A scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory replied to my email with a curt, please don’t waste my time again. The head of the Physics Department at the University of Miami dropped Bob’s research paper like it was radioactive. He receives one of these papers each week, he said. It turns out, there is a whole community of people out there who also claim to have disproved Einstein’s theory. So persistent are these outsiders that John Baez, a Professor of Mathematics in California, felt compelled to publish the crackpot index. It’s an online quiz you can take to see if you are, by his definition, a crackpot.
The flip side of this is something I’ve noticed in academia that I’ve started calling the “crackpot fallacy” where early on crackpots pushing a perspective end up biasing the entire field against that perspective to the point they end up very slow to engage with quality efforts in a similar direction.
So in cosmology you had a guy who dedicated himself to essentially defining a “new physics” back in the 80s around the concept of a mirror universe. It was pretty much total nonsense and he really had rewrite everything to get it to work, which is never a good sign.
But recently the head of theoretical physics at the Perimeter Institute and a fairly well respected cosmologist who shares the name of a thing with Hawking ended up making a ton of headway across several papers based on the idea of a CPT symmetric universe which explains a number of unanswered phenomena, avoided falsification with CERN searching for particle that never showed up which would have invalidated it, and has testable confirmatory predictions likely to be evaluated in the next few years.
And yet most physicists outside of a small network of theoretical cosmologists have no idea about it and if introduced to it evaluate it with great skepticism because it ‘sounds’ like something they’ve learned to associate with crackpots.
We see the same thing in ML right now, where the Google engineer who thought the LLM was sentient ended up making anthropomorphizing LLMs a career jeopardizing move. So we have transformers modeling fluid dynamics accurately with Sora video generation and no one bats an eye at the claim the transformer replicated something complex it wasn’t explicitly trained on, but most balk at the idea that a LLM trained on anthropomorphic data is accurately modeling tangential aspects which feed into that data (in spite of an increasing number of replicated research efforts that show there’s quite a lot more going on than meets the eye).
In pretty much every academic field I’ve looked at, this pattern emerges.
A single crackpot can seed landmines along the path they tread for legitimate researchers who come anywhere near that ground later on.
It’s especially bad for fields where there’s less room for testable predictions or experimental results, as those can somewhat mitigate inherent research biases.
So while it’s probably quite annoying to deal with crackpots, academics would be wise to also be aware of the inherent bias they pick up via those engagements and better distinguish between identifying crackpots by methodology rather than topic - leaving a better chance to avoid dismissing a false negative when good methodology shows up in a topic previously represented only by crackpots.
Someone please put string theory through this quiz
String ‘theory’ is mental masturbation for mathematicians.
Hmm… nothing in our model or math makes sense… I know… let’s just jam all the artifacts into a dimension that cannot be measured. Ahhh… look how elegant it is!
Predictions? No, this doesn’t predict anything. It behaves identically to all existing models but it’s cooler!
Oh no, it seems to predict everything perfectly.
You just have to accept that the known universe is actually a 5D holographic projection on a the inner curve of a 7D frisbee that is floats through an unbounded, dimensionless 11D space that can somehow also expand.
Edit: also that there are infinity solutions to every problem. So tidy and elegant 😌
I am not a crackpot! Who told you that? It was mother wasn’t it!
The hilarious thing about the crackpot index is that almost ALL of it applies to credible physicists.
Physics is in a really dirty place right now, where fundamental “truths” are exploding before our eyes and the “religion” of established physics has become inertial to real growth.
We still have people who will not accept that deep at it’s core, SR is broken and QM has torn off the mask of illusion. We have new JWST data that shows the Big Bang probably never happened and the universe isn’t expanding the way it has been previously thought.
Physics is in a sad place right now with people talking about multiverses and other abhorrent mystical nonsense. Oh, we can’t currently probe at sufficiently low resolution / high energy… that means it must be magic /s
I would love to know Eric Weinstein’s score.