InsaneJournal

Unexpected Side Effects of Being a Grad Student...
Or maybe just an astronomy grad student.

Every couple of months, someone gets the bright idea to email every email account on the website* with their Brilliant New Theory. Since this person seemed to forgo the traditional method of 'publish in peer-reviewed journal', I guess 'make a website then spam the name of everyone in a prestigious astronomy department to go look at your site and adopt your ideas' seemed like a reasonable option.

Well, even ignoring the normal response to unsolicited mass mailings -- that is, 'delete and mark as spam' -- it's the sort of thing that, while it doesn't guarantee your theory is a crackpot one, I would be comfortable betting my salary that that is the case.

This month, we get 'space mirror guy'**, who is apparently convinced that the universe is a bubble 1 AU in diameter, just containing the Earth and the Sun, and that everything else is the product of some kind of space mirror.

I can't really tell. His grammar is not that much better than his grasp of astronomy. I kind of worry that this is some sign of mental illness, but I suppose if the worst thing you do with your time is build websites and occasionally email scientists with generic messages... well, it could be a lot worse.

Which is actually on the loonier side, even for unexpected spam. Normally, we just get Big Bang or general relativity disprovers. Well, and the occasional anti-science troll telling off the Submit a Question form on Ask an Astronomer. (Ask an Astronomer actually collects a lot more of the 'I have a theory!' statements, but the really bizarre ones tend to be the 'mail everyone in the astronomy department, down to the people who do our paperwork and the IT folks'.)

I wonder if this happens to other departments. Or every department. Might be a game -- figure out what kind of crackpot emails go to what department. I can guess at some of them -- usually sciences.

* Emails on the site are a good idea -- if someone reads a paper or sees a talk, googling for the scientist and getting an email to ask questions is a good thing. Just... the To: list is pretty much straight down every professor, postdoc, researcher, office worker and grad student in title-then-alphabetical order.

** Or space mirror gal. The email just has a first initial. So I am assuming a gender, even though I have no reason to think this person is male or female.