On Feb 5, 2011, at 12:35 PM, Jonathan Post wrote:
I plan to publish everything. Right now my inventory is backlogged
with the 4 novels that I wrote in 2010, and the 20 to 30 shorter
fictions circulating through the desks and virtual desks of the major
markets.
So let's try this experiment
You can post the story on your blog, with an explicit notice NOT to
redistribute it in hardcopy or electronically. That is, for your
readers to read, and provide feedback.
...
On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 10:34 AM, JACK SARFATTI <
ok but you plan to publish this - keep it confidential right?
On Feb 5, 2011, at 12:36 AM, Jonathan Post wrote:
Slight tweaks, as suggested by my son Andrew; and typos corrected.
Crackpot
By Jonathan Vos Post
Partial Draft 3.0, 2800 words, 12 pages
5 February 2011, 9 pages, 2,050 words [replaces Draft 2.0, 2700 words, 11 pages
31 January 2011, 9 pages, 2,050 words; 2.1 typos corrected from 1.0 of 28 Jan]
The richest man in the world fell in love with the most beautiful
crackpot. Then she vanished. As if she fell off the Earth.
The richest man, a craggy-jawed American whose face was known to
media-watchers everywhere, hired the best detectives, cops, military
police, crime scene investigators, spies, and skip-tracers. No dice.
She was gone. Cluelessly. Instantly the coldest of cold trails.
He took lovers, he retreated into a 48-hour artificially-induced coma,
he bought whores, he wined and dined three ex-wives, he indulged in
orgies, he hired and fired three people on his boards of directors who
annoyed him, he corrupted underage girls, he experimented with men and
other genders. Nothing worked. He just couldn’t get her out of his
mind. Whenever he closed his eyes, he could still see her violet
irises.
So he did something unprecedented.
Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, giving orders from the Peacock Throne,
erected many splendid monuments, most famously Taj Mahal at Agra,
built as a tomb for his wife, Empress Mumtaz Mahal, beginning in 1632,
one year after her death.
The richest man in the world, after the experts worked around the
clock and submitted the reports he’d demanded, built the Institute for
Crackpot Studies. This was built in memory of his missing crackpot
lover, beginning six months, six days, and six hours after the last
time that he had seen her. Between its Olive and Cypress tree-lined
boulevards and perfumed floral gardens, it was notable for its Great
Crackpot Library flanked by half-scale sphinxes, its tetrahelix
clock-tower with a 13-hour clock, its gold-plated observatory dome,
and its many state-of-the-art laboratories to study antigravity, time
travel, invisibility, extrasensory perception, ghosts, immortality,
alchemy, astrology, conspiracy theories, unidentified flying objects,
and a hundred other willow-the-wisps.
He hired the best science administrators, astronomers, bibliographers,
biologists, chemists, debunkers, dowsers, editors, escape artists, and
experimentalists. He hit the morning talk shows in a dozen countries.
He hired fakirs, fantasists, generalists, gurus, historians, and
hypnotists. He put wanted ads in a thousand newspapers. He had his
staff interview, rank, and hire the world’s leading mentalists,
neurologists, occultists, psychologists, rainmakers, remote viewers,
science fiction writers, skeptics, stage magicians, theologians,
theoreticians, yogins, Zwicky-ideocosmists, and anyone else his
appointed trustees said was needed. He could lure anyone away from
anywhere, with offers they couldn’t refuse.
The Institute funded every X-Files fan club, every Fringe fan club,
paid for the touring company of the Spider-Man musical, ran a hundred
public service announcements with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as
narrators, co-sponsored the San Diego Comic-Con, and awarded
“half-baked idea of the year awards”.
Full-time poets were employed at court to extol the beauty of the
Empress of the Peacock throne, who bore twenty-one children. Seven
died in childbirth. Mumtaz, give birth to her fourteenth-surviving
child in Burhanpur in 1631. This was too much for her system and she
passed away. Emperor Jahan I went into hiding for a year, so stricken
by grief, that his hair turned pure-white. He planned on a pure white
monument, and then, across the reflecting pools, a pure black mirror
image. He died before the worker broke ground on the black one.
