Why is there so much crackpot physics?

[Bikewer]

Allow me to relate an anecdote.
Some years back, we got a "suspicious person" call at the physics department. When we got there, the suspicious person, a crank, had one of the physics professors backed up against the wall, and was expostulating on his "theory".
He had brought along a marvelous construction... A folded-up thing made of squares of cardboard, each taped together so that it could be expanded into a construct several feet on a side. Each square was individually colored and covered with symbols and formulae....He had this thing spread out on the floor and was going on and on....

We convinced him that the very best thing he could do was publish. To write out his notions on actual paper and submit it to some peer-reviewed journals. He agreed this was a fine idea. We accompanied him out to his car, a ratty old chevy van, and discovered that this vehicle was entirely crammed, floor to roof, with old physics textbooks from libraries and universities all over the country.
Our first thought (being suspicious types) was that the fellow had stolen all these books, but we could see they were all very dated and he assured us that they were all cast-offs.
We wished him well....Never saw him again.

 

[Giordano]

I finally managed to catch up on my reading of this thread. I agree with many posters that many crackpot physicists have in common a dismissive, superior, almost angry view of more established physics and that they not only have a crackpot explanation for any failures of their theories, but that they often make up the explanation on the spot after the failure is pointed out. When an actual experimental result contracts the crackpot theory, they often just ignore the experimental result.

 

[lpetrich]

It certainly appears that the crackpot physicists have increased in number lately. ...

Or is it because the Internet makes crackpottery more accessible? Or is it because one may be more familiar with present-day crackpottery? Read Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. It was written in the early 1950's, but much of the bunkum he discussed is very familiar.

In "Down with Einstein!", he discussed physics crackpottery, going back to the late 19th cy. Back then, physics crackpots were anti-Newton, and some physics crackpots rejected wave theories of light and sound.

I assert, without a question
That the chirping of a cricket
Or the twitter of a swallow
Scatters through the air around it
And through every object near it
Atoms real and substantial—
Matter of as true a nature
As the odoriferous granules
Issuing from the cryptic chambers
Of the rose or honeysuckle—

(Alexander Wilford Hall, The Problem of Human Life, 1877)
MG continued:

Reverend Hall was fond of pointing out that the sound of a locust could be heard for more than a mile. If the wave theory of sound were correct, he argued, it meant that a gigantic mass of air, weighing thousands of tons, had to be kept in constant agitation by a tiny insect. No sane person could believe this, he said, although he did not explain how the tiny locust could fill the gigantic space with a substance. Hall was very pugnacious about it all. For eleven years, he edited a monthly magazine called The Microcosm (and for two years another magazine, The Scientific Arena) in which he tried to prod contemporary scientists into debating with him. They refused. This of course convinced Hall that his theories were unanswerable.

Another defender of the particle theory of sound around then was Joseph Battell, who dismissed the wave theory of sound as a "monstrous lie". Instead of a tuning fork's vibrations making sound, the tuning fork's sound makes it vibrate. He expounded his beliefs in detail in Ellen—or the Whisperings of an Old Pine. It is a Platonic dialogue between a 16-year-old girl named Ellen and an old Vermont pine tree, both of whom had a vast knowledge of science and mathematics.

It must be pointed out that quantum mechanics states that wave-particle duality applies to sound as well as to light, a "particle" of sound being a phonon. This has some testable consequences, like in the heat capacities of solids.

 

[edd]

It certainly appears that the crackpot physicists have increased in number lately.

I'm not sure there's much of an increase in number. Maybe it is just that in the past they'd snail mail their way almost straight to some professor's trashcan, but now they can start a blog or post on a forum with very little effort?

 

[thedopefishlives]

I'm not sure there's much of an increase in number. Maybe it is just that in the past they'd snail mail their way almost straight to some professor's trashcan, but now they can start a blog or post on a forum with very little effort?

