Reply #33: Mathematicians can be pretty unworldly ... [View All]

[thanatonautos]

That is what I wanted to know. But, still, do you not find it very curious, if not entirely unbelievable, that a man with Dr. Smale's background would be tied up in something like this? YET, his name is listed on the ZeoSync website as a principal in this company, along with Dr. Blass, who is himself no lightweight mathematician (it says on the website he developed one of the first websites). So I am trying to figure out what this company was really doing, why they made this incredible announcement which then sort of died off, Dr. Blass and Dr. Smale still listed as being involved, and H. Hamby Hutcheson suddenly having removed himself from this company

I don't find it entirely unbelievable that Smale would be
involved in some shady company ... mathematicians of Smale's
caliber can very, very eccentric and not necessarily
business savvy at all. I have met a couple of mathematicians
of that level, though not Smale.

My guess as to what they were doing, is that they
were probably trying to make a lot of money by claiming this
great breakthrough, possibly Smale got involved on Blass's
suggestion. Maybe Smale didn't check the work, maybe
he really didn't care, maybe he's getting a bit old
by now.

As you say, Smale, and Blass were both mathematicians. They knew eachother at Berkeley.

Do you remember the cold fusion nonsense?

Pons and Fleischman were a pair of con-men ... my mother
could tell it from the minute she saw them, I knew the
physics was impossible, but did a trivial calculation to
show it. Their result was impossible by about 80 orders
of magnitude. But some excellent physicists ...
no less than Julian Schwinger, believed in it and that
there was a conspiracy among Western theoretical physicists
to suppress the truth of it.

You see what I'm saying?