Full Review by Lupe Farkas

Rebels, I am no science person. Seriously. If you came here hoping I would settle the Big Bang, correct Einstein, defend Stephen Hawking, explain curved space-time, or finally tell humanity whether the universe is expanding, you have arrived at the wrong woman.

I write books. I read books. I drink an unreasonable amount of Coke Zero. That is where my expertise ends. So I cannot tell you whether Joe Fisher’s theory of the universe could be true, partially true, completely impossible, or whether somewhere Albert Einstein is currently trying to file a celestial restraining order against him.

Joe Fisher was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. He left school at sixteen, describes himself as self-taught, spent his working life with a gas company, and now lives in the United States. And Mr. Fisher is 91 years old.

Apparently 91 is still a perfectly acceptable age to pick a fight with Einstein, Hubble, Hawking and most of modern physics. I already like this man.

What I can tell you is that I read his book, and somewhere along the way, I stopped reading about the universe and started reading about Joe Fisher. That was when everything changed.

A New Theory of the Visible Universe is built around one stubborn, relentlessly repeated idea. Joe believes that what is visibly observable is the only physical reality we can truly claim to know. From there he challenges space, dimensions, time, atoms, gravity, the Big Bang, the expansion of the universe, Einstein, Newton, Galileo, Hubble, Hawking and, eventually, what feels like most of modern physics.

And when I say he challenges them, I do not mean politely. Joe did not arrive at this book carrying a basket of diplomatic language. Stephen Hawking gets called silly. Edwin Hubble fares considerably worse. Einstein is corrected. Google Scholar is interrogated repeatedly like a suspect who refuses to confess.

And yes, the book repeats itself. A lot. By the end, if someone woke me at three in the morning and whispered “visible contrasting surface,” I could probably continue the entire argument before opening my eyes.

But strangely, the repetition eventually stopped annoying me because I began to understand what I was actually reading. This was not simply a man presenting a theory. This was a man who had spent years trying to make someone listen.

Joe includes his essays, searches, correspondence, publication attempts, rejections and acceptances. He tells us about contacting scientists. He tells us about submitting his work. He shows us the doors that closed and the few that opened.

And then comes a chapter called Why Am I Not Famous?

Because underneath all the declarations about infinity, underneath the arguments with Einstein and Hawking, underneath every Google Scholar result and every capitalized proclamation, there is a very simple human question.

Joe tells us he was a high-school dropout. His father was a riveter. His mother worked part-time making brushes. He describes himself as self-taught. He spent decades thinking, questioning, writing and trying to place his ideas in front of people he believed might understand them.

And he kept going. That is the part of this book I can judge. Not the astrophysics. The persistence.

I have absolutely no intention of pretending that reading this book suddenly qualified me to announce that Joe Fisher has overturned modern cosmology. A scientific claim needs scientific scrutiny, evidence and people considerably more qualified than this Coke-Zero-powered book goblin with a Kindle.

But books are more than the factual claims they contain. Sometimes a book becomes a record of the person who needed to write it, and A New Theory of the Visible Universe is one of those books.

Joe is funny without always intending to be funny. He is infuriatingly repetitive. He is combative. He is completely convinced. He can move from discussing infinity to toilet bowls with astonishing confidence. At times I wanted to argue with him. At other times I wanted to tell him, “Joe, I heard you. You can stop shouting now.”

But I never felt indifference, and that matters.

Near the end, he writes about struggling financially and hoping the book might finally bring him some royalties. That sentence stayed with me much longer than another argument about Hubble because suddenly this enormous fight with the universe became very small and very human.

A man wrote down the idea he believed was important. He spent years trying to make people look at it. And at ninety-one years old, he is still asking them to look.

So no, Mr. Fisher, I cannot tell you whether your universe works. I cannot tell you whether Einstein was wrong. I cannot tell you whether Stephen Hawking would read this book and throw it across the room.

But I can tell you one thing.

I read it. And now your idea, your stubbornness, your strange humour, your frustration and a little piece of your life exist inside the head of a woman sitting thousands of kilometres away from you.

Mr. Fisher, you have all my admiration and respect. Not because I am qualified to declare your theory correct. I am absolutely not. But because you kept asking questions. You kept writing. You kept knocking on doors. You kept putting your work in front of people even when they ignored you, rejected you or disagreed with you.

And at an age when the world very often starts treating people as though their stories have already finished, you were still trying to add something new to the universe.

Maybe being heard is not the same thing as being famous. But it is not nothing either. And perhaps, for one reader, that visible surface just became a tiny bit bigger.

For me, 4 stars.