French scientist
Laurent Nottale (born 29 July 1952) is an astrophysicist, a retired director of research at CNRS, and a researcher at the Paris Observatory. He is the author and inventor of the theory of scale relativity, which aims to unify quantum physics and relativity theory.
Scientific career.
Nottale began his professional work in the domain of general relativity. He defended his PhD Thesis in June 1980, entitled "Perturbation of the Hubble relation by clusters of galaxies", in which he showed that clusters of galaxies as a whole may act as gravitational lenses on distant sources. Some of these results were reported in "Nature".
He also published a popular book "L'Univers et la Lumière", Flammarion, Nouvelle Bibliothèque Scientifique 1994, Champs 1998) for which he received a prize in 1995 (Prix du livre d'Astronomie Haute-Maurienne-Vanoise).
According to Vincent Bontems and Yves Gingras there are two distinct phases in Nottale's scientific career. From 1975 to 1991 this included conventional topics, such as gravitational lenses, while from 1984 onwards he focused on developing his theory of scale relativity, a proposal for a theory of physics based on fractal space-time.
The theory of scale relativity.
The theory of scale relativity emerged out of a desire to establish a foundation for quantum mechanics based on first physical principles: the principle of relativity, the geometric interpretation of physical properties and the optimization principle interpreted as a geodesic principle. In a similar way that gravity is the manifestation of the intrinsic curved geometry of spacetime in general relativity, the quantum properties here are the manifestation of another property of spacetime at small scales, its intrinsic non-differentiability. Besides proposing a better foundation for microphysical quantum mechanics, it also proposes that many macroscopic classical systems with highly chaotic behaviour can be considered as non-differentiable and thus described by macroscopic quantum-like laws. Examples of such applications are: planetary formation in the protoplanetary disk phase, violent ejection processes such as the creation of planetary nebulae or turbulence in fluids.
The proposal has not attracted wide acceptance by the scientific community.
References.
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