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Why is there so much crackpot physics?

icebear said:
The problem: Most of 20'th century theoretical physic (relativity, big bang, gravity-only cosmology, black holes, dark matter etc. etc.) is crackpot physics.
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dudalb said:
Hey,icebear has been spreading it around several threads at JREF ever since he got here.......
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He has been alluding to something to do with physics being wrong. I think.

I don't know what you're getting at, icebear, and the suspense is killing me. :)
 
icebear said:
The problem: Most of 20'th century theoretical physic (relativity, big bang, gravity-only cosmology, black holes, dark matter etc. etc.) is crackpot physics.
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Why are you holding back? Why are you reluctant to lay into the morons of the 19th century (Maxwell, Boltzmann, Galois, Cantor), 18th century (Euler, Lagrange, Fourier, Young), and 17th century (Newton, Galileo)? I'm sure they'll all look pretty crackpotty for failing to understand your soon-to-be-revealed truths.
 
Perpetual Student said:
I am curious: What do you suppose drives crackpot physics and cosmology?
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I suspect it is something like this: as a whole, crackpot theorists tend to harbor grandiose sentiments. Because physics is the most fundamental of sciences, the belief that one has a peerless knowledge of the way the Universe works at the deepest level appeals to this grandiosity far more than something more restricted than, say, crackpot psychiatry or crackpot biology.

Having said that, there is a lot of both of those two as well. So it may not be that crackpot physics is actually more prevalent than other crackpot theories to begin with.
 
Ibn Khaldun said:
I suspect it is something like this: as a whole, crackpot theorists tend to harbor grandiose sentiments. Because physics is the most fundamental of sciences, the belief that one has a peerless knowledge of the way the Universe works at the deepest level appeals to this grandiosity far more than something more restricted than, say, crackpot psychiatry or crackpot biology.

Having said that, there is a lot of both of those two as well. So it may not be that crackpot physics is actually more prevalent than other crackpot theories to begin with.
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You know, I would suspect that physics crackpottery is probably easier to identify. Physics is, by it's nature, a pretty hard science. Even the "wierd" stuff can be tested rigorously.

Compare that to biology, where yes, it still has tests and such, but there's a lot of complexity that seems to make it easier to "hide" crackpottery in the gaps, and enough interacting systems that a comparatively easy yes or no answer may be difficult.

Then you get into something like psychiatry, which is really just getting into the harder science mode (it seems, to me, that it's right on the border: graduating froma softer science to a harder one), and those difficulties increase.

Just an observation, but I think there may be some merit to it. I think you're right, that the number of crackpots is probably not that different between various sciences/disciplines, but that the harder sciences seem to make it easier to point out.

Or, in other words, math doesn't lie ;) Also sheds some light on why many seem to denounce the use of math as a requirement to understanding the physics.
 
Not sure I agree with you. Crackpot biology is pretty easy to identify. Things like "cdesign proponentsists" tend to give it away.
 
I just saw this amusing comment in reference to an article about the ultimate demise of life on earth due to changes in the sun in about two billion years:

What; a bunch of nonsense, personally I don't worship or have faith in the religion of evolution. Scientists know that species do not evolve into more complex organisms. All you have to do is look at yourself and see the second rule of thermodynamics in action.

...redbug62
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:D
 
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Don't get me wrong... It's not like there isn't crackpottery on the fringe or anything like that; just that much of the last century's worth of mainstream science isn't much better.

A few Example:


  • The "Big Bang(TM)" idea. BB should have been rejected on day one on purely philosophical grounds. Having all the mas of the universe collapsed to a point would be the mother of all black holes; nothing would ever "bang" its way out of that. BB was never based on anything other than an interpretation of cosmic redshift as distance and velocity, which turns out to be wrong. Halton Arp has shown examples of very high and very low redhift objects which are very clearly part and parcel of the same things, often with obvious connecting material between them. For his troubles, Arp was banned from observatories in the US and subsequently picked up by the Max Planck Institute, sort of like the story of the "Ugly Duckling" which children read.
  • Dark Matter. Invented by scientists with hyperactive imaginations to try to salvage the failed idea of a gravity-only cosmology, which is unsalvagable. The claim is that DM is 95% of the universe. The Problem: Asking our sun and AC to influence each other via gravity is like asking two dust motes to hold together via gravity from four miles distance and the Sol-AC distance is typical for the Milky Way. Claiming that DM fixes the problem at 95 - 5 is like saying "Hey, if we only require the two dust motes to bind via gravity from 1/5 mile, that fixes i! That's plainly idiotic. Gravity is by 40 orders of magnitude the weakest force in nature. It is NOT what holds galaxies together.
  • Relativity (deformable time). What could be stupider than claiming that when two Volkswagens pass each other at light speed (or at any other speed for that matter...), time for each slows down WRT the other?? Aside from every other problem with Relativity, there is the fact that when Dayton Miller reran the MM experiment with much better equipment and at higher altitude, it did not fail...
 
