Do those who espouse crackpot astronomy truly not understand astronomy?

[DeiRenDopa]

What triggered me to start this thread is this post, by icebear, in the Why is there so much crackpot physics? thread. Here's an extract (bold added):

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. [snip]
  
• 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 could, of course, have chosen any of dozens of other posts from this part of the JREF forum, over the past year or so.

In the example above, icebear summarizes what s/he thinks Halton Arp has established - close, physical-distance, proximity of objects with very different redshifts - without having any idea what "redshift" actually is, much less how an astronomer like Arp would go about measuring it. Yet icebear chose to post these opinions, here, in this part of the JREF forum, in a manner which suggests s/he is very certain of the validity of this result.

I have no problem with someone challenging 'the mainstream' understanding of anything in astronomy (or cosmology); but I do expect that, at the very least, they'd have taken the trouble to understand - even at a high level - just what the astronomical observations are, that their challenge relies on.

Yet, in every case I can recall I've seen here, those challenges have quickly been shown to be based on very weak understanding of what the astronomy actually is: what astronomers did, how they took data obtained from instruments attached to telescopes (for example) and converted them into things like 'redshift' or 'distance', what physics theories these steps totally depend on, and so on.

Which is then a good segue to the topic of this thread: Do those who espouse crackpot astronomy truly not understand astronomy?

 

[CapelDodger]

Crackpots settle randomly on a subject they don't understand but where a guru figure tells tales of martyrdom to the real truth - a truth now shared by the crackpot. That conviction makes them feel special, and they'll rarely give that up.

 

[Olowkow]

I took a course from a physicist who held various crackpot ideas, AGW denier, cold fusion works, radiation does not cause cancer, asbestos danger is a hoax, etc, and one that I had never heard before: he claimed that the sun has gone super nova three times. Seriously!

I tried to find this claim on the internet, but I was unsuccessful. Has anyone ever heard this one before?

 

[steve s]

... he claimed that the sun has gone super nova three times. Seriously!

I tried to find this claim on the internet, but I was unsuccessful. Has anyone ever heard this one before?

Are you sure he didn't mean that our sun is a third or fourth generation star, the result of previous supernovae?

Steve S

 

[DeiRenDopa]

I took a course from a physicist who held various crackpot ideas, AGW denier, cold fusion works, radiation does not cause cancer, asbestos danger is a hoax, etc, and one that I had never heard before: he claimed that the sun has gone super nova three times. Seriously!

I tried to find this claim on the internet, but I was unsuccessful. Has anyone ever heard this one before?

Oliver Manuel?

 

[Olowkow]

Are you sure he didn't mean that our sun is a third or fourth generation star, the result of previous supernovae?

Steve S

Oliver Manuel?

We had a pretty extensive discussion in person and by email, and I believe he meant that this sun has exploded then reformed three times. There was another guy who knew his cosmology also in the class who argued angrily with him about it. I told him once "You are merely arguing by assertion and from authority," he responded "That's right".

I sent him the Wiki "supernova" pages, and explained carefully what that meant. He just stonewalled and acted like he knew more than anyone. Many, including me, finally just stopped coming to class, and due to his political agenda (anti AGW, pro Romney) and bad student reviews, he was not invited back.

The strange thing, and the reason I took the class, was that as a grad student, he claimed to have been on the team that discovered the first quark. He talked of often having lunch with Feynman and knowing Teller. He has virtually no publications. The only references to him seem to be as an instructor in small colleges. He doesn't seem senile.

Not Oliver Manuel. I'd rather not give his name.

 

[Reality Check]

Which is then a good segue to the topic of this thread: Do those who espouse crackpot astronomy truly not understand astronomy?

It is even worse - those that espouse crackpot astronomy often do not even understand that crackpot astronomy as well as actual astronomy!

Your example shows

• ignorance of the BB (it is not an explosion of matter!).
• ignorance of Arp's work, e.g. that he never showed any physical connection between low and high red shift objects.
• ignorance of the basics of SR (Volkswagens have mass and never travel at c).
• the astounding ignorance of thinking Special Relativity has no experimental basis.
• the crackpot tactic of cherry picking.
  Dayton Miller reran the MM experiment around 1924 and got an unclear result. The MM experiment has been repeated dozens of times with increasing accuracy. A further 7 tests up to 1930 all showed null results with better precision.
  1955 - 1973: Six more optical tests with null results.
  2003 - 2009: Eleven optical resonator tests with null results.