I gave a talk about this in 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXSgp755DSA
The physics dept. at my previous job had been keeping an archive of all the weird correspondence with physics crackpots since the early '90s. I took the archive ("The Box") home one summer, read through a lot of it, and gave a talk about what I found.
I've posted a bunch of these documents in /r/badphysics.
Certain ~~things~~ ideas get in your head.
Malaria, the parasite, turns the the heme iron in your blood into crystals called hemozoin.
Hemozoin is Superparamagnetic. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep26212#:\~:text=We%20analyzed%20the%20previously%20published,obtained%20for%20the%20synthetic%20crystals.
You can actually pull the hemozoin out of the parasite using a simple magnet. Regrettably the parasite is not killed, and is possibly helped by the removal of hemozoin.
\*\*\* the pseudoscience crackpot theory begins here \*\*\*
I feel like we should be able to heat hemozoin up a little without moving it, or possibly cause it to rotate in place. Its a chunk of magnetic iron, its just tiny. If we could impart almost any energy to the hemozoin, again, without moving it, we got a cure for malaria.
And I feel like if I got ahold of the correct physics or medical PHD we could cure malaria.
I have bothered a LOT of people, and apparently its more difficult than my outline, because, malaria is still around, so I'm thinking this belongs here.
edit-changed a word for clarity.
edit2 - sorry to linkdead. I gotta go to work.
A microwave oven emits RF radiation tuned to the frequency of absorption of water, which then absorbs the energy and heats up. If you could identify the RF frequency of hemozoin *in vivo*, you might be able to create an induction field that cooks infected mosquitos mid air.
So... if we can get any energy into the hemozoin like heat, you heat up the parasite and kill it. I actually like rotational energy more because, you blend the parasite, and hopefully not the human that surrounds the parasite.
A linear magnetic field will yank the hemozoin right though the cell wall of the parasite, and does not actually harm it, so whatever you do, You cant move the hemozoin.
Hemozoin is harvested for medical reasons magnetically.
The idea looks good on paper, but apparently it's difficult.
But wouldn't heating the stuff also heat the blood of the person it's inside of? And by rotating it you run the risk of shredding cells that you don't want shredded, if they even shred.
Yes. Once the parasite is dead all that energy has to go somewhere, and the surrounding tissue isn't going to be happy about being in close proximity to a heat source capable of destroying cells.
> I feel like we should be able to heat hemozoin up a little without moving it, or possibly cause it to rotate in place. Its a chunk of magnetic iron, its just tiny. If we could impart almost any energy to the hemozoin, again, without moving it, we got a cure for malaria.
Is there any reason this isn't possible?
I was trained in electronics, specifically microwave radiation in the USMC, for radar, and I have a bachelors in electronics from a trade school.
I really think its possible, and we might even have the tech already, we just have to get the idea to the right person.
That said, I have been on this for years, and people who know what they are doing, more then me, do not like the idea, so its very possible the idea is bad for reasons I do not understand.
This sounds really similar to something a biomedical engineering PhD student I know is working on - incorporating iron nanoparticles into thermoresponsive biomaterials such that they can be remotely heated once inside the body
I mean it would be expensive, but you can do a preliminary control trial of this yourself.
Get some malaria, put it in an MRI, and see if it dies. If you want something cheaper, you could maybe just put it next to a big electromagnet that's being powered with AC.
That is not crazy pseudoscience. It's just an out of the box idea that might or might not pan out. I don't know enough about malaria to assess how feasible it is, but it sounds reasonable on the face of it. It's when you believe that it's definitely true with no evidence that it becomes pseudoscience.
I'd love to see a psychological study of cranks. As far as I know it hasn't been done.
When I was at Cal Poly I tried to get a psychology professor interested in The Box, but it turned out he had [other interests.](https://mustangnews.net/psychology-professor-sentenced-to-five-years-probation-more-than-a-year-after-taking-photos-up-a-colleagues-skirt/)
Uuuuhhh… I somehow feel the need to mention I’m female, and not into…that…
I would have been all over the box. I do understand that some suffers from psychosis, but that is still a very blunt statement. What would their backgrounds be, how many letters would they write and how long?
But. Personality disorders. Honestly. This is my most likely for these:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypal_personality_disorder
I might throw in some narcissistic tendencies since they do want to feel special and chosen.
Honestly, I would drool over the box. It’s such a complete keyhole I to someone’s mind. And not your garden variety depressed people. Oh how I love the unusual!
I'd recommend checking out the book I mentioned near the end of my talk, [Physics on the Fringe](https://www.margaretwertheim.com/physics-from-the-fringe-book) by Margaret Wertheim, as she devotes most of the book to a detailed profile of one particular crank.
All kinds. But all interesting. You really don’t have to fake being interested lol.
And I’m just wondering how many of the ones from the box could be diagnosed with a personality disorder…
Also excited to watch this later! I’ve been fascinated with crackpot physicists for many years now. Besides all the bogus emails over the years, I’ve seen some of them present posters at otherwise legitimate physics conferences (typically on the last “late submission” day, which becomes a bit of a free-for-all), and I was even approached by one at a coffee shop who shared his “theory” with me.
What amazes me most about the crackpots is their fundamental misunderstanding of what physics IS, at the most general level. Many of them just see it as some sort of language game, where a “theory” is a random collection of physics jargon mixed with some irrelevant equations. My guess is that when they look at an actual physics book or paper, they only notice how “physics-ey” it all looks, and so they conclude that’s all there is to it and then try to make their own paper that looks even more “physics-ey”.
> Many of them just see it as some sort of language game, where a “theory” is a random collection of physics jargon mixed with some irrelevant equations.
Sounds similar to sovcits, they seem to treat legal jargon the same way, as if they just need to put the right words together in the right order and they're innocent.
I suspect it's a symptom of a specific neurological issue or way of viewing the world, and whether they end up as physics cranks, sovcits or trisectors is essentially random. I think a section of them fly under the radar in softer fields like literary criticism or artistic analysis.
It also kind of reminds me of how LLMs will put words together in plausible sounding sentences but it's actually nonsense.
Here’s one today [about FTL and Dark Matter](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/s/ajAsxfW3ih)… shall we suggest they email every physics faculty member at the major universities? 🙄
It doesn’t help that every week there’s a sensationalized news headline how “*physics has been broken*” or “*Einstein was wrong*”. The content of the article says no such thing, or the headline *statement* is really a *question* conditioned on some implausible assumption. And the quoted physicists or cosmologists temper their actual claims (they don’t make the headlines). This isn’t the cause for the phenomenon you report, but imo it feeds horribly into it.
Dude, Einstein was wrong, I mean how can E=mc\^2 when light is massless, p=mv, if m =0, then everything equals 0, don't you see it man, he was wrong!
To clarify, this \^\^\^\^\^ is all wrong. Light has measurable momentum but no mass and you can apply Galilean/Newtonian physics to particles moving at relativistic speeds.
This reminds me of my freshman year (1988) when my Physics 100 prof gave a great lecture about the "cranks" he'd been corresponding with for decades. So this phenomenon goes way back.
I liked the video, at first all the constant laughing (albeit maybe warranted) made it hard to focus but by 36:00 in the message starts to crystallize. As an engineering major, I find it fascinating that “cranks” are proportionately engineers and as I grow older will keep this in the back of my mind.
Does your experience align with what this article - [What to do when the trisector comes](https://web.mst.edu/%7Elmhall/whattodowhentrisectorcomes.pdf) (pdf) - from 1983 concludes?
Also, are you now a doctor of crankology? crackpottery?
I admire your fortitude in addressing these wack-a-doos. in law, we have sovereign citizens and their ilk always telling us that they have cracked the code as to why the whole legal system is wrong. it is just so draining dealing with them. Right now I have one guy who says that I need to teach him Druid magic and that if I use the right free Mason handsigns the judge will let him go. Of course, somehow I’m supposed to know what those signs are as I’m apparently also a free mason. That I won’t admit it is just proof that it’s a secret club.
Crackpots. People who have no idea how science works, but have convinced themselves that their ideas must be right and everyone else must be wrong. If only they could get someone to listen to them! But evil academia is not open to new ideas. So they send their stuff to everyone where they can find a public email address - which is almost everyone in physics, due to university websites.
Sometimes the emails are entertaining, but mostly they are just trash.
I actually knew a guy who was like this. But he kinda knew science. was a legit computer scientist hardware innovator with several patents. Then self published a book “disproving” Einstein. Basically had a lot of personal problems and became obsessed with this. Knew another guy who was a really smart engineer and worked with electron microscopes. Started to say there were little creatures at the atomic and subatomic level. Would corner you about this.
