You don't hang out for long with Joseph Nagyvary before you're faced with an uncomfortable thought: Is the man a genius or a crank?
He certainly bears some of the telltale marks of crankdom. For one thing, he's a monomaniac. Give him the slightest opening, and he'll talk for hours about his research, branching off into tributaries of arcana so narrow and obscure it seems he couldn't possibly find a rhetorical way out. Then, too, he's certain that jealous enemies are conspiring to keep his revolutionary discovery from gaining the respect it deserves. And as with most scientific cranks who claim to have solved a big problem—like discovering an unlimited source of cheap energy—Nagyvary is convinced he has solved an age-old riddle: Why are violins made by Antonio Stradivari, the legendary 18th-century Cremonese instrument maker, so dramatically better than anything built since?
Yet for all of Nagyvary's pretensions to crankdom, ...
