Archimedes Plutonium

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1 Background
2 Plutonium's claims
3 Biographical notes
4 Quotes
5 References
6 External links

Archimedes Plutonium (born July 5, 1950) is primarily noted for his varied and eccentric contributions to Usenet. Plutonium repeatedly claimed to be the greatest living scientist, and referred to himself at least once as "The King of Science" [1], although he is almost universally regarded as a crank. One of Plutonium's earliest and most memorable posts in December, 1993 [2][3] replies to Andrew Wiles' report on the status of his proof of Fermat's last theorem.

[edit] Background

Since strong user authentication is rarely used on Usenet, some Usenet posters had suggested that Plutonium might have been a hoax or a practical joke. However, the claim that Plutonium is a real person is corroborated by a photograph and article about him in the Dartmouth College campus newspaper on November 11, 1991 ^[1]. Nevertheless, there is no assurance that all posts attributed to Plutonium on Usenet were by him.

According to an autobiography he posted to Usenet in the 1990s, Plutonium was born with the name Ludwig Poehlmann in Arzberg, Germany. His family came to the United States in his youth, settling near Cincinnati, Ohio. Ludwig was adopted in his teens by a local real-estate investor named Willis Hansen, and his name was changed to Ludwig Hansen. His autobiography says that he received an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Cincinnati and did some graduate work at a university in Utah, but headed off to Melbourne, Australia, to serve as a mathematics tutor in the early 1970s. He returned to the USA later in the 1970s, and, according to his autobiography, inherited his adoptive father's real-estate holdings, which he claimed to have parlayed into a large fortune through stock market investments in the 1980s. His autobiography also stated that he spent some time in the United States Navy during the 1980s. At some point after his adoptive father's death, he changed his name to Ludwig van Ludvig, under which he may have first posted to Usenet at the start of the 1990s.

Plutonium was long observed on the campus of Dartmouth College, where he rode around on a bicycle and wore an orange hunting hat and a homemade cape decorated with atomic symbols in magic marker. Students frequently saw him using the computer cluster in the basement of the Kiewit Computation Center, and he regularly published full-page advertisements of his claims in the student newspaper, The Dartmouth [4]. Plutonium worked as a "potwasher" (he preferred this term over "dishwasher" because it had the same starting letter and number of letters as plutonium) at the Hanover Inn, which the college owns. When asked on Usenet how this observed job jibed with his claims of wealth, Plutonium explained that he only took the job to get Internet access. In 1999 Plutonium posted various complaints about the management of Dartmouth, calling for a strike by workers there and suggesting various conspiracy theories concerning college administrators [5]. Plutonium lost his job at Dartmouth about August 1999. After making what he termed "science odyssey tours" of the United States and Europe, Plutonium then moved to rural Meckling, South Dakota, where he resumed his Usenet posting, saying he now lives on a "homestead" apparently consisting of a house, two Airstream trailers, and a grove of various sorts of trees.

[edit] Plutonium's claims

In late 1990, Plutonium claimed to have had the realization of his Plutonium Atom Totality Theory, which he claimed to be one of the most important breakthroughs in scientific history. According to this theory, the Universe is a giant plutonium atom, and the part of the Universe we are able to observe from Earth, including Earth itself, is somewhere in its outer electron shells. He then changed his name to Ludwig Plutonium. In autumn 1994 he claimed to have realized that he was the reincarnation of the great early Greek scientist Archimedes, and so once again changed his name to Archimedes Plutonium.

[edit] Biographical notes

In his autobiography (entitled at one point Ludwig Plutonium: the Chosen One, and claimed to be 2200 pages), Plutonium claims he started posting to Usenet on August 12, 1993 under the name of Ludwig Plutonium. He posts and cross-posts to a wide variety of groups on Usenet, especially in the sci. (science) hierarchy.

He is also known for posting about his favorite types of fruit and candy to unrelated science newsgroups [6]. On other occasions he is believed to have rather ineptly attempted to forge posts under the names of those who contradicted his claims.

Plutonium sometimes claimed on Usenet to be independently wealthy from his investments, and on occasion he would post about his stock investment strategies.

Archimedes Plutonium is often nicknamed "Arky", "Archy", "Archie", "Archy Pu", or "Archie-Poo" by others on the internet. His exploits are followed religiously and commented on with a mixture of mockery and amazement on the newsgroup alt.religion.kibology.

[edit] Quotes

"Calm down, man, this is only the Internet, this isn't Vietnam, go play some par golf or tennis set" [7]
"When an electron is collapsed, i.e., under observation then the electron transforms into a ball, a particle, and not the dots which go to making-up of the particle." Quote explaining collapse of the wavefunction from Plutonium's treatise [8].