The Theory of Everything Else: A Voyage into the World of the Weird

by Dan Schreiber

There is a concept practised by Zen gardeners called ‘the Rough Corner’. The idea being that somewhere, in every beautifully tended garden, there should remain a patch of land left completely untouched, growing wild and chaotic so as to remind the gardener of how the universe intended it to look.

His research led him to study the Mesopotamian records, and learn to read cuneiform. It was while reading one particular cuneiform tablet that Michanowsky discovered a reference to a giant star in a part of the sky that we know doesn’t have any stars to match its description. The coordinates, noted Michanowsky, corresponded to the exact spot where the supernova was said to have been. With that, Michanowsky developed his hypothesis. According to him, in the millennia that followed the supernova, the impact of this incredible event could be detected in cultures all around the world. He believed that when the ancient Sumerians witnessed this celestial wonder, they started developing astronomy, mathematics and writing, and the keeping of record books. The supernova, and the mind-expanding wonder it inspired, speculated Michanowsky, might just have been the catalyst that led to the birth of civilisation.

Thomas Edison, for all his brilliance, believed that changing into pyjamas at night messed with your body’s chemistry and gave you insomnia, so he always slept in his work clothes.

Guglielmo Marconi, the pioneering inventor of radio, believed sounds never died, but just got softer, and spent the last years of his life dreaming up a device to track down Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

some of the people who have made it to the top of their industries, from the greatest sports stars to the most successful musicians, and discover that no matter where you look, you’re always going to bump into a little bit of batshit …

This might account for why the term ‘PCR’ has become recognised in households globally, but the name Kary Mullis hasn’t. He was too controversial to promote.

Nobelitis, or the Nobel Disease, is a condition whereby the recipient of the prize suddenly feels they’re an expert on things they know next to nothing about. Sufferers of extreme Nobelitis become suddenly emboldened to speak up about the mad ideas they’d previously kept secret for their entire careers.

He also donated his semen to the controversial Nobel Prize sperm bank, officially known as the Repository for Germinal Choice, which was designed to exclusively stock the sperm of Nobel laureates (but which later expanded to include other so-called geniuses). This sperm bank for geniuses – founded in 1979 by an optometrist called Robert Graham, who started it because he believed that human beings were turning into idiots – ran for 20 years, and produced 217 children. Only three laureates were known to have actually donated sperm (Shockley being one of them, and the only one to reveal his identity), although, following a huge backlash from the public, they all pulled out and had their samples removed from the bank before any of it was used.

Known as the fine-structure constant, 137 (or rather 1/137) is a number that keeps popping up in science.‡ According to science writer Michael Brooks, ‘This immutable number determines how stars burn, how chemistry happens and even whether atoms exist at all.’ Another Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, was fascinated by it too, even speculating that the periodic table would end at number 137 (there are currently 118 elements). It’s of such importance that one professor at the University of Nottingham has suggested that should we ever make contact with aliens, we should greet them with the number 137 to show them we’re of a higher intelligence. ‘It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics,’ wrote Feynamn. ‘A magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man.’ It’s the number that many physicists believe might hold the key to cracking the theory of everything and explaining the universe.§

Tu Youyou, who in 2015 won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering a cure for malaria in a 1,600-year-old traditional Chinese medical book called Emergency Prescriptions to Keep Up One’s Sleeve.

Tu started her investigations at a time when some 240,000 compounds had already been screened, with none proving to be in any way effective. How was she to stand any chance of finding one that worked? Deciding on a different approach, Tu looked somewhere unorthodox: in the medical journals of ancient China. Perhaps, she thought, the cure for malaria could be sitting there in some ancient herbal remedy book from the Han, Zhou or Qing dynasties. Over the next two years Tu travelled around China, meeting up with practitioners, tracking down and reading ancient medical manuscripts, and collecting all of her findings in a notebook she called ‘A Collection of Single Practical Prescriptions for Anti-Malaria’. The book quickly filled up. Her quest to find a cure would eventually see her making 380 herbal extracts from over 200 herbs she had found in over 2,000 traditional recipes.

Remarkably, Tu’s efforts paid off when she discovered the details of a remedy to combat ‘intermittent fevers’ in a 1,600-year-old recipe book titled Emergency Prescriptions to Keep Up One’s Sleeve. The directions given were to soak a single bunch of the plant qinghao, also known as sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua), in hot water and then drink the juice.

it was while reading another recipe written in the 340 BCE text that she found her answer: the water in which the leaves were steeped should be cold, not boiling, it said – so simple a difference, yet a game-changer that would save millions of lives.

