The Lost Prince by Selden Edwards

ask William James if he knew of anyone of such a name, and now, totally at random, here he was handing her a senior thesis with that very name inscribed.
    “Do you know this T. Williams Honeycutt?” she asked, pointing to the first page of the document.
    “Oh, yes,” Dr. James said. “I know Honeycutt, Ted as he is called. Sort of a strange fellow, rather bereft of social grace, but, like that document you hold in your hand, his is quite a story.”
    “And you know how I can find him?”
    “Oh, of course. He has a small office not far from here, in the physics department.” And he reached over to his own desk and wrote on a small slip of paper the office address at Harvard.
    Before the visit to that office in the physics department, also through William James, she found a number of Harvard faculty to interview with regard to the young graduate student’s remarkable thesis, his character and performance. Each of his former teachers was cautious in describing the young man and his intelligence, but each referred to him with something like a wince and Dr. James’s “quite a story.”
    Before Eleanor actually contacted this Mr. Honeycutt, William James told her with a smile, “When he was an undergraduate, he took two of my classes. He was immediately memorable for the look of rapt attention he brought to each lecture, and his intense questioning after it. A razor-sharp mind, but without much social moderation to accompany it, quite disarming actually, and he certainly stood out, this Mr. Honeycutt. He is now a graduate student in the physics department. Quite a famous one, or infamous,you might say. That thesis you have seen stirred up quite a commotion. I have found it intriguing, and most imaginative.”
    The thesis had indeed drawn a great deal of attention within the department. It had been, everyone agreed, a stroke of originality the likes of which few in the department had ever seen. Ted Honeycutt had written an expansive dialogue between himself, called Theodore, and the fourth-century B.C. Greek sage Democritus, the discoverer of the atom. In this lengthy discourse this Honeycutt had summarized—quite brilliantly, it was admitted—the known and theorized world of the atom, including Newton and the newest discoveries, and allowed his Democritus to speculate upon all of it, and the future. The results, called “outrageous and without foundation” by one senior department member, had been heralded as “stunningly bold and prescient” by another.
    Years later, it would be noted that Honeycutt’s Democritan speculations were a near-pitch-perfect description of what would become known as quantum physics, the theory of connectedness. At first, it was feared that he had plagiarized from some unknown source, and when asked how he, a humble undergraduate, had come up with the bold imaginings, the young physics student said, “I simply allowed a visitation from a historical character and let him do the talking. The method came out of my studies with William James,” he offered as some sort of validation. Apparently, it was said, Dr. James had mentioned once or twice in a lecture that dreams were part of the reality of the unconscious mind, and we could carry on revelatory conversation with characters from those dreams in our waking life. “So that’s what I did,” Honeycutt said. “Democritus came to me in a dream, and I started the next morning writing down my conversations with him. I told him about modern physics, and he took it from there. And it worked, I guess.”
    When William James was at first shown the thesis, he said he did not remember making the observation in a lecture, but he considered Honeycutt’s a fitting application of the idea, if he had said it, “a brilliant piece of parapsychology.” Some agreed with Dr. James that the thesis was brilliant, and some thought it the work of a deranged mind. “The young man hears voices,” one professor said, and then added dismissively, “We have