He's the wisest of the wise guys

It's nearly noon, and the self-proclaimed ''world's smartest human being'' is in trouble. Cecil Adams is a day behind schedule, and he can't reach anyone at Otis Elevator to ask if the ''close door'' button on elevators really does anything, or if it just serves as a tension reliever for harried yuppies.

No one at Revlon will say whether the ''hydrolyzed animal protein'' listed as an ingredient in some shampoos is actually human blood, as rumor has it. And no one at the University of Illinois College of Agriculture seems to know for sure whether turkeys are really so stupid as to look up during rainstorms to see what's happening -- and drown.

Adams is working at home -- he saves his trips to the office fordays when he knows he'll be making lots of long-distance phone calls. It's early fall in Chicago, but it's already cold and grey outside. Adams has forgotten to go shopping, and the only food in his cluttered studio apartment is a moldy cantaloupe rind. The room offers a high-rent view of the Chicago River, but on this bleak day the only color in sight is that of a brick-red warehouse bearing a mocking sign: have fun! play tripoley!

Fun is something Adams is definitely not having. He's staring glumly at the telephone on his desk, trying to decide whom to call next. He sits surrounded by stacks of paper. Somewhere there has to be a phone number that will yield pay dirt, a reference book to help unravel these mysteries, a letter with an easier question.

Adams needs the answers for his syndicated newspaper column, TheStraight Dope, which promises to answer readers' questions on any subject under the sun. ''All major mysteries of the cosmos suc- cinctly explained,'' he boasts. Today's major mysteries are pretty typical of what preys on the minds of the eager readers Adams derides as the Teeming Millions, but they're proving tougher than usual to answer.

Still, not to panic. Adams, after all, is no bush league know-it-all, but the champion answer man of the age. Where else could a breathless world have turned to ask: Could a penny flipped off the Empire State Building really kill a pedestrian strolling on the street below? Why don't you ever see any baby pigeons? If all one billion people in China jumped off chairs at the same time, would the earth be jolted out of its orbit? Is it true that south of the equator, water runs out of a bathtub clockwise?

For the past 13 years, Adams has provided authoritative, funny, and less than polite answers to these questions and roughly a thousand more. His column runs in alternative newspapers in about a dozen big cities, including Chicago, where it originated in the Reader. Adams's replies, echoing Hobbes, are nasty, brutish, and short. The best of his answers have been collected in a book, titled (natch) The Straight Dope, and a second volume is threatened.

Adams's work has gotten him some publicity and a bit of cash -- but he continues to labor in near-anonymity, diligently resolving such mysteries as why chewing spitballs made of aluminum foil makes your teeth hurt. It seems a cruel fate, for Adams's unrelenting zeal in the pursuit of knowl- edge is truly an inspiration.

When telephone calls and library trips haven't sufficed, he has carried out one arduous experiment after another. He spent a hot, miserable vacation tooling up and down interstates to find out whether you get better gas mileage with the air conditioner on, or with the air conditioner off and the windows open. For the sake of comparison, he was obliged to spend consid- erable time driving with his windows up and the air conditioning off. He has run hot showers and cold showers and every sort of in-between shower to find out what makes the curtain sometimes drift into the tub. He has set his alarm clock to wake him at intervals through the night to confirm that a full moon is always the same size, even though it looks bigger when it's on the horizon.

Adams is so funny, snide, and well informed that he seems like across between Don Rickles and the Library of Congress. ''Christ Almighty, Barry, you're asking for a short course in thermodynamics,'' he scolded one reader who had asked if a glass of water carried into the cold vacuum of space would boil or freeze. ''Don't you guys want to know about Neil Sedaka any more?''

His combination of nastiness, a sharp ear for good questions, and tenacity in finding answers have won his column some unlikely admirers. Physics Today reprinted a bit of doggerel in which Adams bravely tried to explain the paradoxes of quantum mechanics; the Wilson Library Bulletin carried a rapturous account of his research skills; a miscellany of scientists are among the Teeming Millions.

The secret of The Straight Dope's appeal is its underlying message: the world makes sense, nature follows laws, and Cecil Adams is here to explain it all to you.

''What is it, exactly, that goes on when your ears pop?'' a worried reader asked. ''I live in a high-rise building and lately I've become obsessed with the idea that I'm gradually turning my eardrums into Swiss cheese every time I take the express elevator.'' Adams responded with a short, reassuring explanation of the way the Eustachian tube helps to equalize air pressure on the two sides of the eardrum.