Why the Prevalence of Crackpots in Physics?

[MigL]

Oh no, you don't get off that easy, AJB.

You didn't say he was a superior man playing football, you said he was a superior football player.

And while he had talent ( mostly directed at promoting himself and publicity ), he suffers from the same malady as other English football stars.

They all suck in international competitions.

I do however, enjoy watching Premier league more than Italian Serie A ( I'm of Italian origin ) as it's a more exciting style of football.

And Rooney and Welbeck did great yesterday.

 

My apologies for the hijack.

[Delta1212]

Oh no, you don't get off that easy, AJB.

You didn't say he was a superior man playing football, you said he was a superior football player.

And while he had talent ( mostly directed at promoting himself and publicity ), he suffers from the same malady as other English football stars.

They all suck in international competitions.

I do however, enjoy watching Premier league more than Italian Serie A ( I'm of Italian origin ) as it's a more exciting style of football.

And Rooney and Welbeck did great yesterday.

 

My apologies for the hijack.

Compared to the average human being, he is a superior football player.

[Ophiolite]

Compared to most footballers, of any nationality he is a superior football player. MigL is simply demonstrating that some crackpots can be found amongst soccer fans.

[MigL]

I would say you are absolutely correct, there are way more crackpots amongst soccer fans than in science forums.

Did you happen to watch the Italy-Croatia qualifier today ?

Pandemonium !!

[ajb]

Oh no, you don't get off that easy, AJB.

You didn't say he was a superior man playing football, you said he was a superior football player.

Then you are being pedantic here. I will define anyone playing football at a given time a football player.

 

 

The bottom line must be that if you want to play a serious game of football with, lets say Beckham, then you should have comparable skills and knowledge of the game. If not, then the game will be rather one sided. However, you can learn from Beckham and listen to his advice to make you a better football player.

 

I hope this analogy is okay.

Edited November 18, 2014 by ajb

[timo]

Or you could brutally foul him to get a draw.

[elfmotat]

I hope this analogy is okay.

 

I think he gets it. He just doesn't like Beckham.

[MigL]

Finally, someone understands my (admittedly lame ) sports humor.

 

Yes Becks would run rings round me. Even in my youth, but now my knees are shot ( old age and metal pins and wires ).

Anyway, sorry for the derailment. Back to the crackpot track.

[ajb]

Or you could brutally foul him to get a draw.

Which I think is what crackpots are going for. They just don't play by the same rules.

[CharonY]

A similar thing, albeit at a somewhat lower level can also be found in bio, mostly in the area of evolution. Almost everyone has a rough idea what it is and are pretty convinced that they can understand and explain it. Yet the detailed complexity of evolutionary theory is highly complex and even as a biologist I cannot claim that I actually understand it with the same certainty that many layperson exhibit when talking about it.

Typically that does not end in crackpottery, unless people start extrapolating from their assumptions. With regards to OP, crackpotter in this forum appears to dominant in physics, but in the wider scope of things I still feel that in biology we may have a larger amount of high-end crackpottery.

With that I mean scientists (often emeritus or at least established ones with a fulfilled career) that start looking at bio and try to explain things differently.

This is a great thing, mind you, unless they decided that they can skip existing data and knowledge (similar to regular crackpots). In the area of astrobiogy there are some very weird things (most being self-published, but every now and then a weird regular article pops up). Which is a bit of a shame as it may negatively affect this off-discipline approaches that are actually worthwhile to investigate deeper. Every now and then there is also the opposite where someone from a different discipline tries to do physics (of sorts, I recall a prominent example on our very own boards).
But that is the beauty of physics, often it can be easily demonstrated to be nonsense by maths. Bio and some extent Chem lack those rigors and makes it harder to spot the crackpot.

[overtone]

My first take on the thread title was that it referred to the apparent prevalence of math and physics backgrounds among the scientific types who subscribe to crackpot views in other fields of science and intellectual inquiry. The majority of scientifically educated CO2 hazard denialists seem to be physicists and mathematicians, for example (at least a couple of years ago, before their peers weighed in) as well as a disproportionate share of evolutionary theory denialists (and oversimplifiers) , GMO hazard denialists, Keynesian economics denialists, and the like.

 

My first impression, which I was going to defend in some detail, has been that these guys are used to being the smartest guys in the room, any room, so that their common experience of easily and quickly knowing better than other people has fixed certain habits of dismissal without due diligence in their mental custom. It's not physics or math, so they don't see a need for serious mental effort or wariness of first impressions. This is especially striking in matters involving Darwinian evolutionary theory and related biology, which not even the recent acquisition of seriously hairy mathematics has elevated to the status of something physicists seem to worry about having failed to comprehend.

 

The thread was otherwise intended, I see - but perhaps that side of the issue is not completely irrelevant: it's possible that one of the several reasons crackpots seem to disproportionately infest physics is that the postings of those knowledgable in physics are disproportionately excused from the label "crackpot". That is, it's partly a perception bias.

Edited November 19, 2014 by overtone

[MigL]

I don't think its Physicists or Mathematicians that are crackpots, Overtone. Its more that crackpots tend to focus on Physical ideas and concepts.

Maybe because modern Physics is so far removed from 'everyday' reality, the crackpots feel free to make all sorts of outlandish claims, without need to back them up, and claim that everyone else doesn't 'get it'.