In the poem that Tu’s father took her name from, the bleating deer is chewing on a single plant. Of all the tens of thousands of different species that plant could have been, it just so happens that the one the deer is seen to be eating is the exact same plant that Tu would go on to discover to be the cure for malaria: the qinghao. ‘How this links my whole life with qinghao,’ said Tu, ‘will probably remain an interesting coincidence forever.’‡

The album contains a collection of classical pieces by a number of different composers, including eight works by Liszt, three by Chopin, and one each by Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Debussy, Grieg and Schumann. What makes this album special is that each of the pieces is unique, in that none of them appear in any other catalogues of published works by these composers. This is because all of the composers wrote these pieces long after they had died. Brown was a medium, and it was through her that they imparted their tunes, from the other side.

‘Chopin isn’t at all like I thought he would be,’ she says. ‘He’s not melancholy at all … he makes jokes and he is light-hearted. Schubert is lovely too. He communicates smoothly and quietly. He alters music just after he’s given it. He’ll edit. All the other composers seem to have them all prepared. But he is writing it as he goes.’

Brown was just seven years old when she first had an encounter with a dead composer. The year was 1923, and she was in her parents’ bedroom at her home in Balham, south-west London, when a man with a flowing cassock appeared before her and explained that he’d one day make her famous. Ten years later, she saw a drawing of the composer Franz Liszt (1811–1886) and immediately recognised him as that strange visitor from all those years ago. It wasn’t until three decades on from that moment, though, that Liszt would finally return to Brown ‘in person’ and begin to fulfil his promise of making her famous. He did this by starting to dictate original tunes to her. In total, Liszt gave Brown over 200 pieces of music, guiding her hands across the keyboard like automatic writing. He also spoke to her in excellent English, ‘which he has practised a great deal since leaving our world’, according to Brown.

While most people who contact spirits from the other side are barely given the time of day, Brown was to become a curious exception. After making her debut on BBC TV in 1969, she quickly became a star, and what followed was a career that saw the former dinner-lady playing eminent venues such as London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Town Hall in New York. She appeared on Johnny Carson’s talk show (America’s biggest programme at the time) where she revealed, among other things, that there’s no sex in heaven; she wrote and published three memoirs; and even recorded and released the above-mentioned LP, which was performed by Peter Katin, a musician notable for his in...

Brown, in communication with the dead Frenchman, advised that more pedal was needed, and certain chords should be more staccato. Bennett followed the advice and it solved the problem. The composer was amazed. So much so that he’s quoted on the back of one of her memoirs as saying, ‘I’ve no doubt she’s psychic … A lot of people can improvise but you couldn’t fake music like this without years of training. I couldn’t have faked some of the Beethoven myself.’

It was one night while Hugo was using the table to talk to a spirit claiming to be the concept of Civilisation, that he started expressing frustrations about the writing of his latest novel, which he was considering abandoning. But Civilisation urged him to press on, and Hugo agreed. It’s arguable that without that conversation, Hugo would never have finished writing what would eventually go on to be considered his masterpiece: a book called Les Misérables.

Winkowski has written numerous other books, and was also the inspiration for a TV drama, Ghost Whisperer, starring Jennifer Love Hewitt. In each episode Love Hewitt’s character, who is based on Winkowski, travels to a new house to help deal with a ghost. This is something Winkowski did for Love Hewitt in the real world too.

In his 2005 book The World of the Maya he claimed that Mayan hieroglyphics indicate that their ancestors weren’t from the planet Earth, but came from the Pleiades, a cluster of stars 444 light years away. The Pleiadians are a speculated species of alien that conspiracy theorists believe periodically visit our planet. They’re said to be humanoid in looks, with a lifespan of a thousand years. According to Osmanagić, when they arrived here they created an advanced civilisation in Atlantis.‡

In an online chat with the wellness guru Chervin Jafarieh, Djokovic explained that ‘scientists have proven that molecules in the water react to our emotions, to what is being said.’

Djokovic is flatout batshit, but he’s possibly going to end his tennis career as the greatest player to ever play the game. And he isn’t unique in holding odd beliefs. The history of tennis is littered with players who have made it to the top despite their wild ideas. Like the 1950 US Open champion Tappy Larsen, who used to get mid-match coaching tips from an invisible eagle sitting on his shoulder; or Serena Williams, who will only wear one pair of socks throughout an entire tennis tournament; or Rafael Nadal, who won’t stand on any of the lines on the court between points. Odd beliefs have been practised in the background of sports for centuries. They’re just usually hidden away from us. Though sometimes, very occasionally, we’re accidentally given a glimpse of them

When Leicester City FC kicked off the 2015/16 football season, the chances of them winning the Premier League were so low that both Ladbrokes and William Hill betting agencies offered 5,000–1 odds on the team. This would end up costing both betting agencies £5 million. It was an extraordinary season, and while many praised the team’s captain, Jamie Vardy, and the coaching staff for all the success, others have wondered if their unprecedented Premier League victory was in fact down to the efforts and influence of a bunch of praying monks.

