Why is there so much crackpot physics?

Is this an actual science reporter writing that article? Perhaps the editor added the inane "'Crazy' ideas that turned out to be right" section.

Let's review.
In 1633, Galileo Galilei was accused of heresy for promoting the Copernican theory, which suggested that the Earth revolved around the sun. This challenged the long held view that the Earth was stationary at the centre of the universe. It eventually become the accepted model of the solar system.
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While the theory did face some problems due to lack of precession and the apparent size of distant stars (not a problem most people remember), to call "crazy" an idea that worked well and had been around for a while doesn't seem right.

In 1859, Charles Darwin presented the theory that species evolve gradually with time, adapting to their environment. Darwin's theory was vehemently attacked, particularly by the Church, as it implied that the Earth had not been created perfectly. However, his ideas soon gained currency and have become the new orthodoxy.
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I'm not sure that this counts as "crazy" either. Especially in the context of crackpot science. Darwin produced an astoundingly good argument, unlike those covered in the article.

Over a century ago it was widely believed that the Earth's continents were fixed in position. But in 1914, after noticing that South America could fit into Africa like a jigsaw puzzle, meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed that they were once joined together but had gradually drifted apart. Many scientists ridiculed his idea that continents 'ploughed' through the Earth's crust like a ship through pack ice. His ideas were accepted in the 1960s, when the weight of evidence proved impossible to ignore.
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Sadly, I don't remember the details of this. (Despite having gone over it to actually teach about it. I guess I wanted to forget it.) Anyone have any comments?
 
Crackpot ideas are not merely new or differing ideas. Crackpot ideas are those that contradict evidence or are devoid of evidence.
Both Copernicus and Darwin presented copious evidence.
Wegener's ideas were presented with some geological evidence but included no credible mechanism. This lack of any mechanism (before plate tectonics) doomed his theories. In any case, today's understanding of plate tectonics is a far cry from Wegener's "continental drift."
It is important to note that, in Wegener's own time, special and general relativity and quantum mechanics were very readily and quickly accepted in spite of their revolutionary and counter-intuitive nature. Evidence is king!
 
Kwalish Kid said:
Is this an actual science reporter writing that article? Perhaps the editor added the inane "'Crazy' ideas that turned out to be right" section.
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Hard to say. I was actually at a seminar on science and the media just last week. One thing all the journalists made clear is that they have absolutely no control over headlines, so it's entirely possible to have a perfectly good article with an utterly stupid and misleading headline, and the journalist who wrote the article isn't to blame for that. I don't know if inserts like that would be written by the same person as the article or added later by an editor though.

While the theory did face some problems due to lack of precession and the apparent size of distant stars (not a problem most people remember), to call "crazy" an idea that worked well and had been around for a while doesn't seem right.
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More importantly, Galileo was never actually accused of having crazy ideas. He was accused of having heretical ideas that went against established Christian dogma. People often seem to forget that being persecuted by a religious authority is not the same as being ignored and/or ridiculed by the scientific community.

I'm not sure that this counts as "crazy" either. Especially in the context of crackpot science. Darwin produced an astoundingly good argument, unlike those covered in the article.
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This is an even worse example, since Darwin was never really persecuted at all. He was a respected scientist, and his ideas were accepted pretty quickly, not least because he wasn't the only one, or even really the first, to have them. Again, the only real opposition came (and sadly still comes) from the Church.

Sadly, I don't remember the details of this. (Despite having gone over it to actually teach about it. I guess I wanted to forget it.) Anyone have any comments?
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This one is kind of borderline. The problem is firstly that there simply wasn't a lot of evidence supporting Wegener's ideas, so people were absolutely right not to accept them at first. As the article itself notes, once there was good evidence supporting it, continental drift was accepted. There was rather more ridicule than deserved, where simple rejection should have sufficed, but there's plenty of room for reactions in between ridicule and blind acceptance.

The second problem is that Wegener was, in fact, completely wrong about almost everything. Continents don't plough through oceanic crust, and they don't move due to centrifugal force. He was correct that continents have moved, but he was wrong on virtually every point regarding how and why. So while he's not a bad example of a scientist who got more ridicule than deserved, he's not really a great example of someone who was later proven correct.
 
Cuddles said:
This is an even worse example, since Darwin was never really persecuted at all. He was a respected scientist, and his ideas were accepted pretty quickly, not least because he wasn't the only one, or even really the first, to have them. Again, the only real opposition came (and sadly still comes) from the Church.
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Not quite true. Darwin's ideas were widely accepted, but Darwin was widely criticized as well. The issue was, the Lamarkians and Neolamarkians pointed out (correctly, as Darwin himself admitted) that while Darwin demonstrated how new species can become favored or removed from nature, he had completely glossed over how variation arose in the first place. de Vries rediscovered the rules of heredity (Mendel did it first, but de Vries was the first to make it widely available to the scientific community), which re-ignited a rather rigorous controversy.

That evolution happened was a done deal before Darwin wrote his most famous book (essentially, anyway). How it came about wasn't accepted until the 1900s.