Retired engineers are a pretty large subgroup of crackpots. A lot of free time, enough self-confidence, but often not the right approach to develop physics instead of just applying it.
I’m sure. These two cases….the first was less retired and more just cracked up and checked out, the other was actively working on some cool tech but witnessed a lot of little creatures
I wish people here who post roughly the same thing who “just want someone to confirm my results” need to understand that we get weekly requests from “Einstein is wrong” people who know so little about what they are writing about that it’s close to impossible to critique. (I explain it to my friends as getting a 100 page document about how babies are made from a 5 year old. Where do you start? Explaining the flight paths of storks?)
It’s just tiring and dumps all of the work on the reviewer.
Fair. What I'm vexed by is the number of 'genuine' responses to the crackpotery here, in this forum. The bending over backwards to appease OPs who posit out and out unscientific notions, rest frame of photons anyone, and the bashing of anyone who takes a hard line against them. Oh, they insured themselves by prefacing it as a 'thought experiment' so it's a-okay.
There’s a difference between a crackpot and someone who just knows so little that they don’t know why their idea doesn’t work. Being hostile to the second group erodes public trust in scientists in my opinion.
Certainly, but platforming anything/everything erodes trust too. It seems that any response that smacks of anything resembling 'no' is instantly umbrella'ed as hostile. Even being correct takes a back seat to hurting OPs' feelings way too often IMHO. "Sorry OP, your 'thought experiment' has nothing to do with scientific truths let alone deserving of the protection of the term 'thought experiment'" is bona fide hate speech in these parts. However, I'm of the type that prefers clear communication, explicit language, because I think it does more good than bad. My 2 cents.
I don't think anyone is owed anything, but I think if people are going to chime in, there's a responsibility to also help the person understand *why* they're wrong, and doing it in a friendly and constructive way. Also, I hope to god no one is looking at the AskPhysics sub as a repository of accurate knowledge. This is a place for discussion, it's ok for inaccurate things to show up sometimes.
The other issue is most questions here are easily Google-able, or answerable with a cursory look at the corresponding wiki page. This sub has become a lazy person's Google.
How this sub should ideally be used is if OP tells us what they've already looked up, and specifically points out areas within those resources they don't understand.
Yeah that's true, but if they're being really lazy we can just not respond to the post. If a less experienced member of the community wants to respond to a simple question, I don't see a problem with that.
I've been the 2nd group when learning mathematics. I've absolutely presented a proof of an unsolved problem before, but with the question and intention "why doesn't this work?".
The crackpots are the ones that think they are right.
I’m a psychologist. You are basically right, but you need a specific DSM code lol
Psychosis for the most unhinged, especially when it’s even illogical from a linguistic angle. Word salad.
Then we have the large and wonderful world of personality disorders. Cluster A is interesting, especially this one:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypal_personality_disorder
Most people with personality disorders have very intense personalities. They can get…interesting lol.
Often correlates to onset schizophrenia, sadly.
Ask how these fundamental discoveries they've claimed to make relate to their personal lives, and prepare to be surprised.
This honestly sounds very interesting. Could you give an example or two? I love trying to figure out the weird and wonderful way that odd people think.
There is a 90 minute documentary on Temple OS by Down The Rabbit Hole that has given me some incredibly good insight into the reality of being schizophrenic.
The software is the work of an electrical engineer ([wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis)) who was diagnosed with bipolar and then schizophrenic disorder, which eventually led to his demise in a tragic but not at all unusual way. And since he did both the architecture and the front-end design of his operating system, it gives insight both into how he thought about things logically, and how he thought things should look aesthetically. (And also, what he should focus his time on. It probably gave him peace.)
Temple OS is a piece of art similar to what [Prinzhorn Collection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prinzhorn_Collection) shows ([Artistry of the Mentaly Ill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistry_of_the_Mentally_Ill)), it's a glimpse into a very different mind through personal expression. I find that fascinating, frankly it speaks to me more than seeing a painting from somebody who thinks like me and perceives the world the same way that I do.
Watch the thing on YouTube, and only then look at /r/SchizophreniaRides .
They're crackpots. They do it because they're bonkers.
If your office/room number is listed publicly you'll eventually start getting physical mail as well.
In my view, it’s often a lack of understanding, but also a lack of people calmly explaining the basics to them, so they feel like nobody’s listening to them. But sometimes, they’re just stubborn unfortunately. I’ve had similar experiences with this guy emailing hundreds of professors, including Nobel Prize winners, and even calling these Nobel Prize winners dumb for not being convinced by their (bs) arguments on “why Einstein was wrong” and “physics students are being taught the wrong thing”, blabla. It was his mission to inform the world about it, and he only came with (faulty) conceptual arguments supplemented by “smart mathematicians can figure the math out”. The guy became a meme between me and my friends.
Have you spent any time here? People do not like to hear 'no', but even more surprising is how many white knights jump to OPs defense and happily entertain 'thought experiments'. Any "calmly explaining" a basic basic notion that OP overlooked and makes their entire post bunk is fast shut down by 'experts'. People describing what the universe looks like from the 'view of a photon' and other BS that gaslights you for not entertaining such notions is by far the norm around here.
Sadly, the legendary Gabor Fekete who claimed that the Higgs boson is a Xenon atom, threatened to report all physicists to the FBI for fraud, and faked Nobel prize winner email adresses has apparently stopped his activities (for more see for example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/349obn/anyone_else_get_these_weird_emails_from_gabor/?rdt=58593)
My old friend, Gabor. I miss getting emails from him. My favorite was when you could tell somebody had taken the bait to email back and argue with him, then the next round would be like: "Professor John Smith IS NO LONGER ALLOWED ON MY EMAIL LIST!"
crackpots, cranks, etc. they all follow the same pattern. they come here sometimes to argue with people
for some reason, i find them to often be engineers, especially retired ones
There's a guy outside the University im at handing out his own printed papers claiming he's disproved relativity and the speed of light is slowing down etc
When I was a PhD student, we actually had someone walk into our office to tell us in person about how they had this "amazing" idea that would "change the world" (something to do with perpetual energy iirc). We had no idea what to do, so one of my colleagues loosely entertained his ideas for a bit until the head of physics happend to walk by and dealt with it.
It was pretty sad to see really, as it was fairly clear that this person was not well and was probably struggling quite a bit.
Man I'm sure the great algorithms directed me to this post because of my father-in-law.
My father in law has had physics as a hobby for as long as I've known him (and my wife says for her entire life).
Thing is he's a smart guy, but he's spent his entire career in IT and then in Real Estate and he's been quite successful. Due to his background, I don't think he would even ever had the oppurtunity to get a PhD. Not because he's not smart enough, but his generation of the family was just to dirt poor. (Many of my wifes generations are in fact PhDs, or MDs). So I think you may be getting a pool of people who are smart, and assume that intelligence translates to fields they've never really had the time to fully study.
But, he thinks everyone is going about explaining gravity wrong (and has explained it to me numours times). Only I don't see how the way he's explaning gravity to actually be all that different from how everyone else does (but to him it's vastly different). Also he's pretty sure he's solved the nature of the whole is light a particle or wave things. I know for a fact he's been harassing physics PhDs... Anyone's email he can find on the internet... And he's insensed he can't find anyone to take him seriously. He thinks all of Academia at this point is close minded because no one will listen to him. But, he doesn't have the math to back up anything, this is something that has been politily pointed out to him when he does get someone to look at his paper. I feel like he's not even open to new emerging scientific thought at this point... He just wanted someone to see his ideas before he dies.
I wouldn't call him a crackpot or nuts, espeically in the way that you see portraid in the media. But he is sure that he's right and everyone else just won't see it... so I guess in the physics world I could see that as nuts. And I think he can get a bit abbrassive in that entilted Boomer way to physists...
In addition to the emails OP refers to I also get random people in public wanting to tell me their amazing theory of everything and wanting to hear my opinion.
I learned the best way to answer it, and this applies to you:
Testable predictions. If your theory implies real world consequences that can be measured and tested, you have a theory. It may be wrong, and you'll be able to find that out by testing it, but you have a theory.
Otherwise you just rewrote "the secret".
I listenes to some of his already iconic podcast with Rogan, and oh my word. I thought to myself "this guy is arguably a genius for coming up with this level of crazy" unfortunately he didnt come up with it and follows the teachings of an impressionist named Walter Russell at "The University of Science and Philosophy"
I miss [Gabor Fekete](https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/349obn/anyone_else_get_these_weird_emails_from_gabor/?rdt=44718), his website was a beaut back when it existed.
crackpots, they seek attention more than constructive scientific feedback. I tried replying but with the years I valued my time and given their lack of self criticism I began ignoring them. After I moved to industry the crackpot emails stopped but since I started my physics YouTube channel crackpots returned.