Maybe they figure, if you can believe something like QM and its interpretations, relativity paradoxes, string theory, big bang cosmology, holographic universe theory, etc., then you'll believe anything ( or anything IS possible ).

What they don't figure, is that some members of this board actually understand, and work with, some of the previously mentioned Physical theories and concepts.

[timo]

Which I think is what crackpots are going for. They just don't play by the same rules.

That was, of course, what I kind of tried to suggest with my statement. But still I cannot really put a finger on what the translation back from the example into the real world would be. Media campaigns and paid "smoking is not bad for your health" studies would come to my mind, but they don't fit the topic here. "Not playing by the rules" could be denying the off-side rule (not what I meant, but also interesting). A suitable analogy would be to demand to be considered for the team instead of Beckham, because there is the -admittedly small- possibility that you perform better in the next match. That also captures one of the more under-appreciated issues: Just like the number of slots in a team, attention is a finite resource. A very memorable econophysics talk I attended a few years ago even went as far as to claim it was the most valuable resource of our century.

 

But the foul statement is more catchy

 

@Overtone: I am not convinced about your statement about more physicists being crackpots. What I do believe is that incorrectly extrapolating from being used to be the smartest guy in your peer group to being the smartest person in another group occurs and leads to irritation. The teenager whose friends are impressed with their pop-sci knowledge that come up with their idea of [relativity is wrong, maybe gravity is magnetism in reality, maybe everything is just energy, I think I found a key stone to the world formula] fall into this category. I am not sure if that effect explains resistance to correction, which seems to be what most people find annoying in people they call "crackpots".

[physica]

@Overtone: I am not convinced about your statement about more physicists being crackpots. What I do believe is that incorrectly extrapolating from being used to be the smartest guy in your peer group to being the smartest person in another group occurs and leads to irritation. The teenager whose friends are impressed with their pop-sci knowledge that come up with their idea of [relativity is wrong, maybe gravity is magnetism in reality, maybe everything is just energy, I think I found a key stone to the world formula] fall into this category. I am not sure if that effect explains resistance to correction, which seems to be what most people find annoying in people they call "crackpots".

 

I think we can look at the nature of physics compared to other sciences. Physics uses a lot of maths. It can be easier to see if someone is wrong in physics as opposed to biology or medicine. Maybe in physics it is easier to isolate the crackpots as opposed to sciences in less math orientated degrees. Depak Shopra has a phd and lectured at Harvard medical school. Lanza is a highly renowned stem cell research scientist. Judging on what they write if they tried to do their undergrad and phd in physics with their ideas they would be regarded as crackpots and would be trolling science forums as opposed to having the resources to write books and give lectures. If you're going to have a subject that's more strict on logic you're going to get more rejects.

 

The other thing to consider is the very nature of physics compared to other sciences. We can rerun experiments again and again. Cold fusion was a prime example. When it was released within 24 hours labs all over the world had repeated the experiment and disproved it. If you want to check up on an academic's claims on a medical trial you'd have to go though ethics, recruit loads of patients and do follow ups years later. This is very expensive and time consuming with the concept that the person you're checking up on might be right away. Maybe other sciences have the same amount of crackpots.... it's just that more fly under the radar.

[studiot]

I would have thought that the author of this thread was the sort of member we are seeking to attract, as opposed to crackpots.

 

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/86844-problem-314-turcotte-and-schubert-geodynamics/

 

So what went wrong?

 

I saw the author listed as viewing the thread when I made the second post the following day so he did not just flit through.

Edited December 15, 2014 by studiot

[Ophiolite]

It is my perception that persons asking for homework help are wholly focused on their specific problem and have no interest in scientific discussion. Typically they are not even interested in the problem they are trying to solve, other than as a route to a passing grade.

 

So what went wrong? Despite your sincere, reasoned and well informed effort to help the poster they turned out to be dick. In this case it would be nice if I turned out to be wrong and the member returned with effusive thanks, but I'm not holding my breath.

[davidivad]

there is only one thing worse than a man who does not pay his electric bill.

that would be the one who leaves the light on when nobody is home anyway in the hopes of attracting bugs.

to think that people who believe that physics should be the rule of thumb (rightly of course) cannot take a lemon and find some sugar and water and do something with it is absolutely hilarious. we have all the answers and we cant make lemonade...

 

heck maybe i'm just expecting a lemon to turn into lemonade by itself....

we can have more and it is up to our faculties to do a simple daily task.

lol, lets drag em out in the streets and hang them.... we can blame religion for it later.

 

i propose that the definition of crackpot is as follows..

crackpot -- the guy you need to feel important.

unless you agree in this thread to call people "crackpots" your rep goes down.

 

I like to see even the way out theories, which I can take our leave, but I DO NOT PUT THEM DOWN, Nothing is yet proven.

Some people cannot bend they just "snap".,

 

Carry on with your thread, slapping yourselves on the back,

how superior you are, to us poor ignorants.

 

Shame on you, Shame on science.

 

Everyone is allowed an opinion, if you do not understand that, you will never really understand anything.

 

In the end, most what is known today will be proved "wrong".

holly crap, ethics and humanity...

i wish things were different.

Edited December 15, 2014 by davidivad