This is true of conspiracy theories and other assorted flavors of hokum in general, actually. The Internet has made simple the possibility of both gathering information that affirms one's confirmation bias, and disseminating crackpot information to a wide audience. As a result, the appearance of "large numbers" of physics crackpots, 9/11 Truthers, what have you, is largely an illusion; there seem to be a lot of them because almost all of them are (very vocally) gathered in a few small places on the Internet. However, when the conspiracy powers-that-be try to harvest that wackjob power in a broader popular context, they're perplexed when the purported "millions of supporters" don't show up.

 

[Cuddles]

Of course, there is one factor that really shouldn't be ignored when it comes to crackpots, but often is out of, most likely, politeness - an awful lot of people are really, really stupid. Obviously this site doesn't allow you to just dismiss anyone by calling them an idiot, and in a discussion with any specific individual it's only reasonable to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume their a rational person who can be reasoned with, even though that often turns out not to be the case. But in answering a general question such as the title asks, this point is actually quite important.

IQ is not perfect, but it at least can give a general idea of things when looking at populations. About half of people are below average intelligence (arguments about whether it's exactly half, the nature of Gaussian curves, and so on aren't relevant here). More importantly, about 2.5% of people have an IQ below 70. Important, because until fairly recently that was the medical definition for mental retardation. While it's no longer a simple IQ-based assessment, low IQ is still an important factor in diagnosing intellectual disability. In the USA, for example, an IQ of 70 or below means you cannot be sentenced to death.

Of course there are arguments about exactly how to diagnose this sort of thing and where the line should be drawn, but even if you allow some leeway you're still looking at 1% or so of the population who are considered too stupid to function normally in society. And of course, that leaves an awful lot more who are not considered to be medically diagnosable, but who are still really just not very clever at all.

There are all kinds of reasons why people come to believe and advocate crackpottery and other silly things, and intelligence is far from a perfect defence against that. But it can't be ignored that one of the reasons people can end up believing in stupid things is because they are, in fact, stupid. It may be considered insulting or distasteful to bring up, especially if you do so in reference to an individual, but unless you want to claim that all people are exactly as intelligent as everyone else, there's really no way to deny it.

 

[Giordano]

I agree that one difficulty with the web is that almost anyone with unusual views can find support somewhere among the 7 billion people on this planet, obtain this support through the web (I don't know how many people actually have web access however), and thus believe that they are correct. I know this is a problem for some people with absolutely clear mental illnesses: anorexia for example. I imagine that it can also be a problem when trying to treat people with paranoia or schizophrenia (why should I take these drugs- I'm the one who is fine. A whole community on the web tells me so).

I also recognize that we as a society (USA, Europe, probably others) have become extremely polite in most endeavors, and are very hesitant to (or on this Forum, prohibited from) just dismissing people as crackpots.

Well, I have lived in places with lots of people with crackpot views (to the point of wearing aluminum foil hats at home), and learned to not have it bother me much. So I will need to learn this for the web, too.

 

[Giordano]

Of course, there is one factor that really shouldn't be ignored when it comes to crackpots, but often is out of, most likely, politeness - an awful lot of people are really, really stupid. Obviously this site doesn't allow you to just dismiss anyone by calling them an idiot, and in a discussion with any specific individual it's only reasonable to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume their a rational person who can be reasoned with, even though that often turns out not to be the case. But in answering a general question such as the title asks, this point is actually quite important.

IQ is not perfect, but it at least can give a general idea of things when looking at populations. About half of people are below average intelligence (arguments about whether it's exactly half, the nature of Gaussian curves, and so on aren't relevant here). More importantly, about 2.5% of people have an IQ below 70. Important, because until fairly recently that was the medical definition for mental retardation. While it's no longer a simple IQ-based assessment, low IQ is still an important factor in diagnosing intellectual disability. In the USA, for example, an IQ of 70 or below means you cannot be sentenced to death.

Of course there are arguments about exactly how to diagnose this sort of thing and where the line should be drawn, but even if you allow some leeway you're still looking at 1% or so of the population who are considered too stupid to function normally in society. And of course, that leaves an awful lot more who are not considered to be medically diagnosable, but who are still really just not very clever at all.