Whenever there was an important match, Srivaddhanaprabha would fly a set of Buddhist monks into Leicester so they could bless the team’s stadium goalposts, changing rooms and pitch.

It’s 9 p.m., Fenella and I are sitting upright in bed, books in our hands, while our two boys Wilf and Ted lie between us snoring. ‘It’s called Primal Skin, by Leona Benkt Rhys,’ I reply. ‘It’s apparently the first ever Neanderthal–human erotica novel. It’s …’ ‘You’re reading porn in bed?’ ‘No, of course not. Well, technically yes, but …’ ‘You’re reading porn. In our bed. Next to our sons … Again.’

In 1953, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun – the man who is largely credited with getting us to the moon with his invention of the Saturn V rocket, and who will forever remain controversial for his ties to Nazi Germany – wrote a science-fiction novel titled Mars Project. In it, von Braun included the potentially prescient detail when he wrote: ‘The Martian government was directed

by 10 men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled “Elon”. Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet.’

In 1838 an arguably unfinished novel by Edgar Allan Poe titled The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was published. Unlike his other more gothic work, this was a pirate adventure. In the book four men are adrift at sea after being shipwrecked. One of them, Richard Parker, is killed and then eaten by the other three so that they may survive. Forty-six years later a ship called the Mignonette sunk in the South Atlantic, leaving four survivors on a lifeboat. In order to survive, the crew were forced to kill and eat one of their members. His name was Richard Parker.

if we did ever crack time travel, the big moments in history are going to be absolute tourist hellholes: the Kennedy assassination, the construction of Stonehenge, the Roswell incident. These will all be jam-packed with school excursions, drunken hen-dos, TV historians filming pieces to camera, and merch stands that will confuse the hell out of locals with T-shirts prefiguring an event that’s about to happen.

Did you know that according to a scientific paper published in 2006 by two STI doctors in Leeds, pubic lice are becoming extinct because so many people are having Brazilian waxes? As a result, the lice don’t have a natural habitat to exist in anymore. They’re being deforested.

By using DNA sequencing, it has been worked out that around 170,000 years ago head lice on humans started diverging into becoming body lice. This was a seminal moment in the history of humans, as clothing meant we were able to successfully migrate out of Africa and start populating the world. Thank you, lice! We couldn’t have discovered this any other way, because clothes from that long ago haven’t survived.

Simon believes that we’ve heard quite enough about snow leopards – what about the Canadian blue-grey taildropper slug, whose bum falls off when it gets too scared?

a man called Dr John C. Lilly as he explained to Calvin and a small group of assembled scientists how he had recently trained a dolphin called Elvar to play fetch with a rubber ring in a unique way – instead of using his nose to catch the toy, Elvar had been taught to use his erect penis. Dolphins can achieve voluntary erections in just three seconds, Lilly told the crowd. By the time he’d thrown the toy ring into the pool, Elvar was able to gain an erection and collect the ring as it dropped to the bottom, returning it to Lilly.

We’ve recently learnt they have their own ‘internet’ – known to botanists as the ‘wood wide web’ – which an astonishing 80 per cent of all plants use as their ‘provider’ and where they have been observed committing the equivalent of cyber-crime, as well as doing online shopping. They also, it has been discovered, appear to know who their family are, apparently recognising their siblings, thereby avoiding competing with them for resources and sending them messages through the WWW, warning them of danger.

This was when the universe shifted for Backster. As soon as he had the thought of burning the leaf, the polygraph shot up. It was as if the plant had read his mind and was reacting in fear.

As his experiments continued, Backster started to believe that his plants were growing quite fond of him. For example, one time when he was out of the office, he recorded the time of the exact moment that he had the thought of returning to see them all. When he finally got to the office, he noted a spike on the polygraph readings that matched the exact time. It was as if they were excited dogs watching through a window at home as their owner returns from work.