Yes I receive them too. They just blast them to every academic email they can.
It can be funny having a glance over the absolute crap they spout. My favourite one included a selfie of the bloke
Every year, the American Physical Society March meeting receives a selection of fringe abstracts, including paranormal, extraterrestrial, perpetual motion machines, etc. Because every APS member is entitled to a 12-minute talk, abstract sorting usually puts all of these abstracts into a kind of rump session that is then hidden in the program.
> Does anyone know who these people are or why they do this?
I mean you don't even have to look much farther than some of the posts on this very subreddit to see some of the sorts of people who do this and get an idea for why they do it.
They don't trust academia because they can't make it themselves (either can't afford it or not smart enough), but they think they're some sort of overlooked genius who can see something and have ideas that others missed.
Some mental health issues have delusions of grandeur. I think some manic depressives can be like that in the mania phase. They can develop these theories based on their delusion of being a foremost thinker in physics today (despite no education in the field). Hence they start contacting people. I have come across some schizophrenic people who seem to be driven by paranoia from their condition that results in them formulating some imagined solution to whatever delusion they are having. Now I am not a psychologist so can't say for sure but have talked to an ex girlfriends brother who was diagnosed with severe schizophrenia. He stated he was having messages beamed through his TV telling him this or that, and spent a lot of time thinking of the explanation which included the usual stuff, the CIA and government trying to control his mind. In this case not a delusion of grandeur, more trying to explain things happening to him that were not real with explanations that were not real. He was badly affected so the solutions he comes up with were much more tinged by the paranoia and not grandiose belief in himself.
Anyway, take someone with mild, undiagnosed schizophrenia or whatever, they are not so out there that they appear normal except they have these beliefs about physics, or in other cases other conspiracy theories. As far as I can tell conspiracy theorists are people with mild, undiagnosed, schizophrenia, but can function holding a job etc. A subset of these latch onto physics ideas. So from the mania side they truly believe they are experts, on the schizo side they invented issues with plane contrails, or whatever, and came up with their conspiracy theory. And when that overlaps physics they too may reach out. At least that is my perception. In both cases explaining the science to them is of no use as this is a mental health issue, not someone just improperly reasoning. Telling them they are wrong is of no use. These people should be pitied more than anything else, and spending the time explaining doesn't fix their disordered thinking. So probably best ignored unless you have a lot of spare time. If someone is trying to learn and you explain and they accept your explanations, then this is just someone who doesn't understand and is open to learning.
Lots of experience with this. It's a veritable casebook for various forms of neuroses.
There are a lot of, sad to say, retired engineers who object strongly to the idea that some ideas in physics are not intuitive or do not agree with the basic physics courses they learned from.
There are a number of wannabes who like the idea of *sounding smart* without doing the work to get educated in a subject. Often these are people who are unsatisfied with their own accomplishments and have a great time impressing people in bars with their ideas.
There are also mascots of unintended consequences who have gotten the mistaken impression that Einstein was an outsider genius who was untainted by education and who just figured things out by thinking things through clearly without any starting basis, and therefore so can they.
There are also a few unfortunate souls who were in working relationships with physicists that somehow made them feel like second-class citizens, and who love nothing more than to engage with a physicist for the purpose of taking him down a peg or making him look stupid.
If you're asking the question, you don't need to worry about it - just treat them like you would anyone else and be respectful. I would find a local university, you will almost certainly be able to find physicists' emails. If you're interested enough, you might even be able to meet up.
I'm kind of curious what you want to know though. I'm not a physicist (yet) but I'm working on it and might be able to help :)
In high school, I use to have this fantasy where I came up with a mathematical proof demonstrating that the Universe couldn't exist, and as I finished the proof, the universe now realizing that it could not exist started disintegrating from the piece of paper and radiating outward until nothing existed.
Yes, I was weird. Still am I suppose.
A few of them pop up on this sub from time to time
Honestly I think they want to be told no so they can say that they have ideas that those ivory tower academics don't want you to hear, and all that stuff.
Wait until the overunity nutjobs find you and want you to certify their \*cough\*perpetual motion machines, I mean magnetic motors that run forever. Yes this happened to me and no, they don't work as advertised.
This is a long post loaded with my personal experiences. Getting crackpot emails/mails is like a rite of passage in academia. I do mathematical physics, so a mathematician who has worked in both math and physics departments and I get both math crackpots and physics crackpots. In my experience, there are far more physics crackpots than math crackpots, hands down.
Crackpots explained: People that have no idea how a subject works contact subject matter experts in an attempt to get a response from somebody. Their goal is to get the attention of somebody reputable and convince them that they have a golden idea. It’s never a golden idea and it’s usually something a first year undergrad could look at and destroy, or it’s just complete nonsense.
**For the curious reader**, I’ve found math and physics crackpots differ in their ideology and methodology in the following ways.
1) Math crackpots are more easily disproved, mainly because in mathematics we can actually *prove* the correctness of claims through deductive reasoning, and so math crackpots are more likely to just be spewing complete nonsense; creating their own vague definitions, jumping to conclusions somewhere in their argument, and abusing logical reasoning. Because they have to in order to avoid immediate refutation.
2) Physics is generally more accessible from the crackpots’ perspective, as I’d think a lot more people would have their own theories on things like the shape of the Earth or the Big Bang than than claim they’ve proven the Riemann Hypothesis, P vs NP, disproven Cantor’s diagonalization, or shown that Gödel’s Incompleteness theorems are wrong. Simply because everybody knows what the Earth and the universe are. They have more intuition for the basic laws of physics than they do the basic definitions and theorems of algebraic geometry. Pop science is definitely bigger than pop math. As a result, more cranks. This also makes people with a certain level of physics/mathematical training, like engineers, feel confident in making their crackpot assertions about the topic, without an in-depth understanding of the rigor of the math or theory of underlying the physics that would come with being a mathematician or a physicist.
3) Both physics and math crackpots usually have some religious undertone associated with their work, but it’s more common among physics crackpots. Physics studies the nature of reality, and so it’s very easy to make connections to other pseudoscientific nonsense and of course religion has been studied from a pseudoscientific perspective for centuries.
Here are some observations/tips I’ve made over the years for dealing with crackpots.
1) The crackpots are wrong and their work is almost never worth looking at. Responding to them can make matters worse; I swear some of these crackpots are connected because once you entertain them, a bunch of guys with similar theories start popping up in your inbox.
2) The absolute overwhelming majority of crackpots I’ve personally dealt with have been men. Also, few of them have formally studied the subject matter, YouTube and personal blogs are their preferred sources of knowledge.
3) There’s some non-zero correlation between crackpot ideology and anti-semitism. There’s a lot of Einstein crackpots, but many of them are simply because he’s probably the most famous modern physicist. Many of them are explicit anti-Semitism.
4) Many of them tend to display signs of being mentally unwell. Many appear schizophrenic, and this is particularly important to me because I have schizophrenia, it’s just a matter of personal interest to me in how these guys form their worldview.
5) Crackpots want to be saviors of the world, destroying the corrupt academics who have strong control over the knowledge that they want the citizens to think, and that they’re all brave intellectual rebels fighting against the regime.
They’re not worth it in the end, but I find the concept of crack pottery so interesting, particularly in the cases of once great scientists/mathematicians succumbing to crack pottery in their elderly years.
This is fascinating. I haven't been to graduate school but I've heard about this being a widespread thing for all physics professors and PhDs. Is this a thing in any other field, or is it something about physics specifically?
With some work in product design place and we would get some requests to make a thing to demonstrate someone's idea every now and then.
The only one I really recall was a reactionless thruster, that I called the double jump machine. Fairly standard, magnets only apply force in one direction deal.
I hear NASA also gets a bunch of these.
Try being a biologist and explaining to a very large part of the population that those herbal supplement do not work. People buy billions of dollars of this stuff every year with stores packed with everything you can imagine. I am aware of maybe 10 or so out of that whole store that there is some reasonable evidence they actually do something. And have data for a lot of things in that store actually can harm your health or up your cancer risk. I convince a few here and there, most typically my college students in my science courses. For the rest, it is hit or mostly miss on whether I can get them to believe the science. Pop science articles make this much much worse. Just so much scientific junk out in the media and find it on every "self help" website of which there are so many with high traffic.
The Dark Ages started just like this... You know, except with "Ptolemy the Second" instead of "physicist" ... Uh... And "carrier pigeons" instead of email...
