surface-brightness data, and argue that a theory which does so deserves to be assessed on those predictions rather than on the company its author kept.
Related work on this wiki
LaViolette's continuous-creation cosmology belongs with the wider critique of the standard model documented here — see Big Bang, Redshift, Tired Light and Non-standard cosmology. His electrogravitics work belongs with New Energy. Further material is indexed under Category:Cosmology and Category:Antigravity.
Articles
- "An Introduction to Subquantum Kinetics", International Journal of General Systems, V11, pp. 281–345.
Abstracts
- 1993 - "A Homemade Power Supply for Electrogravitics Experiments"
- 1993 - "A Theory of Electrogravitics"
- 1993 - "The U.S. Anti-gravity Squadron"
- 1992 - "Electrogravitics: Back to the Future"
- 1991 - "Subquantum Kinetics: Exploring the Crack in the First Law"
- 1990 - "Detecting Galactic Superwaves: An Appeal to Scalar Wave Astronomers"
- 1990 - "A Tesla Wave Physics for a Free Energy Universe"
Books
- 2008 - "Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion: Tesla, UFOs, and Classified Aerospace Technology" (Read in full)
- 2006 - "Decoding the Message of the Pulsars: Intelligent Communication from the Galaxy" (Read in full)
- 2005 - "Earth Under Fire: Humanity's Survival of the Ice Age" (Read in full)
- 2003, 2nd ed. - "Subquantum Kinetics: A Systems Approach to Physics and Cosmology" (Read in full)
- 1995 - "Beyond the Big Bang: Ancient Myth and the Science of Continuous Creation" (Read in full)
Personal life
LaViolette was a lifelong resident of Niskayuna, New York, and latterly divided his time between Niskayuna and Athens, Greece, where he lived with his wife Mariana Cristova. He died in Greece on 19 December 2022.