If there is an award for most ambitious amateur scientist of 2003, Mark McCutcheon must be a candidate.
He says Newton and Albert Einstein have led the entire scientific establishment in the wrong direction for 300 and some years.
There is, he argues, no such thing as gravity – at least, not as those great men explained it. What goes up does not come down. It stays "up". But the Earth expands to meet it.
According to McCutcheon, everything in the universe is getting bigger all the time. We do not notice because we are growing at the same rate – and so is everything around us, including the rulers and dials we measure with.
He even comes up with convincing looking figures. Every atom increases by about a millionth of its size a second, he says. That drives the Earth's surface outwards 4.9 metres (16 feet) every second. And both the planet and ourselves double in size every 19 minutes.
When you start to think about it, he says, Expansion Theory is no more bizarre than the idea of a mysterious force which is always pulling inwards.
A 38-year-old Canadian electrical engineer, now living in Sydney, Australia, he published a 400-page book of explanation of his ideas this autumn, optimistically entitled The Final Theory?
He advertised it in serious scientific magazines and sent review copies to dozens of serious scientists, none of whom has replied.
But he has picked up some fans in those areas of the internet where any idea which challenges conventional thinking is good.
Sir Isaac Newton is said to have "discovered" gravity by wondering why an apple fell out of its tree. He proposed that accumulations of matter, like Earth and Sun, were held together by a force which reached out into the space round them.
It seemed to explain a lot. But it did not explain everything. And 220 years later, Albert Einstein came up with some refinements.
Einstein said the journeys of light and other things through space, which appeared to be straight, would in fact be curved, over great distances, because of the gravity of matter. Most famously, he said time and space were linked in a way that meant the faster you travelled, the slower time passed, until it stood still.
The idea was checked out by people who thought they understood what he meant and they told the rest of us that Einstein was brilliant.
But McCutcheon says Einstein's thinking was not complete.
"If it were, it would resolve the mysteries and problems with Newtonian theory and hail a new era of understanding and clarity. Instead, it introduces more abstraction and mystery."
McCutcheon himself says he was inspired by two notions...
1. Flatland: A science-fiction story, published in 1884, about beings that were like drawings on a tabletop. If a three-dimensional cone passed through, so that its cross-section in Flatland got bigger all the time, nobody would understand it.
2. The Space Elevator: As Einstein acknowledged, the device we call a lift, travelling up through outer space, would have no "gravity" but would feel as if it had. If we jumped, we would return to the floor.
McCutcheon proposes... Like the people in Flatland, we only know what we have always known. Could we be riding outwards on the Space Elevator instead of being held down by gravity?
If you entertain the possibility, a hundred more questions follow. And he addresses them in some detail in his self-financed book.
Why don't we bump into the Moon or neighbouring planets? Because they are moving through space at a rate which keeps them ahead of our combined expansion rates.
What about tides? Caused by wobble in the Earth's spin.
What keeps the planets in their orbits if there is no gravity? Orbits are, generally speaking, an illusion, caused by criss-crossing paths through space and the changing perspectives caused by planetary expansion.
How come we successfully programme spaceships and predict the movements of the heavens with calculations based on gravity and orbits? It is another illusion that we do, says McCutcheon. There are simple geometrical rules about the movements of planets which worked pretty well before Newton and the sums still work. Newton just gave an identity to the unknown element in the equation. And Einstein did the same – took known observations and constructed a theory to fit.
McCutcheon does not see why he should not do the same thing.
Where does all the expansion come from? McCutcheon thinks his answer to that is his most important insight. The second half of his book explains a theory of atomic structure in which the electron is the fundamental expanding particle of the universe, all things have been formed from electron coagulations and the boundaries of the atom are constantly being pushed outwards by electron escape bids.
McCutcheon says this explains electricity, magnetism and everything else you can think of.
And without the help of an expert, it is impossible to be sure he is wrong. He clearly understands the established science better than most of us (he studied physics as part of his electrical engineering degree). As a Yorkshireman might say, he might be barmy but he's not daft.
He says: "In five years of living with this theory and questioning it even to myself, daily, I have not found anything that cannot be explained equally well or better by it. It is a sensible and viable paradigm for interpreting and understanding our entire universe and, if I may say so myself, it is an enormous achievement even as a work of enjoyable fiction – though of course I believe it is far more than that."
chris.benfield@ypn.co.uk