Margaret Wertheim
Margaret Wertheim | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 20 August 1958 |
| Residence | Los Angeles, CA, United States |
| Nationality | Australian / USA |
| Known for | Physics on the Fringe; the concept of "outsider physics"; the Crochet Coral Reef |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Author, Physicist, Mathematician |
| Institutions | Institute For Figuring |
Margaret Wertheim (born 20 August 1958) is an Australian-born science writer, curator and exhibition-maker based in Los Angeles. Trained in physics and mathematics, she is the author of Pythagoras' Trousers (1995), The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace (1999) and Physics on the Fringe (2011), and with her twin sister Christine she founded the Institute For Figuring, through which the two created the touring Crochet Coral Reef project. She is of interest to this wiki because Physics on the Fringe is the best-known mainstream book about outsider and dissident physics — it is built around the work of James Carter, and Wertheim attended meetings of the Natural Philosophy Alliance while researching it.
Biography
Wertheim took a Bachelor of Science in physics at the University of Queensland and a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics and computing at the University of Sydney. She has since been a doctoral candidate at Deakin University.
Rather than continuing in research, she moved into science communication. In Australia she created and co-directed the science television series Catalyst for teenage audiences, and she has since written on science and its cultural setting for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Aeon and Cabinet. Her books deal with physics as a cultural and historical enterprise: Pythagoras' Trousers treats the long entanglement of physics with religion and with the exclusion of women from the field, and The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace traces conceptions of space from Dante through to the internet.
In 2003 Wertheim and her twin sister, the writer and artist Christine Wertheim, founded the Institute For Figuring (IFF), a Los Angeles non-profit devoted to the aesthetic and poetic dimensions of science and mathematics. IFF projects present mathematical ideas through hands-on, often craft-based methods.
The best known of these is the Crochet Coral Reef, begun in 2005, which uses crocheted models of hyperbolic surfaces — a technique for physically modelling non-Euclidean geometry — both to teach hyperbolic space and to draw attention to the destruction of coral reefs. The project has grown into one of the largest participatory art-and-science works in the world, with tens of thousands of contributors across dozens of cities, and has been shown at the Hayward Gallery in London, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the Venice Biennale (2019) and the Museum Frieder Burda in Germany. Wertheim's 2009 TED talk on the project, "The beautiful math of coral", has been viewed well over a million times and translated into more than twenty languages.
For her work in public science engagement she received the Klopsteg Memorial Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers in 2016 and Australia's Scientia Medal in 2017.
Physics on the Fringe
Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything (Walker & Co., New York, 2011) is Wertheim's account of what she calls "outsider physics" — a term she coined by analogy with "outsider art" for theorists who work with little or no formal training in the field, and often in complete isolation from it. She had by then spent years collecting the manuscripts, self-published books and letters sent to her by such theorists.
The central figure of the book is James Carter, a Washington State man who built a complete mechanical theory of matter, energy and gravity around "circlons" — ring-shaped objects that reproduce and divide — and who tested his ideas with smoke rings produced in his own backyard using garbage cans and a fog machine. Wertheim points out that Carter had arrived independently at something close to the vortex-atom theory of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and P. G. Tait in the 1870s, a Victorian "theory of everything" that had once been serious physics.
Wertheim's thesis is that outsider theories are not simply errors to be swatted down but an alternative tradition: concrete rather than abstract, mechanical and physical rather than mathematical, and continuous with an older style of natural philosophy that professional physics abandoned. She contrasts the mainstream physics conferences she attended with a 2010 Natural Philosophy Alliance meeting at which dissident researchers from around the world presented well over a hundred papers, and she uses the comparison to raise the question of who is entitled to do physics at all. The book was reviewed favourably by Freeman Dyson in The New York Review of Books (5 April 2012), who wrote that such amateurs "offer an alternative set of visions... concrete rather than abstract, physical rather than mathematical."
Wertheim followed Carter for roughly a decade before the book appeared. With the filmmaker Cameron Allan she wrote and directed a documentary about him, It's Jim's World — We Just Live In It (2001), and she curated an exhibition of outsider-science material at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2002.
Reception among dissident researchers
Because Physics on the Fringe is the most widely read mainstream treatment of the dissident-physics community, its reception within that community matters, and it is mixed. The book brought unusual attention to work that is normally ignored altogether, and it treats the Natural Philosophy Alliance — the predecessor of the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society — as a subject worth taking seriously. But a number of dissident researchers have felt that the portrait flatters no one it describes.
David de Hilster, founder and organiser of the CNPS and owner of this wiki, is among them. In de Hilster's view, Jim Carter was a "safe" choice of subject for Wertheim's book: "fun", but someone who posed no credible threat to mainstream physics.
De Hilster also attended a panel at a book fair at UCLA some years ago at which Wertheim appeared. He recalls that during the panel she was asked whether anything would ever come out of the NPA or the CNPS, and that she answered: no.
De Hilster also reports that his mother, Pat de Hilster – the co-subject of his feature documentary Einstein Wrong - The Miracle Year, in which he takes her to meet scientists working outside the mainstream who argue Einstein was wrong – was extremely upset with Wertheim's characterisation of the NPA members. The film began shooting in 2005, premiered at the Long Beach Arts Theater on 7 December 2013, was completed in 2014, and won best documentary at the SciFlix film festival in Boca Raton, Florida in 2015.
De Hilster contends that Wertheim did not treat the dissident scientists with respect, and that she did so because she did not want to lose her access to mainstream science. This is his own contention and is recorded here as such; Wertheim has not, so far as this wiki is aware, responded to it.
Books
- 2022 - "Value and Transformation of Corals" (with Christine Wertheim)
- 2015 - "Crochet Coral Reef: A Project by the Institute For Figuring" (with Christine Wertheim), Institute For Figuring
- 2011 - "Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything" (Read in full)
- 2007 - "A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space: An Exploration of the Intersection of Higher Geometry and Feminine Handicraft", Institute For Figuring
- 1999 - "The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet", W. W. Norton
- 1995 - "Pythagoras' Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars", W. W. Norton