What effect did Archimedes Plutonium and his Plutonium Atom Totality theory have upon your view of the world?

Everyone was trying to figure out this new medium, the internet, what it was for. It was clearly going to take over the world, this was obvious, although at the time, I imagined it would continue to be more text-based. Authority was a hinderance, Pauli-language, direct bluntness, was an advantage. It was like the physicists had died and gone to heaven.

Then into this heaven came this guy, out of the blue, writing what was essentially poetry in his own language derived from science. He was talking about how we are "electrons, in the electron dot cloud..." of a gigantic plutonium atom, and you could see that he was serious about it. He went on to describe how we would become aware of this, because pi was 22/7 and there are 22 electrons in this orbital and 7 electrons in that orbital of the plutonium atom. It was crazy stuff, but it was mountains! It didn't stop, walls and walls of unique text, I have never seen such prolific writing. It flowed out of him like water out of a tap. Every day, there would be four, five, six long pages of unique text, all about a different completely original idea you had not only never heard before, you couldn't even conceive of hearing before you heard it.

The only comparable originality was in other usenet competitors, Abian suggested to blow up the moon, and explained that mass was used up to "push time forward" (itself funny to a positivist). But all this stuff was like the Salieri to Plutonium's Mozart. It was as if he was born for this medium.

My own impression at the time was that this had to be the greatest crackpot who had ever lived, the most prolific, the most ingenious, the most poetic guy who had ever described all those ideas that physicists get in unsolicited manuscripts in their mailbox. I thought that, since the internet would quickly bring scientific literacy to everyone, that he was also the last of the crackpots, that this was the swan-song of crackpottery before the new age of reason.

I know better now. I don't consider Plutonium a crackpot at all, rather a deep poet of the internet era, a poet who worked in the medium of science prose, to express a scientific religiosity that is difficult to express, except through his unique method. There will never be another like him. I strive to be as original as him every day, and when I am not productive, I always am ashamed, because Plutonium would be writing seven pages full of unique original ideas in the time it takes me to get just a handful of boring pedestrian ideas that do nothing to break the mold. It is humbling to compare yourself to him.

His ideas kept on coming, seemingly inexhaustibly. The "fusion barrier principle", the "stone throwing principle", and so on and so on. You couldn't help but admire the determination. Holy crap--- this guy is producing a stream of original writing and thought with no comparison in the history of writing, let alone of scientific crazy-writing. It was idea after idea after idea, all of them completely mad, but you could begin to see the coherence behind them, that they were based on expressing the innermost content of his soul. He was getting a ton of attention, because his writing was interesting and exciting, the writing style was new, you had never seen such writing before. And it fit the medium. I don't think anyone understood usenet better than Plutonium.

From this, I learned how to write for the internet. I tried to learn to match him in tone, because his tone was the right tone, but I strived hard to be dead-on accurate with the content, walking this straightjacket between honesty and accuracy and complete exploratory originality. I think it has gotten easier with age, whether because the originality diminishes, or because one has more experience, I am not sure.

For me, constrained as I was by the requirements of complete accuracy and internal intellectual honesty, I despaired when I saw this guy--- how can a person who demanded accuracy ever compete in originality and fecundity with such a mind? How could your own work ever compare with such a stream of creativity? It was going to be impossible to do. It meant that the bar for creativity had been raised for everyone, permanently.

I wrote a Wikipedia page for Archimedes Plutonium, since deleted: Archimedes Plutonium

One of the nicest parts of writing this page is that I got to have a long conversation with Plutonium, who came booming down like the voice of Moses from the mountain, and explained that I had forgotten the all important "leading zero" of the Plutonium integer multiplication, and that I was overemphasizing one of his most trite observations, the notion of "googlebombing". I explained to him that googlebombing was stolen by an academic, and that I wanted to make sure he got proper credit for it. But he felt it was too trivial compared to the deeper things, the Plutonium totality, the stone-throwing idea, the fusion barrier thing.

The reason I focused on the Plutonium integers is because this is what got me interested in mathematical logic. It was clearly a consistent nonstandard model of arithmetic, more or less, but it was clear also that here the integers were uncountable!

So many people had argued that the reals were countable, this is the standard objection to Cantor. It's what you get when you Skolem reduce. But here was a person arguing something that clearly no one had ever considered before--- that the reals are equinumerous with the integers, not because the reals are countable, but because the integers are uncountable! The very contradiction in terms makes it stunning, but the "digit arrangements" he talks about make the uncountability manifest (uncountability of the integers in the model, as seen from outside the model itself of course).

Plutonium's exchange on the talk page of the Wikiepdia article was very intimidating (here it is: Google Groups ). You always knew you were talking to Plutonium, because his voice would not waver. I felt like I was talking to one of the great Beat poets, to Ginsberg, or Bukowski. His voice was a thundering boom from the mountaintop. It constantly urges you: do better. What is wrong with you? You can be more original than this.


None at all - he was a raving nutter.


The man spouts total nonsense and balderdash. The only effect he has on me is to cause me to wonder why anyone pays attention to him.