Backster had the idea for an elite force of vegetable officers after conducting an experiment in which he tested his plants to see if they could pick out a murderer from a line-up of six suspects. To do this, he asked six students, one by one, to enter a room that contained two potted plants, and have one of them ‘murder’ one of the plants by tearing it out of its pot and stamping all over it. To make sure that no one knew who the murderer was, including Backster himself, the six participants were each asked to draw pieces of paper from a hat, with only one of the pieces containing the instruction to kill. After the grisly task was completed, the surviving plant, which had witnessed the crime, was then attached to a lie detector as the six students re-entered the room one at a time. As the first five students wandered into the room, the plant showed no emotional reaction, then as the sixth student entered the room the plant began to display ‘wild stress’. When Backster asked if he was the killer, the student admitted that yes he was. The experiment had worked.

According to Backster, this worked too. Collecting the semen from a test subject, he successfully showed that sperm was able to identify its donor. The sperm literally knew who its daddy was.

In truth the Bermuda Triangle is no more dangerous than any other patch of air and ocean on Earth. One of the most travelled shipping lanes in the entire Atlantic Ocean, it has been estimated that roughly 50 ships and 20 aeroplanes have been lost there, in an area that covers 700,000 square kilometres. Many experts have pointed out that the number of ships and planes that go missing there is pretty much the same percentage as anywhere else in the world. It isn’t even, according to a survey by the WWF, on the list of the 10 most dangerous bodies of water in the world for shipping.

There’s a theory that the reason life on Earth began is because billions of years ago some aliens pit-stopped on our ancient planet for a picnic, and then didn’t tidy up properly after themselves. The cosmic garbage theory, as it’s known, was first proposed by Professor Thomas Gold of Cornell University in the 1960s. It proposes that when the aliens were shaking out their picnic rug, bits of extra-terrestrial cookie crumbs landed on the ground, and the microbes within the crumbs went on to spark the genesis of life on our planet.

This is my own particular favourite theory regarding the birth of Jesus. Comets are made of ice, and when they get close to the sun they start to melt, creating a highly dramatic tail of debris that follows them. As a result, when seen over the horizon, the comet appears to be pointing down, which might have looked to the magi like a giant arrow, as if advertising ‘Virgin Birth happening HERE’. There’s a record of a bright comet in 5 BCE by astronomers in China, which could be a candidate for the guiding star.

UK crop circles, we now know, were at the start largely the work of a couple of pranksters called David Chorley and Douglas Bower, both landscape painters, who in 1978 came up with the idea for the hoax after a drink in the pub. For 13 years they sneaked around the fields of southern England with ropes, string and some planks of wood, constructing up to 30 new circles every growing season. They finally revealed that they were the creators of the circles in 1991, silencing a decade of wild UFO theories that had built up around them.

It’s often the case that those caught up in such outlandish theories have no choice but to exploit them, just to keep the wolf from the door.

According to the story, Jesus was replaced at the crucifixion by his brother, who died so that Jesus could live. Jesus then fled to Japan, a place he knew well having studied there in his 20s. His journey involved travelling through Siberia to Alaska, where he boarded a boat that took him all the way to Japan. To integrate himself with the people of Shingo he assumed a Japanese name, Torai Taro Daitenku, and began farming garlic. He then married a woman named Miyuko, with whom he had three daughters. Jesus’ grave in Shingo was protected for many generations by the Sawaguchi family, who had always been told that a man of importance was buried there. What gave further credence to the story is that both the head of the Sawaguchi family and his sister had blue eyes, which singled

the family out as being Christ’s descendants. There were other curious things going on too. The townsfolk practised customs that aren’t really seen anywhere else in Japan, such as newborn babies being swaddled in clothes embroidered with the Star of David and having a cross painted in black ink on their foreheads.

Dennis has since retired from flying. When asked by journalist Francis X. Donnelly what his next plans were, he revealed that he had found work at Disney World ferrying tourists around on a boat. Remarkably, they have made him the boat’s pilot.

Leakey and his team looked into the literature of humans being killed by ‘man-eaters’ and concluded that even when a human was killed, they weren’t immediately eaten. Hyenas, for example, said Leakey, can’t stand our smell, and will wait for a human to go putrid before touching the carcass, some 40 hours after he or she has died. That’s how terrible our natural smell is to predators apparently – they have to wait for the maggots to set in.

Cockroaches, for example, have been observed cleaning themselves after making contact with humans. And according to scientist Diane Ackerman, bats are pretty disgusted by us too. In her book A Natural History of Senses she tells a story about putting a large Indonesian flying fox in her hair, curious to see if it would get entangled in it. When placed on her head the bat began to cough, and once she set back it into its cage it spent some time licking itself clean of the smelly human odour.