By chance I found, and am currently reading, a book published in the 1960s regarding the history of evolutionary thought, organized by the major players at different times (starting well before Darwin). To put it mildly, the standard view of Darwin's book winning over everyone is a gross oversimplification. Steven J. Gould also has a series of essays that includes discussions of legitimately scientific Creationist arguments, stretching as late as the St. Louis World's Fair.

Kwalish Kid said:
Sadly, I don't remember the details of this. (Despite having gone over it to actually teach about it. I guess I wanted to forget it.) Anyone have any comments?
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Wagner was wrong, simple as that. Wagner's idea of continental drift--continents drifting THROUGH oceanic crust--was complete nonsense, given the relative strength of the two rocks. And he had no mechanism to propose for it. Plate tectonics, a very different theory which included a mechanism for tectonic motion, suffered from being lumped in with Wagner's ideas.
I'll grant you, both recieved far more passionate objections than they deserved. And many of the opposing sides didn't so much drift into pseudoscience to disprove them as much as jump in head-first. But it remains true that while Wagner proved that the plates DID move, his idea of HOW was so ridiculous that it could only be rejected. The first part of this article is very relevant to this discussion.


Our current understanding of plate tectonics has shown that the version most of us learned in school is ALSO wrong, by the way. There's no way to position convection currents such that they account for the tectonic activity we see. They almost certainly play a role, but the weight of subducted slabs (we're talking continent-sized bits of rock that strech down to nearly the core) and of oceanic ridges plays a much stronger role than most people, even geologists, truly appreciate. And mantle plumes are still something of a wild card.
 
28 pages, yet the obvious answer to the OP question "Why is there so much crackpot physics?" is that there is an ample supply of crackpots.
 
I'm not a physics major, nor do I have a degree, or read physics magazines or do whatever physics people do. My question is where do you see or hear these crackpot physics? I don't ever see them on TV, or in the papers. Nor on the internet news sites, or even entertainment sites. In fact where does a crackpot physics even exist?
 
r-j: we physicists get it by email or in the post, and it turns up on discussion forums dedicated to physics (or science more generally, like here).
Large chunks turn up on vixra.org too.
 
r-j said:
I'm not a physics major, nor do I have a degree, or read physics magazines or do whatever physics people do. My question is where do you see or hear these crackpot physics? I don't ever see them on TV, or in the papers. Nor on the internet news sites, or even entertainment sites. In fact where does a crackpot physics even exist?
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You hear a lot of it in paleontology, too, believe it or not. Crackpot physics is a necessary component of modern Creationism, so you get all sorts of fun things like insane thermodynamics equations, alterations to the speed of light, and the like when discussing anything with Creationists.
 
r-j said:
I'm not a physics major, nor do I have a degree, or read physics magazines or do whatever physics people do. My question is where do you see or hear these crackpot physics? I don't ever see them on TV, or in the papers. Nor on the internet news sites, or even entertainment sites. In fact where does a crackpot physics even exist?
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As edd implied, we've certainly had threads here that (IMO) were dedicated to crackpot physics. Many threads. Long threads. Stubborn, frustrating, mind-bogglingly not-even-wrong threads.

Sometimes a particularly creative or well-funded crackpot can make it into popular media; I'd lump Velikovsky and von Daniken and Terrence Witt into that category, though they're very different people (I suspect that von Daniken knew full well that he was making stuff up; I believe Witt was sincere).

A lot of crackpot inventions come drifting past; again, sometimes it's difficult to distinguish between the cynical frauds and the sincerely misguided. But a lot of >100% efficient motors, reactionless drives, magic filters, etc, get announced. Some of them are even sold commercially. In general, if an invention prominently features a novel use of magnets, be suspicious.

(I really need to get back to work so I'll stop there).
 
r-j said:
I'm not a physics major, nor do I have a degree, or read physics magazines or do whatever physics people do. My question is where do you see or hear these crackpot physics? I don't ever see them on TV, or in the papers. Nor on the internet news sites, or even entertainment sites. In fact where does a crackpot physics even exist?
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Yeah, they're not very newsworthy. They're just random uninfluential people with ideas they want to talk about. If you replace "physics" with, say, "gun control", *I'm* a random uninfluential person with ideas I want to talk about. What do I do with my gun-control ideas? I toss out comments on Internet discussion boards; I occasionally send unsolicited email to influential politicians. ; I have drafts of longer essays on the topic on my laptop, which I can imagine posting publicly some day.

Translate that back to physics. Crackpots show up regularly on science discussion boards. (Indeed, on many boards (Cosmoquest/Bad Astronomy for example) they overwhelmed so much non-crackpot discussion that they instituted special moderation rules for crackpot threads.) They show up regularly in comments threads on mainstream sites. (Exercise for the reader: (a) go to sciencemag.org, which has open comment sections on its news-section articles. (b) look for articles about any "fundamental physics" topic: Higgs bosons, dark matter, black holes. (c) Read the comment section and count the crackpots. I did this for Higgs articles and found something like 50% crackpots.). They send unsolicited email to influential people---university physics professors. (I get approximately one a week.) And they write up their ideas in long form and post them on the Web. (Vixra, personal web pages, etc.)