There are all kinds of reasons why people come to believe and advocate crackpottery and other silly things, and intelligence is far from a perfect defence against that. But it can't be ignored that one of the reasons people can end up believing in stupid things is because they are, in fact, stupid. It may be considered insulting or distasteful to bring up, especially if you do so in reference to an individual, but unless you want to claim that all people are exactly as intelligent as everyone else, there's really no way to deny it.

I am fortunate to live in a place right now where many of the people I encounter are quite smart, with above average IQs. This applies not only to university professors, but to many of the people who are clerks at clothing stores and who make espressos (in fact, many of the latter are smarter than the forme... oh never mind). Clearly many are smarter than I am. But every so often, frequently in the larger world, I encounter someone from the lower half of the IQ scale, sometimes someone well within the bottom of the Gaussian curve, I am astounded, and I have to remind myself of the nature of this distribution again.

Again,I agree, this is not an IQ thing only- some of the most committed conspiracy buffs I have met had high IQs and were in academia.

 

[JoeMorgue]

I have another idea that might be a factor.

"Physics" is a proud concept. If you are a Woo Slinger with Biology Woo or Economic Woo you can only talk about it in those context... but Physics is different. Physics is well pretty much everything. Only mathmatics is more universal a concept.

It's like when a Navel Gazers rattles off some insane pseudoscientific mystical woo and when called on it hides it under the umbrella of "philosophy." This is sorta the same thing in more sciencey sounding terms. Since in a sense everything is "physics" they think they can't be wrong or off topic.

 

[Giordano]

I have another idea that might be a factor.

"Physics" is a proud concept. If you are a Woo Slinger with Biology Woo or Economic Woo you can only talk about it in those context... but Physics is different. Physics is well pretty much everything. Only mathmatics is more universal a concept.

It's like when a Navel Gazers rattles off some insane pseudoscientific mystical woo and when called on it hides it under the umbrella of "philosophy." This is sorta the same thing in more sciencey sounding terms. Since in a sense everything is "physics" they think they can't be wrong or off topic.

Interesting idea. I do biology for a living. There is no logic necessarily: things just work they way they work, and you need experiments to discover how that is. Yes, you can figure out reasons for certain things retrospectively, but not typically in advance. There are many ways that the things in biology might work, and it is hard to predict in advance which way was actually taken. For example, who would predict a living platypus before actually finding one?

In physics, there is a lot more emphasis on broader theories that explain stuff. So there may be more of an interest among crackpots to create a theory in physics in the absence (or despite) actual experimental evidence, whereas very few biologists do that. On the other hand, there are indeed biology crackpots when it comes to alternatives to the theory of evolution, one of our only broad biological theories. Of course, some of them are governors and senators in the USA.

 

[The Man]

Of course, there is one factor that really shouldn't be ignored when it comes to crackpots, but often is out of, most likely, politeness - an awful lot of people are really, really stupid. Obviously this site doesn't allow you to just dismiss anyone by calling them an idiot, and in a discussion with any specific individual it's only reasonable to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume their a rational person who can be reasoned with, even though that often turns out not to be the case. But in answering a general question such as the title asks, this point is actually quite important.

IQ is not perfect, but it at least can give a general idea of things when looking at populations. About half of people are below average intelligence (arguments about whether it's exactly half, the nature of Gaussian curves, and so on aren't relevant here). More importantly, about 2.5% of people have an IQ below 70. Important, because until fairly recently that was the medical definition for mental retardation. While it's no longer a simple IQ-based assessment, low IQ is still an important factor in diagnosing intellectual disability. In the USA, for example, an IQ of 70 or below means you cannot be sentenced to death.

Of course there are arguments about exactly how to diagnose this sort of thing and where the line should be drawn, but even if you allow some leeway you're still looking at 1% or so of the population who are considered too stupid to function normally in society. And of course, that leaves an awful lot more who are not considered to be medically diagnosable, but who are still really just not very clever at all.