The Institute for Crackpot Studies had an orchestra and gleeclub, and
a theme song.
They All Laughed, Lyrics by George Gershwin, melody by Ira Gershwin:
“The odds were a hundred to one against me
The world thought the heights were too high to climb
But people from Missouri never incensed me
Oh, I wasn’t a bit concerned
For from histry I had learned
How many, many times the worm had turned.”
Many conferences of scientific organizations have a “crackpot session”
where all the questionable interdisciplinary paper authors are stuffed
into one room, and not allowed to contaminate the conventional
peer-reviewed establishment. After all, crackpots can pay registration
fees and annual dues out of pocket, and some lucky ones had
corporations or universities or granting agencies that reimbursed
them.The Great Crackpot Library had every Proceedings of every
conference in the world that ever had a “crackpot session.”
In the typical crackpot session on Physics or Astronomy, there were
always Gravity Gonzos. They debated at length the same questions
every time. Does gravity pull, or push, or does the universe suck? Is
gravity the way that Isaac Newton said, with metaphysically absurd
action at a distance? Is gravity the way that Albert Einstein said,
based on some impossible warping of space-time? How fast does gravity
move, the speed of light, or infinitely fast? Is there gravitational
radiation? If so, is it electromagnetic, stringy, dipole, quadrupole,
five-dimensional, mixed with a Fifth Force, or none of those? Are
there gravitons? Do gravitons attract each other? Do two parallel
beams of light attract each other, repel each other, or does that
depend on whether they are going in the same or opposite directions?
Is the Moon spiraling in, or out? Does gravity get stronger or weaker
over time? Is gravity a force, or a flow? Do you idiots understand
that I alone am right, and you are all wasting time?
In the First Annual Report of the Institute for Crackpot Studies one
chapter was on classification of crackpots. There was one each on
preliminary classification of crackpot theories. There are, the report
said, three broad categories of crackpots, and there is nonzero
mobility between them. Although that phrase is a little crackpotty
itself.
(1) Some people have psychiatric need to attack an intellectual father
figure -- Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, George Cantor. It is more
important for them to think they’re Oedipally proving the father
wrong, than to contribute anything worthy. Anti-Einsteinians,
Anti-Darwinist, Anti-Cantorians. Their “proofs” almost invariably
attack straw men, rather than theories as published, and lack rigor.
It is nearly impossible to get these people to see what their nemesis
genuinely wrote, in context. Einstein admitted in 1906 that his 1905
Special Relativity was wrong, and set to work on General Relativity.
Darwin didn’t know Mendel, and one should read about the Neodarwinian
Synthesis.
“They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother
When they said that man could fly
They told Marconi
Wireless was a phony
It’s the same old cry.”
At the start of each new year, the richest man in the world made a
personal appearance, his salt-and-pepper hair whiter than the year
before, congratulated the entire personnel of the Institute for
Crackpot Studies, told them to keep up the good work, and reminded
them that this all started because he’d fell in love with the most
beautiful crackpot in the world, and dreamed of her every night.
By the time the Second Annual Report was published, the Institute for
Crackpot Studies had earned back half its endowment. Studying why hot
water in ice cube trays froze faster than cold water had led to the
best-selling small refrigerators in the Free World.
(2) There are people classified as crackpots who actually make
interesting, original, and testable hypotheses. Suppose 1% of the
anti-establishment figures do have an idea worthy of serious
consideration? Diamonds scattered in the parking lot gravel.
Cantor himself stated quite clearly: “I realise that in this
undertaking I place myself in a certain opposition to views widely
held concerning the mathematical infinite and to opinions frequently
defended on the nature of numbers.” At the end of May 1884 Cantor had
the first recorded attack of depression. He recovered after a few
weeks but now seemed less confident. He wrote to Mittag-Leffler: “I
don't know when I shall return to the continuation of my scientific
work. At the moment I can do absolutely nothing with it, and limit
myself to the most necessary duty of my lectures; how much happier I
would be to be scientifically active, if only I had the necessary
mental freshness.” Cantor was arguably crazy at the end of his life,
claiming that he didn’t need proofs because God told him the answers
(but so did Ramanujan, for his village Goddess, and Ramanujan was
decades ahead of everyone else).
