A TIME FOR RENAISSANCE IN PARTICLE PHYSICS,
J.F. Johnson, Vantage Press, 1998, pp: 48, ISBN 0-533-12579-0; Price: $12.95 (pbk)

John Frank Johnson, an electrical engineer who worked in the American Armed Forces and later in industry, decided, upon reaching retirement, to devote his time to the foundations of electrodynamics. This project led him to write three books on his investigations. The current book summarises his results and describes his experience in interacting with the physics community. The intended audience is the general public.

The author is convinced that he can build a particle theory strictly with 19th-century physics (Newton's laws, Maxwell's equations, and thermodynamics). Einsteinian relativity is considered an aberration (p. 5): "They [the physicists] mistakenly believe the Lorentz Transformation, which is based on a false assumption and is patently false." In the author's theory, accelerated charged particles do not radiate, and all of matter is built through combination of only two fundamental particles, the positron and the electron. Incidentally, the author seems unaware of the work done by 20th-century physicists on the positronium.

Not surprisingly, these ideas were not well received within the physics community, which the author interprets as a conspiracy (p. 9): "Since the adoption of the Theory of Relativity, there has been a conspiracy among the members of the physics community to deny forum to anyone with arguments that reject the Theory of Relativity and to deny tenure to any professor who holds such views." In the author's view, 20th-century physicists have completely abandoned common sense (p. 31): "The physics community with its special relativity continues to move further and further away from common sense and further and further into the realm of fantasy, and of the mysterious."

With such stinging criticism, one would have expected the author's theory to be flawless. Alas, this is not the impression I was left with: conflation of kinematic and electrodynamic concepts is all over the place, ad hoc hypotheses are teeming, and what is absolutely unforgivable from a scientific viewpoint, the author makes essentially no attempt at deducing testable predictions from his theory. Some very vague consequences are asserted, but nothing beyond that. Needless to say, discrepancies between the author's theory and experimental data are not addressed.

In summary, this book contains hardly any science worthy of the name. Its purchase is therefore not recommended.

Claude Plante
CIPO
Hull, Quebec