In the years after my discovery of a connection between the classical 1904 plum pudding model of the atom and real atoms, several pseudoscientific remarks have emerged. First, I'd like to preface this with a remark from my undergraduate professor who pointed me to a lecture series by J.J. Thomson in the 1920s, The Electron in Chemistry. He noted that this is "the best non-crackpot publication" on the matter. I started worrying about loose similarities between my work and previous works attempting to connect things like mystical number sequences, geometric shapes, and the like, to atomic structure. Scientists are not immune to this kind of thinking, but we do our best to never lose sight of the fact that it is more "crackpot" than not to look for meaning where none exists.

The most prominent question to this end I've received over the years is how my work is connected to the so-called Platonic solids. Plato ascribed such rudimentary meaning to these five highly symmetric geometric shapes (see picture) that it's not unexpected to find many people even today falling into this line of thinking. Yes. Three of the five Platonic geometries are found in the configuration of electrons in the Thomson problem upon which my work is largely premised, but two are NOT. In particular, the cube is not a solution for the 8-electron case. Instead, the solution is easily viewed as a twisted cube. The 20-point dodecahedron of Plato is not a solution either, but something that is interesting is that the calcium atom (atomic number 20) is the largest atom on the periodic table with an equal number of neutrons and protons in its nucleus. It may exhibit highly symmetric geometric properties important to nuclear structure that larger nucleii do not share.

Despite the fact that Plato ascribed the then-believed four elements of the universe with the 4-, 6-, 8-, and 12-point geometries (fire, air, earth, and water) and the perfect universe with the 20-point geometry, this line of thinking is badly flawed. You're encouraged to keep it in the back of your mind for purposes of great story-telling but not for any serious scientific progress on the matter.

Another story I'm reminded of is something my doctoral advisor noted in the weeks after I defended my dissertation. He noted that in the years before I was his student, having more often-than-not hired graduate students directly from China, he encouraged a student to think about this problem in connection with some "famous" sequence of numbers in Chinese culture. Since I don't subscribe to such thinking, I thought nothing of it, and don't recall to which number sequence he was referring.

In the actual science of atomic and nuclear structure, there are sequences called "magic numbers." It is possible someone, perhaps you, will draw a direct mathematical line between my work and these so-called "magic numbers". Have at it!