All science writers, especially those of us who cover particle physics and other fields that purport to reveal ultimate reality, hear from cranks. Pre-email, I got envelopes stuffed with manuscripts, sometimes hundreds of pages long, from people unaffiliated with any research institution known to me. Some letters were so baroque—the text hand-written in shifting scripts and colors, veering between technical and mystical arcana, adorned with fantastical diagrams—that their authors had to be floridly psychotic. Lucid or not, the writers invariably wanted to inform me of a revolutionary new theory that would solve the mystery of, well, everything. If I helped reveal this Truth to the world, I could share the glory!
A couple of decades ago, I made the mistake of faxing an ironic response to what I thought was an ironic faxed letter. The writer—let’s call him Tachyon Tad—had “discovered” a new physics, one that allowed for faster-than-light travel. In my reply, I told Tad that if he built a warp-drive spaceship, I’d love to hitch a ride. Dumb joke. For months, my fax machine churned out sheets covered with Tad’s dense elaborations of his theory and plans for a superluminal machine.
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