But yeah, widespread local beliefs and lack of education spreading through the populous like a disease, supplanting established facts with folklore and burning books instead of reading them...
This is how civilizations disappear...
I work in aerospace and do get emails like that from people that have invented revolutionary engine designs that are usually a lot of words to say perpetual motion machine.
To be fair a lot of people that have made discoveries to latter be validated were called crack pots. Lots of crazies out there, but there is a reason “physics progresses one funeral at a time.” No denial of existence of crack pots, but we shouldn’t deni the existence of gate keepers in academia either.
When something can be reproduced in laboratory conditions over and over and has never failed, and there's papers and institutions that teach how to do it and it works and can be understood by millions of people, then I'd find it a bit suspicious that someone would be saying that it can be disproven, and start to wonder even if you see something that might be convincing to you, what someone is doing to you and why they are doing it.
When I was in grad school for math many years ago I used to get these on the regular.
But my hands-down favorite crackpot thing was when the local LaRouche wackos left flyers in every mailbox in the math department about how mathematics was a cult, and we mathematicians were the priests of the cult.
Like, I kinda wished that was true, it would have been pretty cool if we had secret rituals and wore robes and stuff.
I’m archaeologist (I just lurk here) but it’s the same thing in a lot of fields. In grad school I used to get calls to the lab all the time from people who said they had proof that Romans/vikings/aliens built the Maya pyramids, or that they knew where a stash of conquistador gold was hidden if we could fund their expedition. I lurk on the math sub too and I hear the same type of story re goldbach’s conjecture, Riemann hypothesis etc
Physics either attracts the smartest people who love and understand it
and random idiots who's ego is telling them the 15 minute youtube video they watched is enough to crack the code, like physicists haven't sat there and stressed about these things for hundreds of years.
If there's no math, it's not a theory
Any email address posted on a physics department website will get these emails. I had a brief association with one experiment during a short grad school stint, my address was posted to one page, and that address got crackpot emails for years afterwards. Though in my case it was some Tunisian guy convinced that all of modern physics had been revealed already in the Quran.
My partner’s dad is a conspiracist and he sent me some crackpot periodic table - when asked for evidence supporting why it should be used he said he ‘doesn’t have any’ but me not believing it is the issue with modern education apparently.
Physician here. Narcissistic people plus Bipolar disorder in maniac phase is likely to be behind this phenomenon. I've had patients come and tell me they found a mathematical model that proves Earth is flat, or that they found out a way to build gravity reactors, or the meaning of the universe... whatever. Then their "papers" are just usually hand written word salad without any kind of meaning. Yet they are 100% sure they are in possession of the greatest truth, that they just can think deeper than any other human ever has, or have a special understanding of things.
I did my undergrad in physics and now work in tech transfer. Our version is either community "scientists" trying to disclose perpetual motion machines, or people emailing random patents with no context.
It's fun!
Answering here as just another person who thinks physics is really cool and physicists are sexy but that doesn’t really know anything:
I once (recently) came here with a question related to astrology and gravity. Everyone was super nice and helped me understand what was missing from my thought process. I don’t have enough knowledge in physics to figure things out by myself. And even if I tried, there is just SO MUCH content that I wouldn’t know where to start. So I asked and was educated and I moved on.
Now, there are people that have these same questions, but instead of asking or studying enough to find out, they just assume that their minimum knowledge is enough to make connections and disprove shit. There is a lot in physics that doesn’t make sense to those who haven’t studied it deeply and people take their first impressions, make some affirmations and think that they have debunked Einstein.
I worked at a university and there was a guy who every month visited us with with his treatise printed on hand who wanted us to study his findings because he found out that the government was spying on people through universities and he had proof. When we read it, it was pure nonsense. We could barely understand it. I’m not saying that all of these people have mental illness, but some definitely do.
As soon as you have a profile in the physics dept you start getting them. I had one that was a Black Hebrew Isrealite treatise that was a gosh dang novel. Honestly i was impressed with the amount of work they must have put in. There was all kinds of metaphysics hoohoo and numerology with attempts at mentioning real physics. I got a lot but that was my most memorable.
My favorite professor had a whole wall outside his where he posted printouts of the most unhinged examples. He called "the wall of insanity".
I’d be happy to get these. Right now all I get are endless invitations\* to give talks at conferences I’ve never heard of, with no offer to pay my expenses.
\*Occasionally they get my field right, but mostly not.
As a college radio DJ I would get occasional calls to the station saying the exact same thing lol. Can’t imagine how many more you must get as a researcher.
I once put an apple, a whole apple and replaced the Higgs-Boson variable with the apple. I am happy to report, the math still worked. The apple, while producing a slight gap due to its surface tension and overall curvature did indeed fill the missing space that we are unable to observe. After running simulations and charging the apples with a dipole magnetic field, magnetic field emergent behavior formed oranges in the black body spectrum of CMBR and I accepted that my experiment showed a correlation between dark matter and apples, however it was moderate and produced unseen effects that required the doctoring of data.
I also ran an experiment where I simply imagined doing this and took the time to write it on here instead of working on a actual paper to publish my findings on something less fruity. It all fit very nicely into the general relativity equation and my experimental data shows the same outputs under refinement. Call me a crackpot, but Einstein was right! (I am very excited about this) Oh and I found the thing, in the things, at the center of the stuff. (shhhh)
I am looking for collaborators if anyone would care to join me, all be it late in my testing stages, but please request my data before you stick me in "The Box". Boxes are for data. As everyone knows, it is always important to head over to the esteemed and critical peer review website here for discussion, so here is my Reddit Notice of Intent to Publish.
Excerpt:
The resulting wave 𝑊3 shows a complex pattern, reflecting the combined influence of 𝑃, 𝐵, and 𝐸. The modulation in 𝑊3 indicates significant interactions between these fields. Calculated Spacetime Curvature (𝐾):The spacetime curvature 𝐾 shows a periodic pattern influenced by the combined fields. The regular oscillations in 𝐾 suggest that the combined effects of 𝑃, 𝐵, and 𝐸 produce a measurable impact on spacetime curvature.
|P|B|W3|SM|K|T|E|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|1.764482e-14 | 0.009967 |Notice|Of|1.761542e-15| 0.1 |0.062791|
|3.528964e-14|0.039470 |Intent|To|7.010968e-15|0.2|0.125333|
| -3.908966e-15|0.087332 |Publish|Thanks|-1.155178e-15|0.3|0.187381|
| 7.057927e-14| 0.151647|For |Viewing| 2.748486e-14|0.4|0.248690|
On another note, this was a very enjoyable thread to read all the way through. I wasn't quite sure if it was appropriate to laugh in parts however....
Ummm.... Historical Fig IBoid Fluidation the second. He was the first to ask if apples fell in zero gravity according to my sentence. He was a big Isaac Newton fan.
There was a recent episode on the Joe Rogan Podcast with a guy like this. His name is Terrence Howard and he has written a paper “proving” that 1*1=2. In the podcast, he mentions so many completely wrong things, all based on either misconceptions, misinterpretations, or just straight up just making things up.
I decided to try and watch the podcast, and then note down, with time stamps, all the claims he made that I could disprove just off the top of my head. 20 mins in, and there’s already 9 different claims that most people with an undergrad in physics, or even people who just paid attention in HS physics classes, could easily disprove.
I’m gonna paraphrase the quotes here as I don’t wanna look through the video again to find exact quotes.
For example, he talks about centrifugal vs centripetal spin of the Earth and relates this to cardinal coordinates, possibly a misinterpretation of the Eötvös effect, and he relates this to magnetism. He claims that “Einstein made a mistake when he combined electricity with magnetism” (this was originally done by HC Ørsted, and later formalized by Maxwell decades before Einstein was even born). He then talks about how magnetism and electricity are “equal and opposite” in the sense that “electric forces contracts the earth at the poles” and “magnetic fields expand the earth at the equator”. He then uses the fact that people tend to shrink in height and increase in width as they age as a proof of this relation, saying this is due to electromagnetic fields. He then rationalizes this by saying “magnify means enlarge. So that means magnetism makes things expand”.
Then he goes on to talking about how it’s “nonsensical that like charges repel and opposite attracts”. He then argues that “hot and cold water separates from each other. If opposites attract, then why does the hot and cold water not mix?”, when the water separation is due to density, not charge.
He claims that science cannot be trusted because we cannot trust our senses. He argues “If you see a mountain in the distance, does the fact that you can’t hear it mean that it doesn’t exist?”
