You don't hang out for long with Joseph Nagyvary before you're faced with an uncomfortable thought: Is the man a genius or a crank?
He certainly bears some of the telltale marks of crankdom. For one thing, he's a monomaniac. Give him the slightest opening, and he'll talk for hours about his research, branching off into tributaries of arcana so narrow and obscure it seems he couldn't possibly find a rhetorical way out. Then, too, he's certain that jealous enemies are conspiring to keep his revolutionary discovery from gaining the respect it deserves. And as with most scientific cranks who claim to have solved a big problem—like discovering an unlimited source of cheap energy—Nagyvary is convinced he has solved an age-old riddle: Why are violins made by Antonio Stradivari, the legendary 18th-century Cremonese instrument maker, so dramatically better than anything built since?
Yet for all of Nagyvary's pretensions to crankdom, one fact counteracts all appearances: He does make extraordinary violins, violas, and cellos. Indeed, the instruments this biochemistry professor builds have been purchased for as much as $15,000 apiece and reviewed favorably by members of the Cleveland Quartet, Chicago Symphony, and New York Philharmonic. Yehudi Menuhin played one, on loan from Nagyvary, for 15 years. Still, no one has ever found a satisfactory explanation for the transcendently beautiful sounds that come from the violins made by Stradivari and his Cremonese contemporaries Nicolò Amati and Giuseppe Guarneri—and it isn't for want of trying. Instrument makers have patiently disassembled their violins, calibrated every dimension of the pieces to the hundredth of an inch, and replicated the measurements perfectly in new instruments, yet failed to duplicate the magic. Physicists have used lab equipment to analyze the vibrational patterns of Stradivari front and back plates, the big pieces of wood that generate most of a violin's sound, and had craftsmen carve new plates that faithfully reproduce the patterns, all to no avail. Chemists have cooked up elaborate recipes for the varnish that coats and colors a violin's raw maple and spruce, assuming it's the icing on the cake that counts. Again, no luck.
