Why is there so much crackpot physics? Is there more crackpot physics than combined crackpot Truther fantasies, crackpot kidney-seer delusions, crackpot Bigfoot hunter dreams, etc.? There seems to be crackpot notions associated with many varied areas of interest. I've always been intrigued by people who literally can't separate reality from fantasy and live their lives as if the fantasy part was real.
I think there is more crackpot physics.
I wonder if part of it is the focus on Albert Einstein, and the fact that Einstein was able to get so far with
thought experiments, involving everyday and easy-to-think-about things (train cars, mirrors, stopwatches) and easy math (basic algebra). So there's this picture of someone sitting in an easy chair, with his feet up, "thinking about physics" by putting simple layman's ingredients together in "clever" ways, and figuring it all out. It makes it sound
extremely easy---at least, it makes it sound like it can be done with very little preparation. "I think of myself as clever. Maybe I could do that too."
There's no parallel foundational-acts-of-cleverness in, say, chemistry. The things you think of as heroic feats of chemical thinking might be, e.g., Mendeleev. Inventing the periodic table was not just armchair-cleverness, it required Mendeleev to synthesize a vast amount of experimental knowledge of the elements. (Who else? Boltzmann? Linus Pauling?) In biology, the Einstein-equivalent is Darwin. Darwin's key insights are certainly something you
could come up with in an armchair---but the historiography focuses on the fact that he spent years "in the trenches", aboard the Beagle, collecting the experimental facts he'd later synthesize. Again, nobody reads
The Voyage of the Beagle and says, "I understand this pretty well, and I think of myself as clever; I bet I could do that."
In math, there's no twee mythologizing that makes the geniuses' jobs look easy. Nobody reads a book about Euler or Gauss or Whitehead and says "I could do that". What are the exceptions? Well, there's the sort of math that gets popular books written about it. "Dear reader, you too can understand this math from your armchair", says Ivars Peterson or Simon Singh. What sorts of math do they say this about? Fractals. Infinity. Fermat's Last Theorem. Prime numbers. And lo, I think those are the fields that attract crackpots. (Not calculus. Not differential geometry. Not complex analysis.)
So that's my guess at the problem. Physics is the main field in which the
popularization, and the pop historiography, has a that's-clever-but-I-could-have-done-that feel to it, and that's the main source of crackpots.
Is there an key armchair-genius, "I-could-do-that" figure in any science---indeed, in any scholarly field---other than Einstein in physics?
(I think this hypothesis accounts for crackpot cosmologists, as the pop cosmology literature has the same these-key-theoretical-insights-are-accessible-to-laymen feel as the relativity/QM literature. It doesn't particularly account for
solar physics crackpottery---my guess is that plasma cosmology is a "gateway drug" that draws electric-sun people into the harder stuff.
And it doesn't account for creationists, Bigfooters, UFO abductologists, and 9/11 truthers, but there I think the underlying mindset is different.)
(Also: my humanities colleagues tell me that there
are history crackpots, who, just like science crackpots, wander into offices and conferences and explain their decades-long quest to prove that Pickett's Charge had really been conducted east of Cemetery Ridge. Or whatever.)