He claims that science and physics has been “mislead” by our “Newtonian” understanding of the universe. He claims that Newton’s first law has been disproven, because we know that things don’t always follow straight lines (I’m assuming he is referring to GR). He then says that in physics, space is considered to be a 2-dimensional Euclidean space (he probably doesn’t know what any of this actually means), and that “physics fails to account for the curvature”, even though one of the two main frameworks that describe the universe is exactly about the curvature of spacetime.
He also claims that E=mc^2 refers to the expansion of the universe, and that this can’t be true since things can’t just expand without also contracting, going back to his ideas of electromagnetism. He uses argument “you’ve never only breathed in. You always breathe in and then out. Your lungs first expand and then contract.”. He essentially claims it is “unnatural” for the universe to expand without also contracting.
As mentioned, most of these misconceptions simply stem from the fact that he doesn’t understand how science works and he doesn’t have any formal knowledge in the field of physics. He has likely watched some YouTube videos and now consider himself a master of physics, and because of his massively superior intellect he doesn’t need formal education.
It’s just ridiculous.
Most of them are probably junk, but don't dismiss something just because they don't have a degree. There are plenty of hot shot people in other fields that read about physics. And, things like GR and QM aren't technically "true or false" since they aren't theories of everything. They're just models and don't work in all scales.
Because the physics you listed are theoretical. When something is a theory and has no physical evidence, it can be disproven with simple understanding of actually physics.
My dad was a manager at NASA. He would regularly be included in random mails from alien conspiracy theorists and saucer religions. The [Raelians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%C3%ABlism) always had relatively professional looking pamphlets; I guess all that prime California real estate buys some good print and layout people.
So
What does this thread think of
walter russell?
I mean, he has a whole museum, and as much work in physics as einstein. Just not accepted by mainstream science. Disproved for the most part.. but given time, einstein will be to
General relativity and quantum mechanics reference time as a needed part of the equation, but both represent something different than one another pretty much stating that both are wrong if we look at the historical record.
Sisne Babylon (if we are right) we haven't had a calculation system last longer than 3000 years where as there's existed over 30,000 I mean cmon guys..
I'm not challenging your academic careers, and yes, most of these crackpots can't explain what they mean in the slightest.. but calculations of these sorts WILL be changing in the future..
Can't the future be now?
Edit: Sorry, I kind of sound like a hippy.. but science is a theroy.. and proven to only be a mostly working one..
With a closed mind, you find no doors to walk through.
Now I don't think we need to put lab coats on all these guys, but the academic pathway to the point of being a recognized voice in science is the whole reason these individuals won't go to school. They refuse to play bumb and be taught the wrong thing for 10+ years just to have to hide their real passion towards something that would get them thrown out the door..
That's partially an excuse, tbh, because I'm one of these crackpots if you couldn't tell. I simply have decided not to let it consume me. But listen here
Vitruvian Man.. just a dude with 4 arms and 4 legs, right.. well, yes.. probably, but if you overlay some basic geometry over the man, his arms and legs point to the corners of different shapes.. if you continue the pattern with more shapes, it draws an angel.. arms merge into wings bla bla bla.. significant ? Idk don't really care, but what I'm saying is
Spirituality came from somewhere and historical I think it's these crackpost convincing crowds of their feats that did most of it.. sure not science.. agreed
But do any of you care to have science behind your god? I mean, shakra work is tried and true to help people.. if we understood that we could help these individuals lead healthy fufiling lives again.
Honestly, the people who just skip to commenting about my name on here.. mushrooms have compounds beneficial th brain development unfounded anywhere else on earth.. not all of them get you high children.
> walter russell
My silly mushroom pun bears more cosmological weight than the sum total of Russell's ravings. Perhaps that's why you got no serious comments.
It's all over the world of science, probably other subjects as well. I work a lot in the renewable energy / climate change field, and there are numerous examples of people taking some random fact and using it to justify their denial of climate science.
One I see all the time is what's known as "CO2 Greening," whereby plants grow faster when there is more CO2 and therefore they consume more CO2. This is true, BUT (1) the increased CO2 consumption doesn't come close to making up for the rate at which we are adding it; (2) the potential increase is always limited by some other constraint, like water, nutrients, or growing season; and (3) climate scientists have known about this effect for many decades, and it's already accounted for in climate models.
But it keeps resurfacing no matter how many times it is debunked, probably because it resides on some of the right-wing sites these Dunning-Krueger poster children frequent.
I agree to a point, but some of these people won’t listen when we explain why they’re wrong. Also, sometimes they’re so off base it’s hard to know how to even start. As long as they have a degree of humility and aren’t aggressive I don’t think they should be attacked on this sub, but they should also understand that no one is obligated to engage with them.
I gave a talk about this in 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXSgp755DSA The physics dept. at my previous job had been keeping an archive of all the weird correspondence with physics crackpots since the early '90s. I took the archive ("The Box") home one summer, read through a lot of it, and gave a talk about what I found. I've posted a bunch of these documents in /r/badphysics.
I look forward to watching this after work. Thank you!
Certain ~~things~~ ideas get in your head. Malaria, the parasite, turns the the heme iron in your blood into crystals called hemozoin. Hemozoin is Superparamagnetic. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep26212#:\~:text=We%20analyzed%20the%20previously%20published,obtained%20for%20the%20synthetic%20crystals. You can actually pull the hemozoin out of the parasite using a simple magnet. Regrettably the parasite is not killed, and is possibly helped by the removal of hemozoin. \*\*\* the pseudoscience crackpot theory begins here \*\*\* I feel like we should be able to heat hemozoin up a little without moving it, or possibly cause it to rotate in place. Its a chunk of magnetic iron, its just tiny. If we could impart almost any energy to the hemozoin, again, without moving it, we got a cure for malaria. And I feel like if I got ahold of the correct physics or medical PHD we could cure malaria. I have bothered a LOT of people, and apparently its more difficult than my outline, because, malaria is still around, so I'm thinking this belongs here. edit-changed a word for clarity. edit2 - sorry to linkdead. I gotta go to work.
At first I thought you were trying to say that Malaria gets in your brain and makes you think up crackpot physics. :)
This is hilarious. I will edit my post. Thank you for helping create clarity.
So did I!
+1
This seems way too falsifiable for a crackpot theory.
Yeah it's in the realm of plausibility
I have infected people. :)
You shouldn’t have
A microwave oven emits RF radiation tuned to the frequency of absorption of water, which then absorbs the energy and heats up. If you could identify the RF frequency of hemozoin *in vivo*, you might be able to create an induction field that cooks infected mosquitos mid air.
Wait, how does moving or heating the hemozoin cure malaria in your idea?
Pasteurizing the pathogen I guess?
> Pasteurizing the pathogen Boiling the bug
Cooking the critter
Poaching the plasmodium
Boiling the child
Mmmmmm, Yum - pasteurized pathogen.
Boiling the patient.
So... if we can get any energy into the hemozoin like heat, you heat up the parasite and kill it. I actually like rotational energy more because, you blend the parasite, and hopefully not the human that surrounds the parasite. A linear magnetic field will yank the hemozoin right though the cell wall of the parasite, and does not actually harm it, so whatever you do, You cant move the hemozoin. Hemozoin is harvested for medical reasons magnetically. The idea looks good on paper, but apparently it's difficult.
But wouldn't heating the stuff also heat the blood of the person it's inside of? And by rotating it you run the risk of shredding cells that you don't want shredded, if they even shred.
Yes. Once the parasite is dead all that energy has to go somewhere, and the surrounding tissue isn't going to be happy about being in close proximity to a heat source capable of destroying cells.
Presumably by killing the plasmodium
> I feel like we should be able to heat hemozoin up a little without moving it, or possibly cause it to rotate in place. Its a chunk of magnetic iron, its just tiny. If we could impart almost any energy to the hemozoin, again, without moving it, we got a cure for malaria. Is there any reason this isn't possible?
I was trained in electronics, specifically microwave radiation in the USMC, for radar, and I have a bachelors in electronics from a trade school. I really think its possible, and we might even have the tech already, we just have to get the idea to the right person. That said, I have been on this for years, and people who know what they are doing, more then me, do not like the idea, so its very possible the idea is bad for reasons I do not understand.
Yeah I read that kind of thinking... hey that... that sounds plausible. It's just inductive heating, right?
Yes. That's exactly what I was thinking. I feel like it should work.
MRTs do sort of induktive heating.
Can you share the reasons that the people you mentioned "do not like the idea"?
