Jean-Émile Charon (1920–1998) was a French physicist and philosopher, a graduate of the École supérieure de physique et de chimie de Paris (1944). After work in nuclear physics at France's Commissariat à l'énergie atomique in Saclay and a stint in the United States as a scientific attaché at the French Embassy in Washington (1948–1951), he devoted himself to theoretical physics, seeking to extend Einstein's work toward a unified theory of the universe. The author of more than twenty books on science and philosophy, he is best known for his theory of complex relativity and the concept of infrapsychism, the notion that each elementary particle possesses a form of consciousness and memory. Among his most widely read works: L'Esprit, cet inconnu (1977) and La Science et l'Au-delà (1980).