If you're new to crackpottery and want to see some, I'd recommend vixra as the place to start.
 
ben m said:
Yeah, they're not very newsworthy. They're just random uninfluential people with ideas they want to talk about. If you replace "physics" with, say, "gun control", *I'm* a random uninfluential person with ideas I want to talk about. What do I do with my gun-control ideas? I toss out comments on Internet discussion boards; I occasionally send unsolicited email to influential politicians. ; I have drafts of longer essays on the topic on my laptop, which I can imagine posting publicly some day.

Translate that back to physics. Crackpots show up regularly on science discussion boards. (Indeed, on many boards (Cosmoquest/Bad Astronomy for example) they overwhelmed so much non-crackpot discussion that they instituted special moderation rules for crackpot threads.) They show up regularly in comments threads on mainstream sites. (Exercise for the reader: (a) go to sciencemag.org, which has open comment sections on its news-section articles. (b) look for articles about any "fundamental physics" topic: Higgs bosons, dark matter, black holes. (c) Read the comment section and count the crackpots. I did this for Higgs articles and found something like 50% crackpots.). They send unsolicited email to influential people---university physics professors. (I get approximately one a week.) And they write up their ideas in long form and post them on the Web. (Vixra, personal web pages, etc.)

If you're new to crackpottery and want to see some, I'd recommend vixra as the place to start.
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Interesting.

Speaking of physics, what's your e-mail addy? I have this new idea that will revolutionize our ideas about Relativity...

;)
 
Hellbound said:
Interesting.

Speaking of physics, what's your e-mail addy? I have this new idea that will revolutionize our ideas about Relativity...

;)
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Pfft! Unless "revolutionize" means "get everyone to forget," you're on the wrong track. Through many hours of contemplation, I have discovered that the universe is actually a huge mesh of tiny units that I call 'dasitonstm' and the simple interactions between the dasitonstm explain all of the physics that our so-called experts have struggled to describe. Yes, a couple of simple principles explain everything. I'm still figuring out exactly what those simple principles are, and I haven't worked out all any of the math yet, but we all know that the math is just details. The important thing is having the Big Idea, and it took me hours to do it (or decades, I sometimes forget which), but now I have it. Dasitonstm, all the way down. Yep. Gravity? That's just dasitonstm. Doppler shift? That's just how dasitonstm look from moving objects. Time? Fundamental property of dasitonstm. Quantum effects? Sure, dasitonstm, why not? Quasars? Dasitonstm. Dark matter? Dasitonstm. Wave/particle duality? That's just how dasitonstm roll. Magnets? umm. okay, probably dasitons but... magnets. how the heck do they work?

Anyway,

Sure, the scientific establishment is trying to sweep my ideas under the rug, just like they did with Einstein and Galileo and Newton and Tesla. "Observational evidence" indeed. That will come, in time. Did Einstein have to provide a plate of relativities before they believed him? No! So why should I be held to a higher standard than Einstein? Because I and my dasitonstm are a threat to the hidebound, musty ivory towers of academia, that's why! Why, I can't even get a professional astrophysicist to seriously consider my "Dasitontm Explanation For Supernovae1" unless I first tell him/her some specifics about dasitonstm and how they would explain supernovae.

This is the kind of oppression I face, but it will just make my inevitable triumph more sweet . . .

<remaining 318 pages mercifully snipped. But I could be a world-class crackpot!>

1 "Supernovae are caused by dasitonstm"
 
It seems like what is being called "physics" is a bunch of made up malarky somebody types out on a computer. Can a bunch of words, especially ones that don't fit with current knowledge, really be called "physics"?

That seems like complaining because of the YouTube comments, there is an awful lot of bad writers.
 
r-j said:
It seems like what is being called "physics" is a bunch of made up malarky somebody types out on a computer. Can a bunch of words, especially ones that don't fit with current knowledge, really be called "physics"?

That seems like complaining because of the YouTube comments, there is an awful lot of bad writers.
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For a large part “a bunch of made up malarky somebody types out on a computer” is exactly what is the “crackpot physics” mentioned, though it can be more complicated than that at times. For example a fixation on some previous notion or physicist, while current knowledge has moved on and improved some crack pot may remain stuck on some interpretation of some famous scientist or may be just some interpretation of their own making they attribute to some scientist or statement thereof.

You seem to be attempting to imbue ‘physics’ with some kind of inherent accuracy directly related to “current knowledge”. Unfortunately that is not the case just as trombone playing is not automatically imbued with ascetically pleasing tonalities. Anything that attempts to explain physical phenomena is physics and much like trombone playing some people are just better at it than others. That our current knowledge has altered or eliminated a lot previous notions in physics does not make those previous notions any less of physics.
 
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The Man said:
Anything that attempts to explain physical phenomena is physics
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That is like saying "any attempt to explain climate is climatology". If anything is by definition, considered physics, then everybody is a physicist. Which makes the term "physicist" meaningless as a useful term.

Of course it also means I am now a physicist, which is amazing. Unless I used some bad reasoning, but since even bad reasoning is reasoning, I am now also a reasonable reasoner.
 
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