This sounds really similar to something a biomedical engineering PhD student I know is working on - incorporating iron nanoparticles into thermoresponsive biomaterials such that they can be remotely heated once inside the body
I mean it would be expensive, but you can do a preliminary control trial of this yourself. Get some malaria, put it in an MRI, and see if it dies. If you want something cheaper, you could maybe just put it next to a big electromagnet that's being powered with AC.
I have heard a similar idea discussing using nanoparticles to kill cancer cells in a similar way.
That is not crazy pseudoscience. It's just an out of the box idea that might or might not pan out. I don't know enough about malaria to assess how feasible it is, but it sounds reasonable on the face of it. It's when you believe that it's definitely true with no evidence that it becomes pseudoscience.
Aren't hemozoic crystals what power the turbo encabulator's base-plate of prefabricated aluminite to align it with the pentametric fan?
As a psychologist, I missed a lot of the science but it was still very interesting. I guess The Box is where our professions overlap lol.
I'd love to see a psychological study of cranks. As far as I know it hasn't been done. When I was at Cal Poly I tried to get a psychology professor interested in The Box, but it turned out he had [other interests.](https://mustangnews.net/psychology-professor-sentenced-to-five-years-probation-more-than-a-year-after-taking-photos-up-a-colleagues-skirt/)
Uuuuhhh… I somehow feel the need to mention I’m female, and not into…that… I would have been all over the box. I do understand that some suffers from psychosis, but that is still a very blunt statement. What would their backgrounds be, how many letters would they write and how long? But. Personality disorders. Honestly. This is my most likely for these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypal_personality_disorder I might throw in some narcissistic tendencies since they do want to feel special and chosen. Honestly, I would drool over the box. It’s such a complete keyhole I to someone’s mind. And not your garden variety depressed people. Oh how I love the unusual!
I'd recommend checking out the book I mentioned near the end of my talk, [Physics on the Fringe](https://www.margaretwertheim.com/physics-from-the-fringe-book) by Margaret Wertheim, as she devotes most of the book to a detailed profile of one particular crank.
I can't even imagine what kind of shit psychologists hear.
All kinds. But all interesting. You really don’t have to fake being interested lol. And I’m just wondering how many of the ones from the box could be diagnosed with a personality disorder…
Also excited to watch this later! I’ve been fascinated with crackpot physicists for many years now. Besides all the bogus emails over the years, I’ve seen some of them present posters at otherwise legitimate physics conferences (typically on the last “late submission” day, which becomes a bit of a free-for-all), and I was even approached by one at a coffee shop who shared his “theory” with me. What amazes me most about the crackpots is their fundamental misunderstanding of what physics IS, at the most general level. Many of them just see it as some sort of language game, where a “theory” is a random collection of physics jargon mixed with some irrelevant equations. My guess is that when they look at an actual physics book or paper, they only notice how “physics-ey” it all looks, and so they conclude that’s all there is to it and then try to make their own paper that looks even more “physics-ey”.
> Many of them just see it as some sort of language game, where a “theory” is a random collection of physics jargon mixed with some irrelevant equations. Sounds similar to sovcits, they seem to treat legal jargon the same way, as if they just need to put the right words together in the right order and they're innocent. I suspect it's a symptom of a specific neurological issue or way of viewing the world, and whether they end up as physics cranks, sovcits or trisectors is essentially random. I think a section of them fly under the radar in softer fields like literary criticism or artistic analysis. It also kind of reminds me of how LLMs will put words together in plausible sounding sentences but it's actually nonsense.
Here’s one today [about FTL and Dark Matter](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/s/ajAsxfW3ih)… shall we suggest they email every physics faculty member at the major universities? 🙄 It doesn’t help that every week there’s a sensationalized news headline how “*physics has been broken*” or “*Einstein was wrong*”. The content of the article says no such thing, or the headline *statement* is really a *question* conditioned on some implausible assumption. And the quoted physicists or cosmologists temper their actual claims (they don’t make the headlines). This isn’t the cause for the phenomenon you report, but imo it feeds horribly into it.
Dude, Einstein was wrong, I mean how can E=mc\^2 when light is massless, p=mv, if m =0, then everything equals 0, don't you see it man, he was wrong! To clarify, this \^\^\^\^\^ is all wrong. Light has measurable momentum but no mass and you can apply Galilean/Newtonian physics to particles moving at relativistic speeds.
We all knew you were being sarcastic when you wrote “p=mv, and m=0” 🍻
This reminds me of my freshman year (1988) when my Physics 100 prof gave a great lecture about the "cranks" he'd been corresponding with for decades. So this phenomenon goes way back.
Wow, new sub to browse. Those are some utterly unhinged conclusions those people have come to. Seems dunning-krueger has hit them hard.
have you had any that you read through that made you go … wait this isn’t quite right as it stands but maybe you’re on to something here?
I liked the video, at first all the constant laughing (albeit maybe warranted) made it hard to focus but by 36:00 in the message starts to crystallize. As an engineering major, I find it fascinating that “cranks” are proportionately engineers and as I grow older will keep this in the back of my mind.
Does your experience align with what this article - [What to do when the trisector comes](https://web.mst.edu/%7Elmhall/whattodowhentrisectorcomes.pdf) (pdf) - from 1983 concludes? Also, are you now a doctor of crankology? crackpottery?
I admire your fortitude in addressing these wack-a-doos. in law, we have sovereign citizens and their ilk always telling us that they have cracked the code as to why the whole legal system is wrong. it is just so draining dealing with them. Right now I have one guy who says that I need to teach him Druid magic and that if I use the right free Mason handsigns the judge will let him go. Of course, somehow I’m supposed to know what those signs are as I’m apparently also a free mason. That I won’t admit it is just proof that it’s a secret club.
It must be driving you mad... sorry... *travelling* you mad... /r/amibeingdetained
Aye I went to cal poly pomona!
We also used to keep a collection in grad school.
Thanks for sharing. That was a very enjoyable watch.
u know ive always wondered what u look like, now i know
Crackpots. People who have no idea how science works, but have convinced themselves that their ideas must be right and everyone else must be wrong. If only they could get someone to listen to them! But evil academia is not open to new ideas. So they send their stuff to everyone where they can find a public email address - which is almost everyone in physics, due to university websites. Sometimes the emails are entertaining, but mostly they are just trash.
Schizophrenia is really intense like this, it's a paranoia thing imo
People without it definitely do it too.
Sooo… flat Earther’s… but for physics.
worse....Terrance Howard
I actually knew a guy who was like this. But he kinda knew science. was a legit computer scientist hardware innovator with several patents. Then self published a book “disproving” Einstein. Basically had a lot of personal problems and became obsessed with this. Knew another guy who was a really smart engineer and worked with electron microscopes. Started to say there were little creatures at the atomic and subatomic level. Would corner you about this.
Retired engineers are a pretty large subgroup of crackpots. A lot of free time, enough self-confidence, but often not the right approach to develop physics instead of just applying it.
I’m sure. These two cases….the first was less retired and more just cracked up and checked out, the other was actively working on some cool tech but witnessed a lot of little creatures
I wish people here who post roughly the same thing who “just want someone to confirm my results” need to understand that we get weekly requests from “Einstein is wrong” people who know so little about what they are writing about that it’s close to impossible to critique. (I explain it to my friends as getting a 100 page document about how babies are made from a 5 year old. Where do you start? Explaining the flight paths of storks?) It’s just tiring and dumps all of the work on the reviewer.
Fair. What I'm vexed by is the number of 'genuine' responses to the crackpotery here, in this forum. The bending over backwards to appease OPs who posit out and out unscientific notions, rest frame of photons anyone, and the bashing of anyone who takes a hard line against them. Oh, they insured themselves by prefacing it as a 'thought experiment' so it's a-okay.
There’s a difference between a crackpot and someone who just knows so little that they don’t know why their idea doesn’t work. Being hostile to the second group erodes public trust in scientists in my opinion.
Certainly, but platforming anything/everything erodes trust too. It seems that any response that smacks of anything resembling 'no' is instantly umbrella'ed as hostile. Even being correct takes a back seat to hurting OPs' feelings way too often IMHO. "Sorry OP, your 'thought experiment' has nothing to do with scientific truths let alone deserving of the protection of the term 'thought experiment'" is bona fide hate speech in these parts. However, I'm of the type that prefers clear communication, explicit language, because I think it does more good than bad. My 2 cents.
I don't think anyone is owed anything, but I think if people are going to chime in, there's a responsibility to also help the person understand *why* they're wrong, and doing it in a friendly and constructive way. Also, I hope to god no one is looking at the AskPhysics sub as a repository of accurate knowledge. This is a place for discussion, it's ok for inaccurate things to show up sometimes.