I think that as the science gets softer, the crackpottery gets harder to spot. Mathematical crackpottery is, of course, even more extreme than physics (see http://xkcd.com/435/), and, generally, even easier to spot and debunk. Though it still happens. You see it a fair amount in the software industry. Especially with data compression or cryptography.

At the other end of the spectrum, people can argue for years about whether a particular economic or sociological theory is crackpottery. With science that fuzzy, determining where the crackpottery starts is always difficult.

Biological crackpottery usually seems to revolve around medicine or cryptozoology.

Physics definitely hits a sweet spot, though. Mathematics is almost too abstract, but physics tries to explain the fundamental elements of the universe, which is why, I think, so many people like to come up with their own versions.
 
xtifr said:
I think that as the science gets softer, the crackpottery gets harder to spot.
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For you maybe. I'm personally more experienced in the social and behavioral sciences—I hate the "soft" / "hard" terminology because some social science is in fact harder than certain speculative ideas in physics, so let's ditch that—and for me it's easier to point out the flaws in something like, say, anti-psychiatry than quantum woo, although I know enough to smell the latter.

And if you want me to be perfectly honest, I'd say that a most of mainstream neoclassical economics falls into the crackpot category, even if it has academic and professional backing.

xtifr said:
At the other end of the spectrum, people can argue for years about whether a particular economic or sociological theory is crackpottery. With science that fuzzy, determining where the crackpottery starts is always difficult.
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This I agree with to an extent; see above. That being said, when your rational actor model posits behavior that is uncomputable or exponential in computational complexity—a flaw that computational economists have pointed out in mainstream microeconomic models—then you have a problem. That should not be controversial. Neither should a lot of other things, for instance, the finity of Earth's natural resources. That's not even a normative statement. It's purely descriptive. If for instance you use a stock of natural resources unsustainably—that term can be operationalized perfectly well—eventually you will not have it anymore, and economists tend to have no clue about the biophysical roots of our economy. Of course ideology unfortunately comes into play in economics far more than it does in physics.

xtifr said:
Biological crackpottery usually seems to revolve around medicine or cryptozoology.
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Leaving creationism out?
 
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icebear said:
The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.
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Although ignorance does indeed lie at the core of icebear's argument, both correlation and causation run in directions that counter icebear's conclusions.

icebear said:
Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, or some other member of that crowd.

To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God Hates IDIOTS Too...
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God may hate idiots, and Mr Eastwood is as close to God as anyone alive, but I've been told Jesus loves you.
 
So, icebear, you have spent a lot of time studying creationist's views, yes?

How much time have you spent studying objective views, in their primary form? That is to say; not edited or otherwise restated by people with an agenda.

My impression is that your understanding of objective reality is seriously tainted by subjective theology.
 
OK, I'll bite.

icebear said:
The "Big Bang(TM)" idea. BB should have been rejected on day one on purely philosophical grounds.
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Scientists never reject ideas on philosophical grounds. That's because they are scientists, not philosophers (funny, that). Scientists reject ideas on the basis of scientific evidence.

Having all the mas of the universe collapsed to a point would be the mother of all black holes; nothing would ever "bang" its way out of that.
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And yet, the same theory that predicts black holes - Einstein's general relativity - also predicts that there was a big bang. In other words, you haven't a clue what you're talking about.

The claim is that DM is 95% of the universe.
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Wrong. The claim is that approximately 25% of the mass/energy of the universe is DM.

What could be stupider than claiming that when two Volkswagens pass each other at light speed (or at any other speed for that matter...), time for each slows down WRT the other??
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Why don't you identify the logical error in Einstein's 1905 paper? Since it's so stupid, that should be very easy.

The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.
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Organisms that reproduce more will constitute a larger fraction of the next generation. If there are any mutations, then basic mathematical logic trivially implies evolutionary change.

In other words, you don't have a clue what you are talking about.
 
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ngc7603_rband.jpg
 
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sol invictus said:
Wrong. The claim is that approximately 25% of the mass/energy of the universe is DM.

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The usual claim is 95%. Claiming 25% would be much worse, i.e. it would make the person making the claim look much dopier.

Again gravity is by 40 orders of magnitude th eweaket force in nature. Asking gravity to hold galaxies together is like wanting the littlest kid in the school to compete in the power-lifting event.
 
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