If you can think, and not make thoughts your aim. — Rudyard Kipling
Well, how about the week BYU physics professor Steve Jones just slogged through?
His school suspended him, the Anti-Defamation League is angry at him over what it perceived as anti-Semitic comments, the U.S. State Department and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are all over his case for disagreeing with their scientific findings, and he has responded by saying he won't talk anymore about what he's already talked about.
Kind of makes you glad you're not a genius, doesn't it?
I don't know what Professor Jones' IQ is exactly, but I'm sure I couldn't see it from the top of a tall ladder.
According to his resume, he studied at Vanderbilt, Stanford, Cornell and the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility.
I couldn't even get into Vanderbilt, Stanford, Cornell and the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility.
But every blessing has its curse, and Jones' was getting in over his head with conspiracy theorists who believe the 9/11 terrorist acts were masterminded by a faceless, nameless mysterious international banking cartel (in conspiracy theorist jargon, that's spelled JEWISH).
Some of the theorists think that the Islamic hijackers in their airplanes were merely a diversion on 9/11 — and an unwitting one at that. In a double-cross of gigantic proportion, they actually aided in their own demise.
According to news reports, the deep-thinking, mild-mannered Jones, a former LDS bishop and member of the BYU physics department since 1985, got caught up in all this theorizing because of his studies into the way the World Trade Center buildings collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001.
As a physicist, he found evidence among the ground zero debris and in the videos of the collapsing World Trade Center towers that led him to deduce that pre-set explosives were the culprit instead of the planes that slammed into the upper floors of the buildings.
Backing up from there — going from the effect to find the cause instead of the other way around — he joined those who believe neoconservatives set the explosive charges to foster war in the Middle East that would allow for better control of countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran.
Under every rock of the collapsed towers, these people see a banker.
As Dan Brown would be the first to tell us — if we could reach him
on the private island he's bought from his "Da Vinci Code" royalties — there's nothing wrong legally or morally with thinking outside the mainstream, or in exploring conspiracy theories.
But there are always consequences.
Often it's derision.
Followed by distancing.
BYU, for one, obviously isn't keen on being lumped in with a guy who is refuting the State Department's official findings — the NIST's exhaustive report on the World Trade Center collapse gives no credence to the explosives theory — and suggesting that agents within our own government were in on the 9/11 plot. BYU hasn't fired Jones — not yet anyway — but it has put him on paid leave, which keeps him employed but without a forum.
In the meantime, Jones has said he won't comment publicly anymore about who may have planted the explosives or who set them off. All he'll stand by is his science — until or unless it's proven otherwise.
Which is where he should have stayed from the beginning.
As smart as he is, he still made the near fatal jump from early research to premature conclusion.
Thinking too much can do that.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.