"Adam P. Goucher" <apgoucher@gmx.com> wrote:
Vaguely plausible? They fall down at the obstacle of that theorem whose name I can't remember (and far too inebriated to Google) which states that (rational)^(algebraic) is transcendental.
Vaguely plausible to a teenager, which I was at the time. If I recall correctly, I realized the article was a joke by the time I finished reading it. I think it was the "disproof" of special relativity that did it. Even then, I knew that special relativity, unlike general relativity, was known to be mathematically self- consistent. In other words, it could be proven wrong by physical experiment, but not by thought experiment or mathematical reasoning. Had the article only mentioned exp(pi*sqrt(163)), I would have believed it, since, like many teenagers, I hadn't yet heard of the Lindemann-Weierstrass theorem.