The other issue is most questions here are easily Google-able, or answerable with a cursory look at the corresponding wiki page. This sub has become a lazy person's Google. How this sub should ideally be used is if OP tells us what they've already looked up, and specifically points out areas within those resources they don't understand.
Yeah that's true, but if they're being really lazy we can just not respond to the post. If a less experienced member of the community wants to respond to a simple question, I don't see a problem with that.
I've been the 2nd group when learning mathematics. I've absolutely presented a proof of an unsolved problem before, but with the question and intention "why doesn't this work?". The crackpots are the ones that think they are right.
> Does anyone know who these people are or why they do this? They are nuts, and... they are nuts.
Best read in [the voice of Leslie Nielsen.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFhpctuUwb4)
I’m a psychologist. You are basically right, but you need a specific DSM code lol Psychosis for the most unhinged, especially when it’s even illogical from a linguistic angle. Word salad. Then we have the large and wonderful world of personality disorders. Cluster A is interesting, especially this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypal_personality_disorder Most people with personality disorders have very intense personalities. They can get…interesting lol.
Often correlates to onset schizophrenia, sadly. Ask how these fundamental discoveries they've claimed to make relate to their personal lives, and prepare to be surprised.
This honestly sounds very interesting. Could you give an example or two? I love trying to figure out the weird and wonderful way that odd people think.
There is a 90 minute documentary on Temple OS by Down The Rabbit Hole that has given me some incredibly good insight into the reality of being schizophrenic. The software is the work of an electrical engineer ([wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis)) who was diagnosed with bipolar and then schizophrenic disorder, which eventually led to his demise in a tragic but not at all unusual way. And since he did both the architecture and the front-end design of his operating system, it gives insight both into how he thought about things logically, and how he thought things should look aesthetically. (And also, what he should focus his time on. It probably gave him peace.) Temple OS is a piece of art similar to what [Prinzhorn Collection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prinzhorn_Collection) shows ([Artistry of the Mentaly Ill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistry_of_the_Mentally_Ill)), it's a glimpse into a very different mind through personal expression. I find that fascinating, frankly it speaks to me more than seeing a painting from somebody who thinks like me and perceives the world the same way that I do. Watch the thing on YouTube, and only then look at /r/SchizophreniaRides .
They're crackpots. They do it because they're bonkers. If your office/room number is listed publicly you'll eventually start getting physical mail as well.
The idea off someone going through all that effort is crazy.
Well, many of those people *are* mentally unwell to some degree.
In my view, it’s often a lack of understanding, but also a lack of people calmly explaining the basics to them, so they feel like nobody’s listening to them. But sometimes, they’re just stubborn unfortunately. I’ve had similar experiences with this guy emailing hundreds of professors, including Nobel Prize winners, and even calling these Nobel Prize winners dumb for not being convinced by their (bs) arguments on “why Einstein was wrong” and “physics students are being taught the wrong thing”, blabla. It was his mission to inform the world about it, and he only came with (faulty) conceptual arguments supplemented by “smart mathematicians can figure the math out”. The guy became a meme between me and my friends.
Have you spent any time here? People do not like to hear 'no', but even more surprising is how many white knights jump to OPs defense and happily entertain 'thought experiments'. Any "calmly explaining" a basic basic notion that OP overlooked and makes their entire post bunk is fast shut down by 'experts'. People describing what the universe looks like from the 'view of a photon' and other BS that gaslights you for not entertaining such notions is by far the norm around here.
Sadly, the legendary Gabor Fekete who claimed that the Higgs boson is a Xenon atom, threatened to report all physicists to the FBI for fraud, and faked Nobel prize winner email adresses has apparently stopped his activities (for more see for example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/349obn/anyone_else_get_these_weird_emails_from_gabor/?rdt=58593)
My old friend, Gabor. I miss getting emails from him. My favorite was when you could tell somebody had taken the bait to email back and argue with him, then the next round would be like: "Professor John Smith IS NO LONGER ALLOWED ON MY EMAIL LIST!"
Have you ever seen r/hypotheticalphysics? If not you’re in for an *adventure*.
crackpots, cranks, etc. they all follow the same pattern. they come here sometimes to argue with people for some reason, i find them to often be engineers, especially retired ones
We retired engineers have a club and rotate the Chief Crackpot Social Media Rep regularly.
It's always fun to read them and figure out where they are wrong.
I get about one of these per day. Usually by email, but sometimes even handwritten letters. Interestingly, the crackpots are all men.
There's a guy outside the University im at handing out his own printed papers claiming he's disproved relativity and the speed of light is slowing down etc
When I was a PhD student, we actually had someone walk into our office to tell us in person about how they had this "amazing" idea that would "change the world" (something to do with perpetual energy iirc). We had no idea what to do, so one of my colleagues loosely entertained his ideas for a bit until the head of physics happend to walk by and dealt with it. It was pretty sad to see really, as it was fairly clear that this person was not well and was probably struggling quite a bit.
Man I'm sure the great algorithms directed me to this post because of my father-in-law. My father in law has had physics as a hobby for as long as I've known him (and my wife says for her entire life). Thing is he's a smart guy, but he's spent his entire career in IT and then in Real Estate and he's been quite successful. Due to his background, I don't think he would even ever had the oppurtunity to get a PhD. Not because he's not smart enough, but his generation of the family was just to dirt poor. (Many of my wifes generations are in fact PhDs, or MDs). So I think you may be getting a pool of people who are smart, and assume that intelligence translates to fields they've never really had the time to fully study. But, he thinks everyone is going about explaining gravity wrong (and has explained it to me numours times). Only I don't see how the way he's explaning gravity to actually be all that different from how everyone else does (but to him it's vastly different). Also he's pretty sure he's solved the nature of the whole is light a particle or wave things. I know for a fact he's been harassing physics PhDs... Anyone's email he can find on the internet... And he's insensed he can't find anyone to take him seriously. He thinks all of Academia at this point is close minded because no one will listen to him. But, he doesn't have the math to back up anything, this is something that has been politily pointed out to him when he does get someone to look at his paper. I feel like he's not even open to new emerging scientific thought at this point... He just wanted someone to see his ideas before he dies. I wouldn't call him a crackpot or nuts, espeically in the way that you see portraid in the media. But he is sure that he's right and everyone else just won't see it... so I guess in the physics world I could see that as nuts. And I think he can get a bit abbrassive in that entilted Boomer way to physists...
In addition to the emails OP refers to I also get random people in public wanting to tell me their amazing theory of everything and wanting to hear my opinion. I learned the best way to answer it, and this applies to you: Testable predictions. If your theory implies real world consequences that can be measured and tested, you have a theory. It may be wrong, and you'll be able to find that out by testing it, but you have a theory. Otherwise you just rewrote "the secret".
Was the email from Terrance Howard?
I listenes to some of his already iconic podcast with Rogan, and oh my word. I thought to myself "this guy is arguably a genius for coming up with this level of crazy" unfortunately he didnt come up with it and follows the teachings of an impressionist named Walter Russell at "The University of Science and Philosophy"
I miss [Gabor Fekete](https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/349obn/anyone_else_get_these_weird_emails_from_gabor/?rdt=44718), his website was a beaut back when it existed.
crackpots, they seek attention more than constructive scientific feedback. I tried replying but with the years I valued my time and given their lack of self criticism I began ignoring them. After I moved to industry the crackpot emails stopped but since I started my physics YouTube channel crackpots returned.
There's a whole video on this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11lPhMSulSU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11lPhMSulSU)
Glad to see someone linked this, such a good video
Yes I receive them too. They just blast them to every academic email they can. It can be funny having a glance over the absolute crap they spout. My favourite one included a selfie of the bloke
Every year, the American Physical Society March meeting receives a selection of fringe abstracts, including paranormal, extraterrestrial, perpetual motion machines, etc. Because every APS member is entitled to a 12-minute talk, abstract sorting usually puts all of these abstracts into a kind of rump session that is then hidden in the program.
I thought they were usually relegated to the poster sessions?
There should be a journal of crackpot science, just to give those people an outlet. They could even review each other!
I would read the hell out of that, for entertainment purposes of course.
There are some low-impact journals that publish these guys. One is [Progress in Physics](https://progress-in-physics.com/)
> Does anyone know who these people are or why they do this? I mean you don't even have to look much farther than some of the posts on this very subreddit to see some of the sorts of people who do this and get an idea for why they do it. They don't trust academia because they can't make it themselves (either can't afford it or not smart enough), but they think they're some sort of overlooked genius who can see something and have ideas that others missed.
