Paul Howard Frampton is an English theoretical physicist who works in particle theory and cosmology. From 1996 until 2014, he was the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Distinguished Professor of physics and astronomy, at the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC, UNC–Chapel Hill, or simply Carolina) is a public university, public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. Chartered in 1789, the university first began enrolli ...

. After a well-publicized hiatus involving being victimized by a romance scam, convicted of drug smuggling in Argentina, and fired by UNC (in which he won a lawsuit for wrongful termination), he later became affiliated with the Department of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Salento, in Italy.

Early life

Born in

Kidderminster Kidderminster is a market town and civil parish in Worcestershire, England, south-west of Birmingham and north of Worcester, England, Worcester. Located north of the River Stour, Worcestershire, River Stour and east of the River Severn, in th ...

, England, Frampton attended King Charles I School from 1954–1962 and then

Brasenose College, Oxford Brasenose College (BNC) is one of the Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. It began as Brasenose Hall in the 13th century, before being founded as a college in 1509. The l ...

from 1962–1968. He received the degrees of BA ( double first) in 1965, MA, DPhil in 1968 and DSc in 1984, all from the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

Career

He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1990) and the American Physical Society (1981). In 1987 he was the project director for siting the Superconducting Supercollider, in

North Carolina North Carolina ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, South Carolina to the south, Georgia (U.S. stat ...

. A

Festschrift In academia, a ''Festschrift'' (; plural, ''Festschriften'' ) is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during their lifetime. It generally takes the form of an edited volume, containing contributions from the h ...

was published for his 60th birthday in 2003. His DPhil thesis analyzed the relationship between current algebra and superconvergence sum rules, and contained a 1967 sum rule. In 1970, he analyzed the absence of

ghosts In folklore, a ghost is the soul or Spirit (supernatural entity), spirit of a dead Human, person or non-human animal that is believed by some people to be able to appear to the living. In ghostlore, descriptions of ghosts vary widely, from a ...

in the dual resonance model. Three examples of his model building are the chiral color model, in 1987, which predicts axigluons; the 331 model, in 1992, which can explain the number of quark-lepton generations, and predicts bileptons; his proposal, in 1995, of the binary tetrahedral group as a flavor symmetry. All three serve as targets of opportunity for the

Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, ...

(LHC). In 2002, he built a model relating matter–antimatter asymmetry in the early universe to measurements possible on Earth. In 2015, he showed that the 331-model predicts long-lived quarks accessible to Run 2 of the LHC. In formal directions, three examples are that he calculated, in 1976, the rate of vacuum decay in

quantum field theory In theoretical physics, quantum field theory (QFT) is a theoretical framework that combines Field theory (physics), field theory and the principle of relativity with ideas behind quantum mechanics. QFT is used in particle physics to construct phy ...

; in 1982, he analyzed ten-dimensional gauge field theory, and its hexagon anomaly, precursor to the first superstring revolution; in 1988, he constructed the Lagrangian which describes the dynamics of the p-adic string. For cosmology, two examples are, in 2007, he built a

cyclic model A cyclic model (or oscillating model) is any of several cosmological models in which the universe follows infinite, or indefinite, self-sustaining cycles. For example, the oscillating universe theory briefly considered by Albert Einstein in 1930 ...

which can solve a 75-year-old

entropy Entropy is a scientific concept, most commonly associated with states of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty. The term and the concept are used in diverse fields, from classical thermodynamics, where it was first recognized, to the micros ...

problem; in 2010, he discussed how

dark energy In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is a proposed form of energy that affects the universe on the largest scales. Its primary effect is to drive the accelerating expansion of the universe. It also slows the rate of structure format ...

may be better understood by studying

temperature Temperature is a physical quantity that quantitatively expresses the attribute of hotness or coldness. Temperature is measurement, measured with a thermometer. It reflects the average kinetic energy of the vibrating and colliding atoms making ...

and entropy. In 2015, he demonstrated how cyclic entropy can lead to flat geometry without an inflationary era and estimated the time until contraction to be close to one hundred times the present age of the universe. In 2015 he also proposed a novel theory of

dark matter In astronomy, dark matter is an invisible and hypothetical form of matter that does not interact with light or other electromagnetic radiation. Dark matter is implied by gravity, gravitational effects that cannot be explained by general relat ...

, where the dark matter constituents are primordial black holes with many solar masses. In 2022, he published the idea that the accelerated cosmologicial expansion is caused by Coulomb repulsion between like-sign electrically-charged Primordial Extremely Massive Black Holes (PEMBHs).

Drug smuggling conviction

In January 2012, Frampton was arrested at the Buenos Aires airport after checking in a bag containing 2 kilograms of cocaine hidden in the lining. That November, Frampton was convicted of drug smuggling in Argentina and was sentenced to four years and eight months in detention. He said that he was a victim of a romance scam, and that he was tricked into transporting the suitcase. While in prison, Frampton was diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder by a forensic psychologist hired by his legal team, a condition which Frampton says makes him gullible and more susceptible to such a scam. Soon after his arrest, his pay was stopped and he was placed on personal leave. The move was widely criticized by the academic community. He was fired from his UNC post in 2014. On 16 June 2015, an appeals court in North Carolina unanimously ruled that his university violated its own policies by placing Frampton on unpaid leave while he awaited trial, and ordered the university to restore Frampton's back salary and benefits. Frampton's account of these events was published in 2014. Under Argentine law, a foreign national can be released from prison and deported after serving half of his sentence. Frampton was granted such release and returned to England in 2015, agreeing never to return to Argentina.

Subsequent work

Since his return to England, Frampton has continued to author physics papers. These include ''A new direction for dark matter research: intermediate-mass compact halo objects'' (2016), ''Exploring scalar and vector bileptons at the LHC in a 331 model'' (2018), and ''Electromagnetic accelerating universe'' (2022). In 2023, he expanded the explanation of this novel cosmological model and showed the internal consistency when there is no dark energy but only charged dark matter.

Publications

Frampton's first publication was ''Chirality Commutator and Vector Mesons'', in 1967. He has published over 500 articles on particle theory and cosmology. He was the author of a book on string theory, in 1974 (2nd edition, 1986), when it was still named the dual resonance model. In 1986, he published a book on

(2nd edition 2000, 3rd edition 2008). A book on cyclic

cosmology Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe, the cosmos. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', with the meaning of "a speaking of the wo ...

, for the general public, was published in 2009. A book on the history of particle theory was published in 2020.

References

External links

Paul Frampton's home pagePaul Frampton's publications at Google Scholar Researchgate references to/by Paul Frampton, Univ. of Salento
{{DEFAULTSORT:Frampton, Paul 1943 births 20th-century British physicists 21st-century British physicists Living people Alumni of Brasenose College, Oxford English people convicted of drug offences English people imprisoned abroad British theoretical physicists University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty British particle physicists Phenomenologists People from Kidderminster Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows of the American Physical Society Prisoners and detainees of Argentina People with schizoid personality disorder