archimedes plutonium in the sioux falls argus leader
oocc
A King or a Crackpot?: Prolific Net poster theorizes about universe from
Meckling
Nestor Ramos June 29, 2008
On the streets of Vermillion, people call him Archie.
In Meckling, where he lives, children call him Bee Man as he walks
through town in a beekeeper's suit. But he keeps no bees.
And online, where he is internationally famous, mathematicians and
scientists call him a kook, a crank and a nuisance.
But when you hear his name - his legal name - you will not believe it.
Are you ready?
Archimedes Plutonium.
Again?
Archimedes Plutonium, and he calls himself the King of All Science. And
if the wild theory that has taken control of the past 18 years of
Archimedes Plutonium's life turns out to be true, then our entire galaxy
is contained in the 94th electron of an incomprehensibly vast plutonium
atom.
But if Archimedes Plutonium is not right - if he is, in fact, flagrantly
and spectacularly wrong - then he is another lonely man living on
society's outskirts, albeit one who has achieved a large-scale infamy.
His fame largely is unknown even to the neighbors who regard him as an
eccentric friend. It has grown since the earliest days of the Internet,
when Plutonium worked as a dishwasher - albeit a dishwasher with a
master's degree - on the Ivy League campus at Dartmouth University. As
he wrote more and more about his theory online, his celebrity grew - as
much for his incredible persistence as for his outsized ideas. His fame
spread further as he became tangentially involved in a high profile
murder investigation. And it continues today from South Dakota.
"I could be wrong. I know that. A lot of people call me a nut, a
crackpot," Plutonium said, standing amid the chaos of one of his homes.
"I thought I'd be a nobody. And then, by 1990, I had this theory."
Certainly, this much is true: Archimedes Plutonium is not a nobody. He
is anything but.
His theory
Have you ever found yourself so fascinated by something that it consumes
you, whether for a few minutes or a few days? Your daily routine seems
trivial or even hollow. Talking with friends or relatives, you bend the
conversation toward the idea you can't shake.
On the night of Nov. 7, 1990, that happened to a man named Ludwig
Hansen. He changed his name - formerly Ludwig Poehlmann, formerly Ludwig
von Ludwig, formerly Ludwig Plutonium - to Archimedes Plutonium and
never looked back.
His theory struck three years earlier, but Archimedes Plutonium found
his true calling in 1993. His first post to the online discussion
network Usenet was a refutation of Andrew Wiles's famous proof of
Fermat's Last Theorem, a baffling complex idea that had frustrated
mathematicians for centuries.
His second post - and many of the tens of thousands that have come since
- was about Atom Totality Theory, the defining idea of his life.
Usenet is, in many ways, a precursor to the Internet as we know it now.
Users post messages to various different categories, responding and
interacting with one another. For Plutonium, it was a chance to spread
his theory to far more people than he ever could before.
He had a degree in mathematics from the University of Cincinnati and a
master's in education from Utah State University, and an e-mail account
from Dartmouth University, where he worked washing pots at Dartmouth
University's Hanover Inn and restaurant. Dartmouth was one of the first
campuses in the country to embrace the Internet by giving everyone on
campus an e-mail address, and Plutonium spent hours on the university
computer terminals. To a mathematician a world away, he might as well
have been a nobel-level thinker.
Now 57, Plutonium always has been solitary. He said his family
immigrated from Germany when he was a young boy - he was Ludwig
Poehlmann then - and that he was adopted by a family in Cincinnati who,
his parents felt, could give him a better life: The Hansens. His
adoptive father was a landscape architect from whom he got his love of
trees.
For a quiet man with a gospel to spread, Usenet newsgroups were, first
and foremost, a way to unleash the Atom Totality Theory on the world. In
brief, his theory suggests that the universe as we know it is a single
plutonium atom, with galaxies existing within its protons and electrons
and a nucleus far, far away.
"An electron is an electron-dot-cloud, much like a windshield broken
into millions of pieces of glass shards and one of those glass shards is
the Milky Way Galaxy," Plutonium said. "A different glass shard is a
different galaxy. So every object in the night sky of astronomy is a
tiny piece of the last single electron of the Atom Totality."
He thinks his theory unites science and religion. "Most scientists are
atheists," Plutonium said, "but my theory is a scientific theory (that)
puts God back into science. If everything is one big atom, that's God."
The key numbers that define a plutonium atom parallel the great numbers
in all of mathematics: Some approximate pi. Some account for the E in
Einstein's famous equation.
Plutonium has held forth on these and other ideas many times a day, at
great length, every day, for 15 years.
He's posted so often and with such consistency that some believe he is
not real, but rather a computer program - a "bot" - written long ago by
Dartmouth students.
A 'perfect neighbor'
But Archimedes Plutonium is very real.
The cinder block garage outside the trailer home in Meckling where
Plutonium spends most of his time is decorated with flatware - gold and
silver knives and spoons are mortared high on the walls.
Every surface in his living space is painted white, and scientific
contraptions litter the place.