For example, a retired Aerospace Engineer told the author of this
chapter his New Aether Theory. “First, since he was buying me dinner,
I listened. Second, I verified that he had read the serious papers of
Aether experts pre-1890, and of the Michelson–Morley experiment as
performed in 1887 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at what is now
Case Western Reserve University. Then I asked HOW the Earth could
freely move through something trillions of times more rigid than
steel.”
“He said: ‘The luminiferous Aether is a Superfluid.’ I don’t believe
he’d read Dr. Jack Sarfatti’s work on a Supersolid Aether, but at
least this was a testable, falsifiable hypothesis, and thus the start
of real Science. We do know something about quantization of vorticity
in superfluids. Let’s do the experiment, eh?”
By the time the Third Annual Report was published, the Institute for
Crackpot Studies had broken even. Its sponsorship of the IgNobel
Prizes had been a great investment. Among other lucrative products,
the device that translated dog barks into the major human languages
had sold tens of millions of copies. The app for translating baby
cries into adult language had saved numerous lives.
“They laughed at me wanting you
Said I was reaching for the moon
But oh, you came through
Now they’ll have to change their tune
They all said we never could be happy
They laughed at us and how!
But ho, ho, ho!
Who’s got the last laugh now?”
(3), continued the First Annual Report, “I am therefore willing to
listen with an open mind to people considered crackpots, because I
think that (2) above is, as some of our scholars suggest, better
called ‘Fringe.’ Mind you, I'm usually not the guy to build the
experiment. I often suggest the conceptual design of the experiment.
I’m a Theoretical Mad Scientist, like Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén,
Stephen Hawking, Edward Witten, or Max Tegmark. The Fringe needs to
collaborate with Applied Mad Scientists, like Michael Faraday,
Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz, Nikola Tesla, Linus Pauling,
Jr., or Segway inventor Dean L. Kamen. Sadly, they never listen to my
replies as carefully as I listened to their pet Theory, and not one
has gone on to test their ideas with my tests, either as
gedankenexperiment nor with real hardware. Yet I don’t give up.
Someone castigated and rejected may in fact have the basis for a
Stardrive. Let History determine that.”
By the time the Fourth Annual Report was published, the Institute for
Crackpot Studies was a billion dollars in the black. Half the
commercial flights into orbit used the improved rocket fuels, engine
designs, and guidance, navigation, and control which used a startling
discovery that came from dowsers and the fastest Rubik’s cube solvers.
The wings of the Library included the world’s most comprehensive
collections of documents on these categories and more:
ALIENS ON EARTH: they came from outer space, molest our cattle, and
abduct our women;
ALTERNATE WORLDS: history might have happened differently, and if you
don’t believe me, listen to Al Gore’s Inaugural Address;
ANTIGRAVITY: what goes up may not come down, and let me sell you a
share in my Cavorite factory;
BAMBI’S CHILDREN: animals who speak, think, or act human, and here are
tickets to the re-remake of Planet of the Apes;
BEAM ME UP: matter transmission, techno-teleportation, and can you
teleport just me but leave my common cold viruses behind?
