Eleven years ago Eugene Sittampalam was sitting in a hotel room on the Libyan coast when he stumbled, as if by fate, on the unified field theory of physics. "I was on an engineering project at the time, with hardly any social life," he says. "I would retire to my room after dinner. I would switch on the radio, relax at my table, and start doodling." The problem that occupied him has stumped physicists from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking: How to join together the profound yet disparate insights of general relativity and quantum theory. But Sittampalam's doodling, apparently, drew connections that the rest had missed. "One thing led to another," he says, "and before the evening was over, I had the inverse square law of gravity derived—for the first time ever—from first principles!"
Sittampalam has no advanced degrees in physics. His theory is girded by mathematics no more complicated than high school algebra. Still, his claims are modest compared with those of other "maverick theorists," or cranks, as most scientists call them. At the American Astronomical Society meeting in 1999, a freelance astronomer argued strenuously that connecting certain pulsars across the night sky made an arrow that pointed directly to a vast alien communications network. A few years before, at Dartmouth, a dishwasher swamped the Internet newsgroups with his descriptions of the universe as a giant plutonium atom. The man, who identified himself as Archimedes Plutonium, wrote songs praising this atom universe and also provided stock tips. When he appeared on campus, it was in a parka covered with equations like a necromancer's robe.
Letters from crank theorists—often handwritten or manually typed, exhaustively diagrammed, up to a hundred pages long—have inundated university science departments for years. Neel Shearer, the graduate assistant who filters physicist Stephen Hawking's e-mail, says that Hawking receives "hundreds of letters a month, at least, mostly theories about how the moon doesn't rotate, why gravity doesn't exist, how to go faster than the speed of light."
Judging from the reams of odd theories sent daily to science journals, universities, and researchers, science cranks are more prolific than ever. This is true despite a discouraging silence on the part of the recipients. The author of one atmosphere-based theory of gravity estimates that he has mailed 5,000 copies of his work to physicists over the past 15 years but received just two replies. Presentation is part of the problem. "GENTLEMEN ARE YOU INTERESTED IN SEPARATING VALUABLE CHEMICAL COMPOUNDS FROM THE SUNSHINE RAY?" demands one impatient correspondent. Crank papers are so consistent in their tics that they're sometimes hung on physics department bulletin boards and given ratings—with points awarded for bold type, multiple exclamation marks, and comparison of self to Newton, Einstein, or God. But a few, like Sittampalam's, are more difficult to dismiss.
