Dear Guardian: You've Been Played - Scientific American Blog Network

Dear Guardian: You've Been Played - Scientific American Blog Network: No, my beef is with the Guardian for running the article in the first place. Seriously: why was it even written? Strip away all the purple prose and you've got a guy who's been out of the field for 20 years, but still doing some dabbling on the side, who has an intriguing new idea that a couple of math professors think is promising, so he got invited to give a colloquium at Oxford by his old grad school buddy. Oh, and there's no technical paper yet -- not even a rough draft on the arxiv -- so his ideas can't even be appropriately evaluated by actual working physicists. How, exactly, does that qualify as newsworthy? Was your bullshit detector not working that day?