Today the world of outsider art has its own system of galleries and stars, some of who have been accepted into the artistic canon. Beginning with the life of one idiosyncratic individual, Wertheim finds herself drawn towards fundamental questions about the place of theoretical physics in the imaginative landscape of our time.Īt the start of the twentieth century, a few pioneering thinkers began to take seriously the work of “outsider artists,” people with no formal training who were producing images of exceptional visual power. In this ground-breaking book, Wertheim embarks on a journey of discovery into the world of fringe physics that exists in parallel to, and often hidden from, the scientific mainstream. Carter had perfected his concepts in experiments performed in his own backyard using garbage cans and a fog machine to make giant smoke rings, which in his theory model the structure of subatomic particles.įor the past fifteen years, science writer Margaret Wertheim has been collecting the works of Carter and other “outsider physicists” – a term she coined as a scientific corollary to “outsider art.” Many of these theorists have no formal scientific training, yet each of them is convinced he has found the true theory of the universe. Gravity, matter, the periodic table and the creation of the universe – all these Carter explained through wildly inventive ideas dreamed up during a life spent as a gold miner and abalone diver.
What drives a man with no science training to think he can succeed where Einstein and Stephen Hawking have failed? In 1993, James Carter, a trailer-park owner in Enumclaw, WA, announced the publication of a book in which he proposed a complete alternative theory of physics.
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