And I would think they would have tons of trouble having you extradited from the U.S. or the U.K. Not that this has anything to do with the case at hand.

I don't know how seriously the scientist took this research.

But I do remember that Richard Feynman wrote a paper on the wobbling movement of a spinning plate. He did this because he was depressed and had scientific writer's block. And nobody would deny the importance of his later work.

Science is science. If what they find is correct in the scientific sense, it really doesn't bother me too much.

I'd be worried if scientists started really competing for the Ig Nobel prizes. But I doubt that they ever will :-).