by John Allen Paulos
The director of the National Science Foundation, appointed by newly elected President Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., just announced a number of heretofore largely secret findings. At a hastily organized press conference, Ed Cayce, the rather pugnacious man at the helm of the agency, stated that his staff had convincingly verified a number of controversial claims regarding UFOs, psychics, and other hot button issues.
The first involves a strange piece of metal found in Roswell, N.M., where many believe an alien spacecraft crashed in 1947. Cayce declared that the fragment has quite an amazing property. “Sensitive measurements have revealed that it exerts a faint physical attraction on every information‑processing instrument so far tested. Moreover, this attraction is nine times as strong one foot away from the metal as it is one yard away.”
What to make of the fragment’s effect is open to differing interpretations, Cayce admitted, but he maintained it can no longer be denied. He pointed out that “perhaps this strange attraction is related to new evidence for the sentience of animals, plants, and perhaps even of metals and rocks.
Continuing in this vein, Cayce also cited developments involving psychic readings. Specifically, he referred to an AI analysis of extensive data mining from labs all over the globe that demonstrated psychics are indeed commonly correct in their perceptions of others. Moreover, there are countless cases where psychics have accurately described the characteristics and life experiences of dead relatives of subjects.
He also referenced the tens of thousands of cases of dreams prefiguring events that occurred the next day and offered as a possible explanation the notion of entanglement and other counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics. Determining the unexpected, perhaps frightening consequences of these laws, he described as “walking the Planck” and then chuckled at his witticism.
Later in the news conference, Cayce effusively thanked President RFK Jr. for his full support and then ceremoniously popped a pink pill containing a minuscule nano-portion of jellyfish extract. “This sort of capsule I can state with certainty is one of many effective homeopathic remedies and countless other so-called alternative remedies. Such formulations are followed many times by complete remission of the disease or condition in question and make almost all vaccines unnecessary, if not downright harmful. The evidence indicates this is especially so after the patient has had a serious medical crisis.”
Displaying what has become his trademark impatience with “arrogant so-called experts” in astronomy and elsewhere, he pivoted to a report on advances in how scientists are using convoluted topological structures to help make precise astrological and biorhythmic predictions. Theorems about these structures have shown that many ideas and findings in astrology and biorhythmic analysis are, in fact, universal truths.
Continuing along his stream of consciousness, Cayce brought up biorhythms again and the odd numerological properties of the numbers 23 and 28. The numbers, he asserted, are “the periods for the immutable male and a female principle, respectively.” He paused, perhaps expecting some pushback, before explaining that the numbers “have the special property that by adding and subtracting appropriate multiples of them, one can express any whole number whatsoever. That is, any number at all can be written as 23X + 28Y for suitable choices of X and Y. For example, 6 = (23*10) + (28* ‑8).”
Cayce was a little less assertive on some issues as when he emphasized that UFOs are, of course, unidentified flying objects, but was not sure about claims of aliens in the US. Another less cosmic issue that made him surprisingly uncomfortable was phrenology, the belief that head shape helps determine personality. Perhaps he was self‑conscious about his rather small, lumpy, asymmetric head.
Near the end of his iconoclastic news conference, he reiterated that astrology is a branch of astronomy, that he was a “proud Aquarius, and stressed that astrological signs are quite informative and reflective of human personalities as untold millions of people throughout history have already confirmed. “And that’s despite what the scientific elite think,” he muttered under his breath,
Winding up, he returned to mathematics and its relevance to the “global warming hoax.” Bringing out posters showing graphs of the sine function with different heights and periods, he concluded, “as you know, over decades the temperature rises and falls as described by the familiar sine wave. All this fuss about the climate is fear mongering. It’s about what you would expect from basic trigonometry.”
Cayce stopped abruptly and added, “President Kennedy and I thank you for your attention to these matters.” Then he quickly left the lectern before reporters could ask him any questions.
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John Allen Paulos is an emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Temple University and the author of Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. These and his other books are described and available here.
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