There are all kinds of reasons why people come to believe and advocate crackpottery and other silly things, and intelligence is far from a perfect defence against that. But it can't be ignored that one of the reasons people can end up believing in stupid things is because they are, in fact, stupid. It may be considered insulting or distasteful to bring up, especially if you do so in reference to an individual, but unless you want to claim that all people are exactly as intelligent as everyone else, there's really no way to deny it.

Yeah, but it takes special kind of idiot to think they must be some kind of an idiot savant when it comes to how the universe works. Dunning–Kruger effects aside, I recall there was some study or something that showed such crackpots were likely to be Engineers, not that Engineers are likely to be such crackpots. As a Mechanical Engineer for most of my career, it still hits closer to home than I would have liked. So sure there are enough idiots to go around but it seems there are still plenty of what we would expect to be mostly intelligent people making their rounds on the crackpot cart. It seems to be some kind of blind spot that apparently afflicts doofus and brainiac alike, with the common thread perhaps being that the universe should somehow be intuitively understandable to us. Though just more so to them at the moment. You would instantly understand it too if you would just open up your freak’n mind and stop being brainwashed by the scientific cult dogma. Wake up you cardboard sheeple!!!

 

[dasmiller]

You would instantly understand it too if you would just open up your freak’n mind and stop being brainwashed by the scientific cult dogma.

But if I open up my mind and stop being brainwashed by the scientific cult dogma, I'd lose my shill payments. The contract is very clear about that.

 

[xtifr]

Of course, there is one factor that really shouldn't be ignored when it comes to crackpots, but often is out of, most likely, politeness - an awful lot of people are really, really stupid.

In my experience, though, the stupid crackpots seem more attracted to more mundane conspiracy theories and the like. The ones that take it upon themselves to tackle physics, while obviously not as smart as they'd like to believe, seem to me to be fairly smart, in general.

Of course, I grew up in a college town with somewhat of a reputation for craziness, so my samplings may be biased.

 

[Perpetual Student]

Of course, there is one factor that really shouldn't be ignored when it comes to crackpots, but often is out of, most likely, politeness - an awful lot of people are really, really stupid. Obviously this site doesn't allow you to just dismiss anyone by calling them an idiot, and in a discussion with any specific individual it's only reasonable to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume their a rational person who can be reasoned with, even though that often turns out not to be the case. But in answering a general question such as the title asks, this point is actually quite important.

IQ is not perfect, but it at least can give a general idea of things when looking at populations. About half of people are below average intelligence (arguments about whether it's exactly half, the nature of Gaussian curves, and so on aren't relevant here). More importantly, about 2.5% of people have an IQ below 70. Important, because until fairly recently that was the medical definition for mental retardation. While it's no longer a simple IQ-based assessment, low IQ is still an important factor in diagnosing intellectual disability. In the USA, for example, an IQ of 70 or below means you cannot be sentenced to death.

Of course there are arguments about exactly how to diagnose this sort of thing and where the line should be drawn, but even if you allow some leeway you're still looking at 1% or so of the population who are considered too stupid to function normally in society. And of course, that leaves an awful lot more who are not considered to be medically diagnosable, but who are still really just not very clever at all.

There are all kinds of reasons why people come to believe and advocate crackpottery and other silly things, and intelligence is far from a perfect defence against that. But it can't be ignored that one of the reasons people can end up believing in stupid things is because they are, in fact, stupid. It may be considered insulting or distasteful to bring up, especially if you do so in reference to an individual, but unless you want to claim that all people are exactly as intelligent as everyone else, there's really no way to deny it.

In some cases, it seems a narcissistic personality is at work. Terence Witt may be a good example. A holder of a BSEE, he launched Witt Biomedical Corp. and reportedly saw it go to a $50 million in sales.
A cursory review of his crackpot book "Our Undiscovered Universe" demonstrates a high enough intelligence, but also reveals an arrogance leading to his advocacy of his "null physics" and a wholesale rejection of mainstream physics and cosmology.
However, his followers (assuming he has any) may very well fit your low IQ category.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

Not sure if I'm adding anything to answer the "why" question, but from my recent experience in a popular thread here, in this SMMT section, I think part of the answer is "because it's so incredibly easy!"

