Credit: Justin Randall

ANDREI VASILOV is the cosmology wunderkind who had his PhD at 18 and had his work published in Nature the same year. He became a great embarrassment to the scientific community when he lost his mind and began proclaiming that aliens are eating our universe.

In his defence, I want to tell you that he was a brilliant scientist, and likely remains one. Mad, of course. As his best friend, I have my own theories about why it all happened. Unfortunately, I played a role in his collapse.

I first suspected Andrei was losing his grip on reality the night Alpha Centauri A began to implode. At that point, he still lived with Julie. She was not a problem between us. Yet. No, we were just two postdocs in cosmology. I worked on dark matter theory and black holes, and he worked on dark energy (which he didn't believe in) and the expansion of the universe.

That night, at about 3:30 am, my phone rang. I had only just gone to bed - a typical theorist, I'm not much of a morning person - so I didn't much mind. I traded time off at the observatory with Andrei, and knew he was in the middle of his night shift, so I expected it to be him.

"Yeah?"

"Lew-" His Russian accent was unmistakable. "Alpha Centauri A is dimming."

"What?"

"It's growing dim."

"You woke me for some kind of atmospheric disturbance?"

"No other stars are changing their luminescence. This one
alone."

I thought about it. "This could be big. A cloud of dark matter maybe, near Alpha Centauri A, moving in between us and it? This could be big. You try a spectrograph yet?"

"Just the one we have built into the software. No change yet. Nothing unexpected. I don't think this is occlusion. I think the star itself is growing dim."

"Crap," I said. But added, "I'll come up." I heated some pizza and ate before I dressed, then drove up to the mountaintop.

By the time I got to the observatory Andrei had already woken half the cosmologists in the U.S. and even called the press. Nor was I the first local person he'd phoned: a crowd had formed around him already. He hardly noticed my arrival. I watched for a while, intrigued but tired, then went back home to bed.

That's one source of the problem: Andrei was a brilliant scientist who had very good hunches but he always assumed he was right, even when they were no more than hypotheses. And when he thinks he's right, he wants to tell everyone. That's my take on it, anyway.

Of course, he was vindicated - that one time, I mean. Alpha Centauri A, almost the twin of our own Sun, just four lightyears away, not only grew dimmer, it shrank right down and became a little white dwarf within just a few days. Biggest scientific mystery of all time.

A month later, after Andrei had been on all the science programs and interviewed by the popular press and things started to die down a bit, I got a call one morning at a more reasonable hour.

"Lew, hi, this is Julie. Andrei's girlfriend."

"Yes, of course." I'd immediately recognised that sweet French accent. "I remember you." She was the most beautiful girl on campus. And, did I mention, French? She was a doctoral student in geology, researching volcanoes.

"Hi, well, I wanted to ask of you a favour. Could you talk to Andrei? I am worried, you see. He won't leave the lab. He is very obsessed with this Alpha Centauri thing."

"We all are.It contradicts all of our best astrophysics, a young star only five billion years old going straight to white dwarf like that. No one understands it."

"Yes, yes, but Andrei is very ... he is much obsessed with this. It is like he thinks that our own Sun is going next. If you could see him, perhaps talk your physics talk, you could bring him out a bit. Make him eat something, walk outside, see the Sun."

"Sure, Julie," I told her, eager to please. "I'll go over there right now."