He also owns the large fire-damaged home across a field of trees and
shrubs, where a neighbor keeps her llama and pony. And the old gift shop
along the main highway - he owns that, too. And the two plots along the
main drive into Vermillion. All told, the assessed value of his
property, which he owns outright, is about $100,000. The sale value
likely is quite a bit more.
All the women who work at the Clay County Courthouse know him by name.
"Oh, sure, Archie." His name brings a knowing smile at the sheriff's
department, too, where they say he's never caused any trouble.
His neighbor, April Gawboy, said she gets along well with Archie.
"He really cares about me and my children," she said. "He really kind of
watches out for us. He's what I would call a perfect neighbor."
Gawboy recalled when Plutonium came to her house to cut away some shrubs
that had overgrown, then hauled away the refuse.
"I trust him 100 percent," she said, "but he's very different." He wears
a beekeeper's suit to fend off mosquitoes, but Gawboy said the neighbors
suspect his many tubs of rainwater breed armies of them.
She was surprised to learn her kindly neighbor was well known for his
scientific ideas.
"Like Einstein? I had no idea!" she said. Well, yes and no.
"He has more interest in mathematics and physics than the average
person, certainly, and so he's picked up some understanding in math and
physics (and a lot of misunderstanding)," said Jesse Hughes, an adjunct
professor of philosophy at Bennett College and Salem State College in
Arlington, Mass., in an e-mail.
Hughes, a long-time contributor to many of the same Usenet newsgroup
that Plutonium frequents, called Plutonium's theory "mind-bogglingly
silly," and dubbed him the "reigning king of Usenet cranks."
"I would not say his ideas are credible in the least. A few readers,
more charitable than I am, try their darnedest to read what he writes in
the best light possible. Thus, if it is possible to interpret what he
writes in a positive, coherent manner, they will do so, even if it means
pretending he said more than he did. Any appearance of credibility is a
bit like Nostradamus's reputation for prescience: Both authors gain
prestige because their vague writings can be interpreted positively."
Ahead of his time
Like most scientifically inclined would-be revolutionaries, Plutonium
thinks he simply is ahead of his time.
"While Democritus was living, he probably thought that no one would know
him," after he was dead, Plutonium said. "They burned all his books.
They hated him, and wrote bad about him." Plutonium considers himself
the next in a line of men of science that begins with Democritus, the
great Greek thinker who gave the world atomic theory - the idea that
everything is made up of tiny bits of matter called atoms.
"Most cranks have the image of science as advancing by revolutionaries,
with dull tedium in between the exciting bits. All revolutionaries are
mocked mercilessly by the old school dogmatists, but the revolutionary
always wins out in the end (sometimes after death). The crank notices,
of course, that he is mocked mercilessly, too, so he draws the
attractive conclusion," Hughes wrote.
How does he know he's not one of the crackpots?
"I don't know," he said. "I don't know. But if you're not able to change
your ideas, you're probably a crackpot. I'm willing to change. A
crackpot, he gets onto an idea, and he's not willing to budge."
The mockery of Archimedes Plutonium began in earnest at Dartmouth, a
time he is reluctant to talk about, and that did not end well.
Riding a bicycle and wearing a hunting cap and homemade cape covered in
mathematical equations, he was probably asking for it.
Plutonium's firing from his job at Dartmouth's Hanover Inn is chronicled
in Eric Francis's book "The Dartmouth Murders," a true crime book about
the 2001 murder of two Dartmouth professors, Half and Susanne Zantop.
Plutonium was briefly a suspect in the killings.
Plutonium's employment at Dartmouth was doomed before the Zantops were
murdered. His online posts at the time included long, detailed
complaints about his job and unfair treatment by the university.
After the professors turned up dead, his posts gained an eerie menace.
"Dartmouth science professors, instead of helping Archimedes Plutonium,
mocked and persecuted AP," he wrote in one of his posts cursing the
university before leaving for South Dakota.
According to Francis' account, detectives investigating the murders
wanted to speak with Plutonium and contacted him by e-mail, but he
refused to call. When they finally contacted him, he said he'd been
online, in South Dakota, posting on Usenet at the time of the murders.
It checked out. His prolific Internet-posting habits cleared him.
Living in the Midwest
Why South Dakota? And why does a man who seems so determined to find
attention on the Internet remove himself so completely from society?
The clean air, for one: Plutonium is an environmentalist, and he loves
planting trees. Dozens of saplings adorn his various properties. He's
ready to leave town if the proposed oil refinery goes up.
The Atom Totality Theory suggests a different reason.
"There is no free will in the universe," Plutonium said. "My death is
written in the nucleus." Plutonium believes in super-determinism, in
which everything in the universe is a puppet on a string.
The greatest geological events and the tiniest movements always were
bound to happen. The paths traced by a falling leaves are pre-ordained.
Archimedes Plutonium demonstrates the use of a Van de Graaff generator
in his Meckling home. (Photos by Lara Neel / Argus Leader)
pete
> But if Archimedes Plutonium is not right - if he is, in fact, flagrantly
> and spectacularly wrong - then he is another lonely man living on
> society's outskirts, albeit one who has achieved a large-scale infamy.
If you were taking bets, what odds would you give?
