Archimedes Plutonium

Archimedes Plutonium (born July 5, 1950), also known as Ludwig Plutonium, wrote extensively about science and mathematics on Usenet. In 1990 he became convinced that the universe could be thought of as an atom of plutonium, and changed his name to reflect this idea. He is notable for his offbeat ideas about Plutonium Atom totality, physical constants, and nonstandard models of infinite arithmetic.

Archimedes Plutonium, in his Usenet posts, was the first to describe the process of biasing search-engine results by planting references, and coined the phrase search-engine bombing to describe it. This later became well-known as google bombing .

Biographical Sketch

Plutonium was born under the name Ludwig Poehlmann in Arzberg, Germany. His family moved to the United States and settled near Cincinnati, Ohio, where Plutonium was adopted into the Hansen family and brought up under the name Ludwig Hansen. Under the names Ludwig Von Ludvig, then Ludwig Plutonium, he began posting to Usenet in 1993. His prolific posts quickly made him a well known usenet figure.

Plutonium was long observed on the campus of Dartmouth College, where he rode around on a bicycle and wore an orange hunting hat and a homemade cape decorated with atomic symbols in Magic Marker. Students frequently saw him using the computer cluster in the basement of the Kiewit Computation Centre, and he regularly published full-page advertisements of his claims in the student newspaper, The Dartmouth.

Plutonium worked as a "potwasher" (he preferred this term over "dishwasher" because it had the same starting letter and number of letters as plutonium) at the Hanover Inn, which the college owns. When asked on Usenet how this observed job jibed with his claims of wealth, Plutonium explained that he only took the job in order to get Internet access. In 1999 Plutonium posted various complaints about the management of Dartmouth, calling for a strike by workers there and suggesting various conspiracy theories concerning college administrators. Plutonium lost his job at Dartmouth about August of 1999.

After making what he termed "science odyssey tours" of the United States and Europe, Plutonium then moved to rural Meckling, South Dakota, where he resumed his Usenet posting, saying he now lives on a "homestead" apparently consisting of a house, two Airstream trailers, and a grove of various sorts of trees.

Plutonium was questioned by New Hampshire police during an investigation of a famous case. The crime was completely solved a short time later and he was not involved in any way, but because of his eccentricity, he was a prominent character in the reports.

Writing

Plutonium is the author of tens of thousands of unique postings to dozens of newsgroups.

Plutonium Atom Totality

Plutonium Atom totality is a metaphysical idea that the universe should somehow be thought of as a gigantic atom of the element plutonium, Pu 231. It is not believed by most scientists that the universe considered as a whole is any type of atom, let alone an atom of plutonium. The cosmic atom, often written ATOM, is a manifestation of god, or the totality of all things. It is attributed with some divine properties, although the physical universe in Plutonium philosophy only obeys natural laws and does not include supernatural phenomenon.

Plutonian Integers

An integer in Plutonium's philosophical view includes objects which have a decimal expansion which never ends. Just as the real number 1/3 can be represented as:

${1 \over 3}=0.33333...$

the infinite integer whose decimal expansion consists solely of 3s is a valid Plutonian integer

$x=...33333\,$

This type of number resembles the p-adic integers, but it is very different because it is not considered as a convergent sequence, but as a philosophically primitive element of the mathematical universe, an integer. This type of object has no counterpart in standard mathematics, and all of the results that Plutonium claims for them are not accepted as part of mainstream mathematics.

The addition and multiplication of Plutonian integers is defined by a digit-wise procedure. Any product or sum which produces integers with equal digits are equal. So for example, in Plutonian arithmetic

$....9999+1=1...000\,$

So that the number

$....9999\approx -1\,$

in that both, when adding 1, give a number with a lot of zeros at the end. Unlike in the p-adics, the number which is all nines is large and positive in Plutonium's arithmetic, not small and negative.

It is a theorem of Peano Arithmetic that there do not exist integers x,y,z with:

$x^{3}+y^{3}=z^{3}\,$

but this is not necessarily a property of the Plutonian integers. So the Plutonian integers can violate some of the usual laws of arithmetic, and Fermat's last theorem can be false for the Plutonium integers . Accepting the Plutonian integers as the true integers leads to a philosophical idea of counting which is explicitly infinitary.

Plutonium often states that the set of all integers is uncountable, which in standard mathematical language is an oxymoron. By this statement he usually means that the set of all Plutonian integers cannot be ordered into a list in the usual way. His proof for this claim is to apply Cantor's diagonal argument to the Plutonian integers. He also sometimes states that there is a direct one-to-one map from the real numbers to the integers, which consists of taking all the digits behind the decimal point and putting them in front.

Plutonium does not admit bi-infinite sequences, because there is no digit-by-digit multiplication algorithm for these. So he has two types of numbers, the "adic integers" which are infinite to the left and finite to the right, and the "real numbers" which are infinite to the right and finite to the left. The two numbers cannot be added together.

Other Writing

Plutonium has questioned narratives about Jesus, and formulated the idea that humans evolved as apes that could throw stones at one another. He is the author of countless other ideas and speculations, most of which claim to displace currently accepted mathematical and scientific theories, and none of which are accepted by mainstream science.

Quotes

• "The whole entire Universe is just one big atom where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies."
• "God is Science, and Science is god."
• "God is this one big atom that comprises all the Universe, much like what Spinoza discovered some centuries past, called pantheism. Where we are a tiny part of God itself. And where there is a heaven and hell in part of the atom structure. And where we will be judged by God when we die and our photon and neutrino souls will reincarnate once again in a future life somewhere in the Cosmos."
• "The world's finest Bibles are current physics textbooks or biology or chemistry textbooks such as the Feynman Lectures on Physics."
• "When you have a foggy notion of what you are working with, it is impossible to prove much about them."