Decrypting God's Language, and Other Items From Professors' Crackpot Files

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By RICHARD MONASTERSKY

Many professors quietly keep them, either hanging in the back of some file cabinet or stashed in the digital recesses of an e-mail account. And when work gets too stressful or they need a chuckle before bedtime, they pull out those messages — the ones that are too weird, funny, or creatively punctuated to throw away.

Scott A. Hughes, an associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received a 22-page, single-spaced screed this May just begging for a place in the crackpot file. The subject line read, in part, "God's language is CRYPTOGRAPHY which reveals that Global Warming is the end of the world." That message also went to 33 other physicists at MIT, Harvard, and Princeton.

A standout inquiry from last year, sent by an engineer in India, included a paper on the "Discovery of Intelligence Field" and requested that Mr. Hughes nominate the author for a Nobel Prize, "as I can not noimnate for myself," explained the engineer.

Mr. Hughes is something of a magnet for enthusiastic theorists with poor spelling. As an astrophysicist, he publishes often on Einstein's theory of general relativity, which exerts a powerful pull on people with a weak grasp on reality. Amateur physicists love to take shots at the man with the crazy hair. "There are some people out there who suffer from a Don Quixote syndrome, and they just come galloping toward Einstein," says Mr. Hughes.

On his Web site, he tries to dissuade people from sending him their discoveries: "If you have found the Ultimate Theory of the Universe … I'm very happy for you, but I really don't care to hear about it."

Mr. Hughes is in good company when it comes to attracting attention from would-be geniuses. Fields as diverse as archaeology, literature, and mathematics each nurture a different type of crank, according to researchers contacted by The Chronicle. Most often, the obsessed attention seekers are harmless, even when they accost professors at meetings or wander the halls of a department looking for an open door. But some reach beyond private inquiries to post bile-filled messages about a scholar's work on Internet discussion groups. And one professor who studied cranks was even sued by an irate correspondent, who later came knocking on his front door.

The taxonomy of crankdom includes one genus that mixes mania with money. William H. Schlesinger often hears from people hawking inventions to solve the world's energy problems. "Someone will come into my office or e-mail me or call me and tell me they've got a solar cell that is 50 percent effective … or automobile designs that get 100 miles per gallon and emit no CO2," he says. As president of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and a former dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, Mr. Schlesinger finds that most of these inventors are casting about for an established scientist and a university connection to legitimize their products, but they invariably refuse to let him see their designs.

The topic of how to deal with calls from random people recently drew the attention of the anonymous blogger Female Science Professor. Most academics, she says, are too polite or too committed to teaching to turn away requests from what she terms wackos.

For Jodi Magness, a professor of early Judaism and archaeology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, some of the messages are oddly personal. "I have even gotten marriage proposals from complete strangers," she says with a laugh. Other letters come from members of the public who "are just interested and have ideas, but the ideas are not feasible and not grounded in academic reality — where Noah's ark is located, for example."

On occasion, however, the correspondences turn combative, even threatening. When Ms. Magness published a critical essay recently about a television documentary that linked a tomb outside Jerusalem to Jesus, she received an e-mail message from a computer-science graduate student that she described as "a little scary."

She says she often replies to e-mail messages, trying to keep the tone polite and professional. She answers basic questions and refers people to places where they can get more details. Other researchers say that they typically respond to questions from students and genuine requests for information from the public. But when academics try to rein in a patently unrealistic idea, "you're automatically dismissed as being a stuffy academic," says Ms. Magness.

Douglas Bruster, a professor of English and a Shakespeare scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, says that in the past people often contacted him to push their own theories about the true author of Shakespeare's plays. But with the advent of Wikipedia, electronic mailing lists, and other outlets for ideas, he says, "now people can talk to themselves and other converts about these things and pretty much leave us out of it, which is not a bad thing."

While most professors keep the obsessed at arms' length, Underwood Dudley has gone hunting for them. An emeritus professor of mathematics at DePauw University, Mr. Dudley wrote a book called Mathematical Cranks and a follow-up called The Trisectors, about amateurs who are convinced they have discovered something ABSOLUTELY AMAZING.

When asked what kind of advice he would give other researchers, Mr. Dudley does not equivocate. "You want to discourage the cranks as much as possible," he says. "Try to get them to quit, throw their stuff away. Tell them there's a federal law against this stuff, and if they don't stop, they'll be thrown in jail. Anything to get them to quit."

While doing research for his books, Mr. Dudley says he corresponded with hundreds of cranks and even visited three of them. One person he quoted anonymously sued him unsuccessfully three times and even sought him out at home, but fortunately Mr. Dudley was out.

Could Mr. Dudley, himself, be a bit obsessed when it comes to the topic of cranks?

"That's too strong." he says. "I'm just interested."