The Best Australian Science Writing 2012 by Elizabeth Finkel Page A

in a trailer park on a spectacular piece of land nestled in a forest on the lip of the aptly named Green River Gorge. It turned out that he owned the land and had built the trailer park himself. On his front lawn he had a collection of huge vintage Chryslers and Cadillacs rusting in picturesque heaps. There was a pet swan that followed him around like a dog. He also had two actual dogs, plus a wife and two young sons, and the swan must have understood something about his affection for his family, because every time his wife came near it, it hissed and spat and tried to bite her. Soon after I met Jim the swan disappeared – a gang of local trailer park dogs was suspected of the crime. I kept going back, and over the years my encounter with him has grown into one of the strangest and most challenging relationships of my life. Quietly and inexorably, as I sought to understand what makes Jim tick I began to realise that I had to reassess what makes the science of physics itself tick.
    As I intersected with Carter’s life and work I began to wonder what exactly is the role of theoretical physics in the collective life of our society? What functions does it serve?
    For whom? And how? And why?
    * * * * *
    Jim Carter is a small man, about 175 cm and wiry framed. He is one of those men whose hair began to recede early, giving his head a high, domed, sage-like appearance. At 66 he wears his age lightly and his eyes, now deeply creased, are prone to twinkle in a face that often lights up with amusement. As a well-broughtup country boy Jim is too polite to laugh outright at his fellow human beings, but his wide mouth frequently lurches into a smirk as if he is enjoying some private joke. What hair he does have is now grey and he wears it at a medium length cut evenly round the bottom like the fringe hanging off a lampshade. In his youth the hair was long and sun-bleached and in photos from the 1960s he exudes a cheeky larrikin charm.
    In 1976, when the Carters took over the property, Jim was returning to live in the country that was in his blood. He had grown up in Buckley, a tiny hamlet just down the road from Enumclaw that stands within view of Mount Rainier. Though he had been born in Seattle, when he was five years old his family had moved to Buckley and a 16 hectare farm. In addition to farming, his father held a full-time job as a handyman at a local school for the disabled; farming was a supplement and a means of survival. His mother, Phyllis, kept an enormous vegetable garden that went a long way towards feeding the family. Jim and his brother John grew up milking cows, mowing hay, repairing tractors and knowing what it meant to be self-sufficient.
    Even as a child, Phyllis now recalls, Jim insisted ‘on taking things apart and putting them back together again’. Whenever he was given a new toy, the first thing he would do was to pull it apart to see what was happening inside. Like the young Isaac Newton, who spent his youth building wooden windmills and other mechanical contrivances, Jim came into the world with an inherent love of machines. He would never tolerate anyone else explaining how something might function. As Phyllis tells the story, Jim was a headstrong child, always determined to dothings in his own way. Today, at 97, Phyllis herself is a force, a minute birdlike woman in full command of her faculties and with no tolerance for ‘nonsense’. A churchgoing teetotaller, she has spent her long life working hard, living quietly and staying home. ‘What would you want to do that for?’ is one of her frequent phrases, and it seems more than possible that her son’s adventurous nature is at least in part a reaction to his mother’s awareness of limits.
    It was the farm rather than school that got Jim thinking about science. With ‘the push and pull reality of a farm boy’, he says, he ‘began to understand, little by little, how the world must work’. Using levers and