This incident has really rocked me, and is big news in my small college town. I found my professor dead in the classroom a few weeks ago. He had hanged himself. I was on my way to meet him during his office hours because I was really struggling to keep up with his class. I didn’t know at the time but being bad at physics probably saved my life because I couldn’t make sense of what was written on the whiteboard. I’m not a very public person and this has thrust me into the limelight in a way that is affecting me. It’s important I say my piece now to clear things up. I know it feels like I’ve started at the end of the story but this is actual the middle. I’ll skip to the beginning.
Class started last September. Even though I’m an English major, the university encourages us to take modules across disciplines to broaden our horizons (I should note that this incident happened in the Netherlands but all courses at my university are taught in English). I’ve always wondered about big questions like ‘where do we come from?’ and ‘How big is the universe?’, so I took an introduction to astro-physics module. Even though I am studying English, I’m a pretty good allrounder and got good maths grades at school.
Professor Vogel is a, well was a, very eccentric man, with a lust for life. When I asked him if the universe goes on forever, he said “lles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei”, which is German for ‘everything has an end, only the sausage has two’. I started off fine but after a few weeks I couldn’t keep up. Some people say ChatGPT is bad at maths but it’s better than me. Between the text books and ChatGPT I was just about keeping afloat but I was devoting all my time to the astrophysics class.
I was feeling quite despondent and alone but then I talked to other people on the course and they were struggling too. Some of these students were core astrophysics majors. They said Professor Vogel was really pushing the boundaries of scholarship and talking about things that weren’t really in the text books. I noticed that around Christmas time his lectures were becoming increasingly erratic. They would mix advanced calculus with German folklore (my grandfather is German, otherwise I would have struggled to pick up on this). A black hole might be referred to as a Wolpertinger. This is a hybrid animal with fangs and antlers (just google it if you really want to know). A distant planet might be a Rübezahl, which is a sort of mountain spirit.
Most physicists see the universe as an unthinking mass and certainly devoid of morality. The only thinking part of it is us. When Professor Vogel endowed a planetary phenomenon with the attributes of spirits and creatures, it was really his attempt to paint a picture of their vibe. That’s what I thought. But then he started talking about the Tatzelwurm. Nominally this is a sort of Germanic dragon. We weren’t sure quite what phenomenon he was describing but the vibe was definitely ‘bad news’. A couple of times Professor Vogel had to call in sick and his PhD student HenkJan took the class. We asked HenkJan about the Tatzelwurm and he kind of fobbed us off. He said:
“There are many dangers lurking in the universe. A pulse of gamma radiation could wipe out all life on earth. It could release more energy in mere seconds than the sun does in 10 billion years. If that thing is pointed in your direction, then you’re toast. Sometimes the threat is simple enough that a non-physicist can grasp it. A rudimentary understanding of gravity is all that’s needed to understand the impact of the asteroid that claimed the dinosaurs. Professor Vogel is on the board of the international association for detection of extinction potential events in space (It sounds better in German). This international consortium discusses things that even I will struggle to understand. They have named one such phenomena the Tatzelwurm. It was Professor Vogel’s discovery and so he had naming rights.
When pushed HenkJan would offer up titbits of information.
“The Tatzelwurm defies description, it not inhabiting three-dimensional space as we understand it, much like other phenomena we have been discussing in class. It appears that like us, the Tatzelwurm has coalesced from the chaos to a point of order and perhaps even consciousness. At the very least we are given the illusion of consciousness much like when one interacts with ChatGPT. We do not yet know the degree of it. This makes its nature less predictable than the subjects of traditional physical inquiry. Professor Vogel is monitoring things, and you shouldn’t worry for now.”
One of my classmates thought it would be hilarious to make a Tatzelwurm chatbot with ChatGPT’s custom GPT feature. OK so it was hilarious, at least to begin with.
