Sure. Physics professor is short of a paper over a slow summer. Said professor decides to write up an idea he and his poker buddies dreamed up that has the twin benefits of being trivial to research and having a guaranteed negative outcome. Unfortunately, all the physics journals our hero knows have standards so he ends up pushing a draft to arxiv.org in the hope of getting at least a conference poster out of it. The draft goes viral, it is an amusing idea after all, and our professor achieves minor celeb status from it. Eventually he gets published in a journal that not even he has heard about so all is good with the world.

Something like that.