It’s also possible that the theory actually says something rather different, but it is hard to decipher from the paper. (Andrulis has not responded to phone calls, nor has he answered questions sent by email, though he has said he would.) Even referring back to the definitions of terms that Andrulis uses in the paper, many of his logical steps don’t seem to make much sense.

Or in the words of astrophysicist Ethan Siegel at Lewis and Clark College (and author of the blog Starts With a Bang), “Crackpottery doesn’t even begin to describe just how dreadful this is, and how much shame should be heaped upon CWRU for this.”

At least a few editors at Life have said they are resigning as a result of Andrulis’ paper, while others have been discussing just how this paper got published in the first place. (For its part, Case Western has said it is taking another look at how it decides which papers to issue press releases about.)

There were 23 people on Life’s editorial board, plus the editor in chief. At least one member of the board, Ginestra Bianconi, a physicist at Northeastern University, emailed LiveScience to say she tendered her resignation. Marie-Paule Bassez, a professor at the University of Strasbourg in France, said she hadn’t seen the paper at all and wasn’t interested in being the editor in chief.