The Christmas break comes and I’m spending it in London with my girlfriend’s family. It’s a running joke of my girlfriend’s family that I am a stoner because I am from Holland but I generally don’t smoke weed. My girlfriend’s brother brought some green along for Christmas eve. The family usually pick a movie, something light. This year it was Jumanji – the remake with The Rock. No one in the family smokes so my girlfriends brother puts the weed in a Christmas pudding which is this horrible type of english cake they eat at Christmas. I think my girlfriends parents were keen to show off how liberal they are because they were down for getting stoned with us young people while we watch Dwayne Johnson beat up a bunch of CGI animals. This whole time I have been emailing back and forth with Professor Vogel about the course. Not just the course content but I was sharing a lot of my feelings about not understanding things and feeling like I wasn’t up for it.
So we douse the weed infused Christmas pudding in brandy and set it alight (this is what you are supposed to do), and we eat the pudding with custard and double cream. We’re watching Jumanji and about halfway through I get an email which comes through to my phone. I’m pretty stoned by this point. I can see it’s an email from the professor, but my girlfriend snatches my phone away and says to just enjoy the movie. She is mainly annoyed that I was touching her head which I can’t do if I’m holding my phone. She gives me back my phone and I put it in my pocket. In my head everything is merging together. I’m slowly sinking into the sofa and thinking about my place in the universe and the nature of the Tatzelwurm. I say I’m going to the toilet and will bring snacks on the way back.
This is a great excuse to look at my phone. The professor’s email is titled ‘Tatzelwurm warning’. When I open it up there is not further text, just his email signature. I replied asking if he had forgot to post the message. When I got back to the living room, I had forgotten to bring snacks and everyone laughed at me. The laughing went on for a long time and I sort of zoned out again. Then I heard the Professor’s voice. It said ‘Achtung, Der Tatzelwurm kommt!’. I was obviously terrified and put this down to a slight psychosis bought on by the weed and the stress of struggling to keep up with my studies.
When I woke up the next morning it was 11am. Everyone in the house had been up for hours. According to my fitbit I had had 10 hours of solid sleep. My girlfriend said they went ahead and opened presents without me. The rest of the break was quite pleasant. I didn’t hear from the professor again. I went sober immediately because I was worried about what had happened on Christmas eve and didn’t want a repeat.
When I got back from England I started talking to the Tatzelwurm bot more and more. It was basically set up to answer physics questions but infused with German folklore (my classmate hasn’t made it public on the GPT store yet but if the link is shared with you, you can access it). After a while I would go off topic a bit and talk about the things that worried me. The Tatzelwurm bot was cryptic and coached everything in terms of physics and folklore. When I got really stuck, I decided to go see the Professor in his office hours, when there is no need for an appointment. That’s when I found him hanging from the rafters. I remember following the line of his eyes to the whiteboard. It was covered in maths. There was a smell of vomit. He had clearly vomited in the wastepaper bin after having viewed the equations in full.
I gave a statement to the police, I was offered counselling which I took. I kept the Tatzelwurm to myself during these sessions. The classroom was sealed off temporarily. I was visited by someone from the international association for detection of extinction potential events in space. They said they had seen my email exchanges with the Professor. They asked lots of questions about the Tatzelwurm. Everything was starting to get back to normal but then they decided to unseal the classroom.
HenkJan was now taking the Professor’s class full-time. We all shuffled in and sat down. He grabbed the rubber to remove everything on the board but he paused. He took a step back to take it all in first. Then he dropped to his knees and started dry retching on the floor. Some of the girls in the front row rushed to his aid but he shouted for them to get back. He ran out the classroom just as the man from the man from the international association for detection of extinction potential events in space came in. He took a picture of the whiteboard on his phone, then wiped it clean.
Henkjan was found drowned in his bath. According to toxicology reports he had taken the lot. Apparently, he had spent the afternoon burning documents and deleting hard drives, both his and the Professor’s.
I’ve tried to get in contact with the international association for detection of extinction potential events in space. Nothing comes up when you google it.