Laurent Nottale


Laurent Nottale 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.
According to Vincent Bontems and 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.

Nottale and Scale Relativity theory

Scale relativity claims to extend the concept of relativity to physical scales.
Proponents have made wide-ranging claims on its behalf, including applications to the existence of dark matter and the formation of planetary systems, as well as to biology, geology, and the technological singularity.
Nottale, himself, did not study technological singularties.
However, the proposal has not attracted wide acceptance by the scientific community.

Selected publications