> His fame largely is unknown even to the neighbors who regard him as an
> eccentric friend. It has grown since the earliest days of the Internet,
> when Plutonium worked as a dishwasher - albeit a dishwasher with a
> master's degree - on the Ivy League campus at Dartmouth University. As
> he wrote more and more about his theory online, his celebrity grew - as
> much for his incredible persistence as for his outsized ideas.
He was a POTWASHER and was insulted by anybody
who called him a dishwasher.
--
pete
Tim Chmielewski
oo...@cakefarts.com:
> Argus Leader
>
> A King or a Crackpot?: Prolific Net poster theorizes about universe from
> Meckling
>
> Nestor Ramos June 29, 2008
>
>
Any photos or an online version of the article? I have only ever seen one
photo of him.
Thanks.
--
My Photos: http://photos.timchuma.com
Selected photo prints now available: http://timchuma.redbubble.com/
Hong Kong movie reviews: http://hkmovies.timchuma.com
Love Sarah: http://lovesarah.timchuma.com
Wiblur the Once
news:jMSdncRiR5utsSbV...@earthlink.com:
> He was a POTWASHER and was insulted by anybody
> who called him a dishwasher.
Post Proof or Retract!
ps: This is my favorite way to get someone to do my homeowrk for me.
--
"Lots of former sitcom stars eat dog food. Except for the unsuccessful
ones, who only get to eat lead paint chips and, as an Easter treat, a dust
bunny." - James "Kibo" Parry
http://www.wiblovia.com - The Wiblovian Institute of Kibology
Dr. HotSalt
> o...@cakefarts.com (oocc) wrote in news:1imj9c6.p1xohsrg8cg9N%
> o...@cakefarts.com:
>
> > Argus Leader
>
> > A King or a Crackpot?: Prolific Net poster theorizes about universe from
> > Meckling
>
> > Nestor Ramos June 29, 2008
>
> Any photos or an online version of the article? I have only ever seen one
> photo of him.
(beware wrap)
> Thanks.
Yer welcome, I think.
I'm reminded of Elwood P. Dowd recounting his mother giving him the
'smart/nice' choice.
Dr. HotSalt
Dr. HotSalt
> pete <pfil...@mindspring.com> wrote innews:jMSdncRiR5utsSbV...@earthlink.com:
>
> > He was a POTWASHER and was insulted by anybody
> > who called him a dishwasher.
>
> Post Proof or Retract!
>
> ps: This is my favorite way to get someone to do my homeowrk for me.
I can find a few cites from a Wikipedia article on him, but
apparently there's no current article on him.
Dr. Hot"curiouser and curiouser"Salt
pete
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=archimedes+plutonium+potwasher
Results 1 - 10 of about 82 for archimedes plutonium potwasher.
http://www.kibo.com/rawdata/1999/1999-10-10.txt
From: James "Kibo" Parry (ki...@world.std.com)
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 06:52:15 GMT
Ladies and gentlemen, at last I believe we have discovered why
Archimedes Plutonium has always insisted that he was not a 'dishwasher'
but a 'pot-washer'.
--
pete
John Burrage
"oocc" <oo...@cakefarts.com> wrote in message
news:1imj9c6.p1xohsrg8cg9N%oo...@cakefarts.com...
> Argus Leader
>
> A King or a Crackpot?: Prolific Net poster theorizes about universe from
> Meckling
[snip]
Lordy, he's been doing this for years! YEARS! How slow are they?? This is
why the ESS-EMM-ESS is soon to go the way of the dinosaurs, soon to be
replaced by the mighty BLOOGSPHERE!
Or so I read.
Anyway, someone should contact this guy and tell him to turn it into a
weekly series; next week they could do George Hammond or B_ll P__mer. But
not me, because I'm too lazy and it's time for a nap.
Tim Chmielewski
oo...@cakefarts.com:
> He also owns the large fire-damaged home across a field of trees and
> shrubs, where a neighbor keeps her llama and pony. And the old gift shop
> along the main highway - he owns that, too. And the two plots along the
> main drive into Vermillion. All told, the assessed value of his
> property, which he owns outright, is about $100,000. The sale value
> likely is quite a bit more.
>
What? Is he still claiming to be a property tycoon? What about his private
island and boat? Does he still own that skiing suit with the butt cut out?
Did he spend all his money on imaginary lawsuits?
--
My Photos: http://photos.timchuma.com
Selected photo prints now available: http://timchuma.redbubble.com/
Australian movie reviews: http://ozfilms.timchuma.com
Love Sarah: http://lovesarah.timchuma.com
David DeLaney
>Lordy, he's been doing this for years! YEARS! How slow are they?? This is
>why the ESS-EMM-ESS is soon to go the way of the dinosaurs, soon to be
>replaced by the mighty BLOOGSPHERE!
>
>Or so I read.
>
>Anyway, someone should contact this guy and tell him to turn it into a
>weekly series; next week they could do George Hammond or B_ll P__mer. But
>not me, because I'm too lazy and it's time for a nap.
I've got this guide they could use. Sure, some of it is out of date now, but
with Goodegleja around, everything's available forever, right?
Dave "---------------------v" DeLaney
--
\/David DeLaney posting from d...@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.