Alas Poor Sheldon

Paul Frampton seems to have a lot in common with the fictional physicist Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory. Frampton undoubtedly has an IQ in the top 1%, which fact he seems to reflect on frequently, but his common sense intelligence, or CSIQ, is clearly in the bottom 1%. Unlike Dr. Cooper, though, Frampton is not free of lust, either the usual or monetary types. This fact, together with his exceptionally low CSIQ, seems to have done him in.

If the story of his involvement with someone pretending to be a Czech bikini model, and cocaine smuggling in South America has caught your attention, Maxine Swann's long story in the New York Times Magazine has the tale in full.

If Frampton hadn't been a slightly famous physicist who had written 450 papers, it would be just the story of another dope smuggling dope, but it has its moments.

In November 2011, Paul Frampton, a theoretical particle physicist, met Denise Milani, a Czech bikini model, on the online dating site Mate1.com. She was gorgeous — dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a supposedly natural DDD breast size. In some photos, she looked tauntingly steamy; in others, she offered a warm smile. Soon, Frampton and Milani were chatting online nearly every day. Frampton would return home from campus — he’d been a professor in the physics and astronomy department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 30 years — and his computer would buzz. “Are you there, honey?” They’d chat on Yahoo Messenger for a while, and then he’d go into the other room to take care of something. A half-hour later, there was the familiar buzz. It was always Milani. “What are you doing now?”

UPDATE: Comment posted from Argentina, by someone claiming to be Paul Frampton, on Peter Woit's NEW:

If I may chime in as the subject of this discussion, I wish to state categorically that I am not, and have never been, an intentional smuggler of illegal substances. When I checked in a bag belonging to somebody else, which admittedly showed bad judgement, at Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on January 23, 2012 I had no knowledge or suspicion whatsoever that the bag contained any illegal material hidden within it.

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