A Scientist's Revenge (1)

Part 1 — My Greatest Research Proposal

Let me tell you about my latest research project: murder!

I have revealed this idea to a number of people, and they all have the same objection. "How can this be classified as `research'?"

They do not object that it is unethical or illegal. It will be obvious why in a moment. They do sometimes ask how I hope to get away with it, but I've found a solution to that one.

To tackle the most serious objection first, the reason that this counts as research is that I do not know the identity of my victim, or his whereabouts. These two problems constitute the first work package of my research plan. Only once they have been solved can I move on to the main objective of my second work package, which is to devise a means to carry out the murder. Having found a theoretical solution to the problem, the third work package consists of its application.

To carry all this out will require substantial resources, and so, of course, I have applied for a grant. This has been a huge success. For the first time in my academic life I have been able to tick all of the most difficult boxes in any grant application. No-one can deny that this project is truly ambitious, or that it satisfies that most mythical of aspirations, high risk for high gain, at an incredible level. It is also fantastically inter-disciplinary. I will need team members with data research skills (to find my victim), a wide range of electrical, mechanical and chemical skills (to explore methods to eliminate the target), and then the highest level of legal talent to defend me in court.

It is clear that there are many stages where this project could fall apart, and so I had to put a lot of thought into my risk mitigation strategy. The most important concern for the funding agencies, of course, is ensuring success, so from their point of view the biggest issue is that WP3 (Work Package 3, i.e., the murder), relies heavily on the results of WP1 and WP2 (finding the victim and planning his execution). To those unfamiliar with research grants, this may sound like an insoluble problem, but for a seasoned academic it was a trivial issue. Clearly the identification of effective and ideally un-traceable assassination procedures is an important research topic in itself, and dedicated research into the construction of irrefutable legal defence strategies is sure to produce a number of valuable breakthrough results in legal theory that will fully justify the research programme, even in the event that they do not need to be used.

You see? Easy.

My proposal was so successful, and so highly rated by the funding agencies — ambitious, innovative, inter-disciplinary, and with such obvious positive societal impact — that I'm tempted to switch research fields permanently. Assuming that I manage to actually complete the project. The claim that it is high risk for high gain is no exaggeration.

Before I tell you how it's going, I should explain who the target is. You may be wondering who all of my colleagues, and the teams of administrators at the funding agencies, and the international peer reviewers, and the members of the grant review panel, were all so eager for me to bump off. Scientists are often enthusiastic about killing people, but since it's usually each other, it is difficult to get funding. In this case they were unanimous in their support. That's because my target is someone every scientist can get behind eliminaing: a crackpot.

This was no ordinary crackpot.

No, that's not quite right. All crackpots are ordinary, in the sense that they share the same stupid views backed up by the same nonsensical arguments, and the so-called cases that they present, and the ways they present them, are all childishly inane and dull. They are the most boring and dull and unremarkable people you can imagine. Political conspiracy theorists are dull and stupid, too, but at least they have a glimmer of a sense of the dramatic. Scientific crackpots are just plain dull.

Some non-scientists complain that science is boring. (I am considering them for a follow-up project.) The reason they think science is boring is because they do not understand it. A stream of technical jargon is obviously going to be boring if you have no idea what it means. Once you've understood the ideas behind the science, and the clever arguments and experiments that back up the ideas, and the increasingly rich stream of ideas that are the logical consequences of the first ones, then you're hooked, and it is all fascinating and wonderful. But first the ideas have to mean something.

That is why crackpots are irredeemably dull: their ideas do not mean anything, and so they cannot be interesting.

But I digress. I got a bit worked up.

What made this particular crackpot unusual was that, instead of sending me an email, or posting me a dot-matrix printout of his nutjob treatise, or writing me a letter in crayon, he turned up, in person, at my office. You may be shocked, sensitive reader, but it is true: I met him face to face, and I was just as terrified as you are.

I need to calm down, but when I have, I will tell you what happened.

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Up next: Part 2 — The Visitation

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Needless to say, you will also want to tell everyone about it!