I am curious: What do you suppose drives crackpot physics and cosmology? They do not seem to be very knowledgeable about physics and cosmology, other than having mastered a lot of jargon. They seem to be quite ignorant of mathematics. Yet they seem to be passionate to an extreme about their views -- to the point of behaving like religious zealots. How can they possibly believe tens of thousands of specialists (many quite brilliant) are all wrong, but somehow (although they lack the education) they have stumbled on the truth?
What do they gain out of this avocation? Appearing wise to their friends and relatives and the uninformed at cocktail parties? Are they delusional narcissists? Do they hold myriad other unorthodox opinions about he world (like, say, political conspiracy theories and Internet driven puffery)?
Any opinions?
In addition to physics and cosmology being about The Rules (as was pointed out very early in this thread), there's another fundamental attitude that is in play.
Physics has been quantitative since at least the time of Galileo, certainly Newton. One thing that follows from this is that if you, personally, don't have a good handle on quantitative, then you will not ever be able to understand physics very well. But if you find that you cannot quiet the inner voices which keep on insisting that knowing The Rules is crucial to your happiness, you will be driven to work out what The Rules are for yourself ... and as you cannot understand physics, you will have no choice but to denounce it (and you will never be able to stop yourself devoting most of your waking hours to this impossible task).
(Of course, there are people who are crackpot about physics who do do quantitative, but they will likely fairly quickly get tired of this section of JREF, will write up their ideas, and find somewhere to publish them).
One interesting thing: the 'don't do quantitative' physics crackpots get extremely touchy when there's mention of similarities between the way they present their ideas and with religion ... and yet notice how often 'belief' ('believe', etc) features in their writing; notice the huge use of what looks like 'what the Lord God {X} wrote is the Truth, every word of it' (where X might be Birkeland, for example, or Alfven) - the search for quotes, the twisting of words to suit the belief, etc. Too, much of the criticism of 'the mainstream' (or whatever) is couched in religious terms ('deities', 'dogma', and so on) - and to many a crackpot no doubt it does seem just like this (try making sense of a university physics textbook if all the equations were replaced by random text strings!).
It's rather sad really; just think how many wonderful things could be done if all that passion and energy had been devoted to something practical!
