Cambridge University Press, 2000. For modern readers, raised on 1984 and Kurt Cobain , anything that smacks of the mainstream arouses suspicion. So after every cosmology article in Scientific American, editors brace for an onslaught of letters demanding that alternatives to conventional theories be given their due. The heterodoxy is seductive. But in a commentary in the April 1999 issue of Physics Today, cosmologist Andreas Albrecht outlined the failings of the theory and the tests it would need to pass before being taken seriously by most cosmologists.
Science is tricky.
Seemingly plausible ideas can have subtle flaws, and it takes a collective effort of problem solving to find them out. Petros Papachristos, born in Athens in 1895, was sent to the University of Berlin after his teachers discovered his enormous talent for mathematics. He earned his doctorate in 1916 and left for England, where he began an intensive collaboration with G. H. Hardy , J. E. Littlewood and Srinivasa Ramanujan , the world's leading number theorists. In 1919 he was appointed professor at the University of Munich. He lived an uneventful life up to the moment he claimed to have succeeded in his efforts, whereupon he died, leaving a mystery surrounding his proof as perplexing as the one that enshrouds Fermat's Last Theorem .