Harristotelian Logic

I've seen replies from posters indicating a desire to protect math people who are tops in the social hierarchy of the current mathematical world, which isn't a surprise.

But why will it be easy to convince governments around the world to send prosecutors in with the full power of the law to find out how much they knew and when?

Well, remember that paper that sci.math'ers helped get yanked, and then the journal died?

An early draft went to Barry Mazur, a professor at Harvard. He commented on it, even asked me a question about it.

After him, an early draft went to Andrew Granville, who passed on denying acceptance for the New York Journal of Mathematics, deferring to the chief editor who claimed it was too small a size paper in terms of length for the journal.

And beyond all of that, a freaking mathematical journal keeling over and dying after yanking a paper that it published from a guy called one of the biggest cranks in Usenet history is not the kind of thing that math people could NOT notice.

The event could have well made headlines in major newspapers around the world if math people did not have so much power in their community to control information.

So yes, necessarily, governments around the world will pit their full powers of investigation against top people in the math world, going through their houses, going through their computers, questioning their colleagues and students.

We are talking about the future of the world here.

What if Newton had been stopped by petty academics?

Or Gauss had never managed to get attention for his work because of dumb social stuff?

Our world would not be the one we have today.

The future depends on what people today do, just like our present depended on the people of the past.

A math journal does not just keel over and die with such a spectacular story behind it and not get noticed.

I think there will be a clear trail, like with Enron, from emails to conversations with colleagues and students.