In that thread, the proponent of a whole lot of crackpot physics seems to have been able to create pages and pages of fantasies, each chock-a-block full of solid-looking physics terms ("electron degeneracy pressure", "blackbody radiation", "Planckian oscillators", even "active galactic nuclei"), most of which have only coincidental relationships to the corresponding terms found in textbooks and papers (so it seems). The proponent styles himself as a "critical thinker", yet his critical thinking did not extend to doing even the most basic of checks on the "facts" he uses to support his "hypotheses" (so it seems to me).

So why "easy"?

Because it's a story-telling narrative: cherry-pick from the almost infinite variety of material available on the internet (paying particular attention to the cranks and fringe material), spin a yarn, studiously avoid any quantitative analysis (and most definitely do NOT go download a MB or GB of freely available actual data, let alone analyze it! ), create a few nice-looking graphics, "publish" it on vixra, and bingo! Now you're an unappreciated genius (or at least an unacknowledged "critical thinker"), whose myriad hypotheses fantasies are on par with the best of what's in papers published in peer-reviewed journals! And you've done this without the need to study any university-level textbook (let alone master its contents), much less get your hands dirty with actual data or equations.

Perhaps the question might be better posed as "why aren't there far more crackpot physics ideas?"

 

[ben m]

So why "easy"?

Because it's a story-telling narrative:

I think that's right, but maybe not in quite the way you write. The storytelling isn't just the crappy references/historiography that cranks put together to impress their critics. There's also a story-telling narrative about the physics itself, a story the crank constructs about the workings of things. In the crackpot mind, if you want to know how an electrically-charged star behaves, you just lean back in your armchair and form a mental picture of a star. Then you imagine some charges on its surface. Then you imagine them moving around, wherever you like, and tell yourself a story about why they did so. "OK, the ions go, where? Up? So the electrons go down? Let's call that a double layer, that's a thing, right? There's something going on at the sunspots, so let's say the Double Layer migrates to the sunspot. Why would it do that? Let's see, it'll do that because of a temperature gradient."

It's exactly the same reasoning you need to use if you're writing fiction and are trying to feel your way through the plot. "OK, someone needs to sacrifice himself to the cauldron. One of our characters, not Taran, needs to be extra-heroic. That's great if it's part of an arc, so the character has to be unheroic before, so maybe one of the party is a traitor and repents? Or screws up? What sort of screwup is big enough? Needs to be a major character flaw, maybe one that serves as a character lesson for Taran---wrath, sloth, vanity? OK: we have written in a vain prince who loses the cauldron for misguided self-glorification. This all holds together, great."

This feels like "inventing a physics theory", because the result sounds like the sort of narrative that's described in a popular-level science book. If Stephen Hawking can invent narratives like "Spacetime is stretched near the horizon, so an infalling observer's clock seems to stop", why can't Joe Crank invent narratives like "A particle is just a local distortion of spacetime, so protons and electrons freefall towards one another in eternal helix knots"?

Perhaps the question might be better posed as "why aren't there far more crackpot physics ideas?"

I bet there are, in a sense. I bet that millions of people read popular physics books, articles, watch documentaries, etc., and walk through mental narratives of what's going on. "OK, Brian Green says there's a string, I can see that, and it's dancing, OK, well I can imagine that getting tangled. Maybe a tangled string is something special? Ooooh, here's Neil DeGrasse Tyson talking about Higgs bosons decaying into photons, now my mental picture is of a tangled string decaying into photons, it all makes sense." I bet that's not rare at all.

What's missing, in most cases, is the narcissism required to post that on the Internet and argue about it.

 

[Giordano]

I think also that a lot of the terminology of real physics is familiar to many people, but the real meanings are only vaguely understood (perhaps as taken from metaphors published in popular articles). So it is easy for a crack to use these teams in their own theory to make it look plausible to the many people who do not really understand those terms. Quantum, dark energy, time compression,, etc. all sound impressive and convincing if you don't understand the real facts, and these terms have the benefit of being nonintuitive even if you do. If someone told you that the Earth weighed 2 kilograms you might be skeptical, but if someone told you that the Earth was an quantum electrical helix of dark energy, you might think that they knew what they were talking about.

