 The leading character is Jim Carter, a man with an "unshakable belief" in a theory of the whole universe constructed of "endless hierarchies of circlons", circular mechanical objects that reproduce and split like smoke rings.Unknown to Carter, his basic idea that atoms could be explained as subatomic smoke rings had already been proposed in the 1870s by the renowned English physicist William Thomson (later Baron Kelvin), and the Scottish mathematician P.G.Tait.