At APS, there are the invited talks, and then there are the talks that might affectionately be known as the “crackpot” talks. Any member of APS, regardless of their background or affiliation, can submit an abstract and give a 10 minute talk. Nothing is rejected.

So about once a day, there’s a session with a coded title like “Unconventional ideas in XXXX.” That’s where the weird ones go. Sunday morning, Sunil Thakur, with an affiliation of “Individual Research”, was scheduled to give a talk on the “Nature of Reality.” In the abstract, Thakur promised to explain that “how the reality is revealed does not depend only on the properties of the reality itself but also depends on the properties of the medium through which the object is manifested.”

It looks like last year, Thakur submitted an abstract on black holes, where he claimed that temperature affects the speed of light. But today he didn’t show up, and the session ended early. Everyone filed out of the room, maybe a touch disappointed.

“I wanted to learn the nature of reality,” muttered one young physicist, not without sarcasm. “Now I have to find something else to do.”