 

[The Man]

I think also that a lot of the terminology of real physics is familiar to many people, but the real meanings are only vaguely understood (perhaps as taken from metaphors published in popular articles). So it is easy for a crack to use these teams in their own theory to make it look plausible to the many people who do not really understand those terms. Quantum, dark energy, time compression,, etc. all sound impressive and convincing if you don't understand the real facts, and these terms have the benefit of being nonintuitive even if you do. If someone told you that the Earth weighed 2 kilograms you might be skeptical, but if someone told you that the Earth was an quantum electrical helix of dark energy, you might think that they knew what they were talking about.

Indeed, often employing their own meaning or some element of more common usage. In one case on these threads (some years ago) a poster was suggesting that when we see word "X" in papers we just replace it with his meaning "Y". I staunchly refused and expounded on the tendency of cranks to try to appropriate the work of others by deliberately attempting to change the meanings intended. Formal language is a critical element of science. Whether it be that of mathematics, logic or well established scientific definitions of words (some having multiple definitions in common usage or even different meanings in other fields of science). In fact I often find inconsistent usage of definitions to be a central element of some crackpot physics, as just consistently applying the definition they, at one time, claim to want to use results in problems for their notions.

 

[Giordano]

I also find inconsistent usage of definitions to be characteristic of many forms of crackpot physics. in fact I think the inconsistent use of definitions is crucial in most cases of crackpot physics. Very few people can invent a fully self-consistent fictional universe, so any inconsistencies must be smoothed over by constantly changing the definitions in response.

 

[steenkh]

I think that's right, but maybe not in quite the way you write. The storytelling isn't just the crappy references/historiography that cranks put together to impress their critics. There's also a story-telling narrative about the physics itself, a story the crank constructs about the workings of things. In the crackpot mind, if you want to know how an electrically-charged star behaves, you just lean back in your armchair and form a mental picture of a star. Then you imagine some charges on its surface. Then you imagine them moving around, wherever you like, and tell yourself a story about why they did so. "OK, the ions go, where? Up? So the electrons go down? Let's call that a double layer, that's a thing, right? There's something going on at the sunspots, so let's say the Double Layer migrates to the sunspot. Why would it do that? Let's see, it'll do that because of a temperature gradient."

It's exactly the same reasoning you need to use if you're writing fiction and are trying to feel your way through the plot. "OK, someone needs to sacrifice himself to the cauldron. One of our characters, not Taran, needs to be extra-heroic. That's great if it's part of an arc, so the character has to be unheroic before, so maybe one of the party is a traitor and repents? Or screws up? What sort of screwup is big enough? Needs to be a major character flaw, maybe one that serves as a character lesson for Taran---wrath, sloth, vanity? OK: we have written in a vain prince who loses the cauldron for misguided self-glorification. This all holds together, great."

This feels like "inventing a physics theory", because the result sounds like the sort of narrative that's described in a popular-level science book. If Stephen Hawking can invent narratives like "Spacetime is stretched near the horizon, so an infalling observer's clock seems to stop", why can't Joe Crank invent narratives like "A particle is just a local distortion of spacetime, so protons and electrons freefall towards one another in eternal helix knots"?



I bet there are, in a sense. I bet that millions of people read popular physics books, articles, watch documentaries, etc., and walk through mental narratives of what's going on. "OK, Brian Green says there's a string, I can see that, and it's dancing, OK, well I can imagine that getting tangled. Maybe a tangled string is something special? Ooooh, here's Neil DeGrasse Tyson talking about Higgs bosons decaying into photons, now my mental picture is of a tangled string decaying into photons, it all makes sense." I bet that's not rare at all.

What's missing, in most cases, is the narcissism required to post that on the Internet and argue about it.

I think this is the best analysis of the making of a crank theory. It is a pity we cannot find a crank (or a reformed crank, if they exist?) to support it.