Gerry Canavan

The paper would almost certainly have languished in obscurity were it not for the fact that the press office at the Case Western chose to publicize it with a press release that repeated many of the paper’s most outlandish claims.

A paper like this can put a university’s Press Information Officer (PIO) in a tough position. According to a PIO at a major university (who asked to speak without attribution because he works in the field), a PIO can typically recognize when something is off on the fringes of science, and they don’t want to promote a story that will damage their institution’s credibility.

“We do try to avoid doing stories that we feel could backfire on the institution, but it’s not always up to the PIO to say no to a paper that is appearing in a peer-reviewed journal,” the PIO told Ars. “Note that she [the Case Western PIO] made the point about peer-review explicitly in the release—that’s a pretty telling detail.”

Update on a link from Friday: How the craziest f#@!ing “theory of everything” got published and promoted.