BEYOND THE FIELDS WE KNOW: magical world unconnected to ours, since in
an infinite multiverse there must be worlds where magic works;
CITIES OF THE FUTURE: bigger, better, and more astonishing urban visions;
CLONES: chimeras, and genetic engineering, especially of people;
CYBER PUNK: near-future tales of hackers and cyberspace;
DYSTOPIA: really, really bad futures (opposite of “Utopia”);
ECOLOGY: books, stories, and films about Ecology, Biology, and Gaia;
EXTRA-SENSORY PERCEPTION: telepathy, psi, other paths to the mind;
FASTER THAN LIGHT: impossibly fast travel, beyond the Einstein
barrier; and see what this report says about Anti-Einsteinians;
FEMINISM and gender-change;
HARD SCIENCE FICTION: based on real science & engineering;
HEROIC FANTASY: also known as “Swords & Sorcery”;
HORROR: that old black magic, the really scary stuff; and maybe you
don’t need magic or demons; maybe the heat death of the universe is
horror enough; see the H.P. Lovecraft appendix;
IMMORTALITY: Those who live forever, or try to;
INVISIBILITY: Mostly about people who can’t be seen;
LOST LANDS/LOST RACE: neoprimitive place/people discovered;
MATHEMATICS: Fantasy and Science Fiction about Mathematics, circle-squaring;
MYTHOLOGY: Mythology and Science Fiction or Fantasy about Religion;
POLITICS: science fiction about social and political concerns;
SEX: love, love potions, science fiction authors who also write erotica;
SPACE OPERA: battles between planets and stars;
SPACE TRAVEL: rockets to asteroids, moons, planets, stars;
SUPERMEN: extra powers make characters more than human;
THEOLOGY: Science Fiction or Fantasy about Religion ;
THERE AND BACK AGAIN: leave our world for a more magical one; and
maybe return, as in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe;
TIME TRAVEL: time machines, travel to the past or the future;
TV and MOVIE: books spun-off from television series or sc-fi films;
UNDER THE SEA: submarines, undersea cities, underwater living
UNICORNS IN THE GARDEN: magic events within our mundane world; see
also: miracle;
UTOPIA: Fictional and Nonfictional glimpses of an ideal future;
WORLD COMES TO AN END: no more civilization, or people, or worse...;
YOU CAN TELL A BOOK BY ITS COVER: science fiction, fantasy, horror.
They had, actually, the second largest library of arcana and the
occult, but only because the Vatican had been at it much longer. Also,
it took a while to pay the bribes needed to keep books bound in human
skin.
“They all laughed at Rockefeller center
Now they’re fighting to get in
They all laughed at Whitney and his cotton gin
They all laughed at Fulton and his steamboat
Hershey and his chocolate bar
Ford and his misery
Kept the laughers busy
That’s how people are.”
By the time the Fourth Annual Report was published, the Institute for
Crackpot Studies was two billion dollars in the black. A 9-year-old
girl in Borneo had come up with a new twist on a cat’s cradle pattern
her great-grandmother had taught her, and a suite of patents on
innovative loom design brought vast royalties from the Chinese
fabric-makers and clothing manufacturers who dominated that global
market.
And then, six years, six months, six days, and six hours after the
last time that he had seen her, the Chairman of the Trustees of the
Institute for Crackpot Studies ushered the missing the most beautiful
crackpot into the sea-side skyscraper-mansion of the richest man in
the world.
“Yes,” said the Chairman, “she vanished. As if she fell off the
Earth. She had, in fact, fallen off the Earth. We figured out how to
levitate back onto the Earth.”
“They laughed at me wanting you
Said it would be, ‘hello, goodbye.’
But oh, you came through
Now they’re eating humble pie
They all said we’d never get together
Darling, lets take a bow
For ho, ho, ho!
Who’s got the last laugh?
He, hee, hee!
Let’s at the past laugh
Ha, ha, ha!
Who’s got the last laugh now?”
And they lived happily ever after. I mean really ever after. Because
by the time the Thirteenth Annual Report was published, an old
Kashmiri folk medicine had turned out to be the key, when combined
with the latest Nanotechnology, to genuine immortality. It was
mind-numbingly expensive. But just within reach of one man.
Being the richest man in the world can break your heart. But it can
also buy the ultimate happy ending. In another 66 years, the
antigravity aether-drive starship, named in her honor, left for the
gas giant planet orbiting Episilon Eridani, and the two debris belts
composed of rocky asteroids, 10.5 light years away, the third closest
star system visible to the naked eye, and returned within a week.
Ha, ha, ha!
Who’s got the last laugh now?”
===The End ===
1700-1929 1130-1219 0000-0032
28 Jan 2011 31 Jan 2011 5 Feb 2011 JVP\acp\crackpotdoc
<crackpot2.doc>