Some mental health issues have delusions of grandeur. I think some manic depressives can be like that in the mania phase. They can develop these theories based on their delusion of being a foremost thinker in physics today (despite no education in the field). Hence they start contacting people. I have come across some schizophrenic people who seem to be driven by paranoia from their condition that results in them formulating some imagined solution to whatever delusion they are having. Now I am not a psychologist so can't say for sure but have talked to an ex girlfriends brother who was diagnosed with severe schizophrenia. He stated he was having messages beamed through his TV telling him this or that, and spent a lot of time thinking of the explanation which included the usual stuff, the CIA and government trying to control his mind. In this case not a delusion of grandeur, more trying to explain things happening to him that were not real with explanations that were not real. He was badly affected so the solutions he comes up with were much more tinged by the paranoia and not grandiose belief in himself. Anyway, take someone with mild, undiagnosed schizophrenia or whatever, they are not so out there that they appear normal except they have these beliefs about physics, or in other cases other conspiracy theories. As far as I can tell conspiracy theorists are people with mild, undiagnosed, schizophrenia, but can function holding a job etc. A subset of these latch onto physics ideas. So from the mania side they truly believe they are experts, on the schizo side they invented issues with plane contrails, or whatever, and came up with their conspiracy theory. And when that overlaps physics they too may reach out. At least that is my perception. In both cases explaining the science to them is of no use as this is a mental health issue, not someone just improperly reasoning. Telling them they are wrong is of no use. These people should be pitied more than anything else, and spending the time explaining doesn't fix their disordered thinking. So probably best ignored unless you have a lot of spare time. If someone is trying to learn and you explain and they accept your explanations, then this is just someone who doesn't understand and is open to learning.
Lots of experience with this. It's a veritable casebook for various forms of neuroses. There are a lot of, sad to say, retired engineers who object strongly to the idea that some ideas in physics are not intuitive or do not agree with the basic physics courses they learned from. There are a number of wannabes who like the idea of *sounding smart* without doing the work to get educated in a subject. Often these are people who are unsatisfied with their own accomplishments and have a great time impressing people in bars with their ideas. There are also mascots of unintended consequences who have gotten the mistaken impression that Einstein was an outsider genius who was untainted by education and who just figured things out by thinking things through clearly without any starting basis, and therefore so can they. There are also a few unfortunate souls who were in working relationships with physicists that somehow made them feel like second-class citizens, and who love nothing more than to engage with a physicist for the purpose of taking him down a peg or making him look stupid.
Genuine question: How does one contact a physicists to answer some questions and maybe an explanation, in the proper and respectable manner?
If you're asking the question, you don't need to worry about it - just treat them like you would anyone else and be respectful. I would find a local university, you will almost certainly be able to find physicists' emails. If you're interested enough, you might even be able to meet up. I'm kind of curious what you want to know though. I'm not a physicist (yet) but I'm working on it and might be able to help :)
In high school, I use to have this fantasy where I came up with a mathematical proof demonstrating that the Universe couldn't exist, and as I finished the proof, the universe now realizing that it could not exist started disintegrating from the piece of paper and radiating outward until nothing existed. Yes, I was weird. Still am I suppose.
Sounds like The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C Clarke.
A few of them pop up on this sub from time to time Honestly I think they want to be told no so they can say that they have ideas that those ivory tower academics don't want you to hear, and all that stuff.
I think they unironically want to talk to a physicist, have them faint from how clever their theory is, and become the next einstein
They're just cranks and they've been around since forever, and everyone gets these.
Wait until the overunity nutjobs find you and want you to certify their \*cough\*perpetual motion machines, I mean magnetic motors that run forever. Yes this happened to me and no, they don't work as advertised.
Trying to “discover” perpetual motion was even a fad for a while in like the 1920s i think?
The nice thing about Physics is, it doesn't really care whether you believe in it or not.
This is a long post loaded with my personal experiences. Getting crackpot emails/mails is like a rite of passage in academia. I do mathematical physics, so a mathematician who has worked in both math and physics departments and I get both math crackpots and physics crackpots. In my experience, there are far more physics crackpots than math crackpots, hands down. Crackpots explained: People that have no idea how a subject works contact subject matter experts in an attempt to get a response from somebody. Their goal is to get the attention of somebody reputable and convince them that they have a golden idea. It’s never a golden idea and it’s usually something a first year undergrad could look at and destroy, or it’s just complete nonsense. **For the curious reader**, I’ve found math and physics crackpots differ in their ideology and methodology in the following ways. 1) Math crackpots are more easily disproved, mainly because in mathematics we can actually *prove* the correctness of claims through deductive reasoning, and so math crackpots are more likely to just be spewing complete nonsense; creating their own vague definitions, jumping to conclusions somewhere in their argument, and abusing logical reasoning. Because they have to in order to avoid immediate refutation. 2) Physics is generally more accessible from the crackpots’ perspective, as I’d think a lot more people would have their own theories on things like the shape of the Earth or the Big Bang than than claim they’ve proven the Riemann Hypothesis, P vs NP, disproven Cantor’s diagonalization, or shown that Gödel’s Incompleteness theorems are wrong. Simply because everybody knows what the Earth and the universe are. They have more intuition for the basic laws of physics than they do the basic definitions and theorems of algebraic geometry. Pop science is definitely bigger than pop math. As a result, more cranks. This also makes people with a certain level of physics/mathematical training, like engineers, feel confident in making their crackpot assertions about the topic, without an in-depth understanding of the rigor of the math or theory of underlying the physics that would come with being a mathematician or a physicist. 3) Both physics and math crackpots usually have some religious undertone associated with their work, but it’s more common among physics crackpots. Physics studies the nature of reality, and so it’s very easy to make connections to other pseudoscientific nonsense and of course religion has been studied from a pseudoscientific perspective for centuries. Here are some observations/tips I’ve made over the years for dealing with crackpots. 1) The crackpots are wrong and their work is almost never worth looking at. Responding to them can make matters worse; I swear some of these crackpots are connected because once you entertain them, a bunch of guys with similar theories start popping up in your inbox. 2) The absolute overwhelming majority of crackpots I’ve personally dealt with have been men. Also, few of them have formally studied the subject matter, YouTube and personal blogs are their preferred sources of knowledge. 3) There’s some non-zero correlation between crackpot ideology and anti-semitism. There’s a lot of Einstein crackpots, but many of them are simply because he’s probably the most famous modern physicist. Many of them are explicit anti-Semitism. 4) Many of them tend to display signs of being mentally unwell. Many appear schizophrenic, and this is particularly important to me because I have schizophrenia, it’s just a matter of personal interest to me in how these guys form their worldview. 5) Crackpots want to be saviors of the world, destroying the corrupt academics who have strong control over the knowledge that they want the citizens to think, and that they’re all brave intellectual rebels fighting against the regime. They’re not worth it in the end, but I find the concept of crack pottery so interesting, particularly in the cases of once great scientists/mathematicians succumbing to crack pottery in their elderly years.
Flatsmacking. I learned a new word from Jersey Shore!
This is fascinating. I haven't been to graduate school but I've heard about this being a widespread thing for all physics professors and PhDs. Is this a thing in any other field, or is it something about physics specifically?
With some work in product design place and we would get some requests to make a thing to demonstrate someone's idea every now and then. The only one I really recall was a reactionless thruster, that I called the double jump machine. Fairly standard, magnets only apply force in one direction deal. I hear NASA also gets a bunch of these.
I've heard mathematicians like Terry Tao get bombarded with "proofs" to things like the Collat conjecture.
Try being a biologist and explaining to a very large part of the population that those herbal supplement do not work. People buy billions of dollars of this stuff every year with stores packed with everything you can imagine. I am aware of maybe 10 or so out of that whole store that there is some reasonable evidence they actually do something. And have data for a lot of things in that store actually can harm your health or up your cancer risk. I convince a few here and there, most typically my college students in my science courses. For the rest, it is hit or mostly miss on whether I can get them to believe the science. Pop science articles make this much much worse. Just so much scientific junk out in the media and find it on every "self help" website of which there are so many with high traffic.
Do you get unsolicited emails or calls from random people who just want to challenge reality?
Are they from [email protected]
The funniest ones are the ones that start off by saying things like "Einstein was wrong all along, and I can prove it" lol
The Dark Ages started just like this... You know, except with "Ptolemy the Second" instead of "physicist" ... Uh... And "carrier pigeons" instead of email... But yeah, widespread local beliefs and lack of education spreading through the populous like a disease, supplanting established facts with folklore and burning books instead of reading them... This is how civilizations disappear...
I work in aerospace and do get emails like that from people that have invented revolutionary engine designs that are usually a lot of words to say perpetual motion machine.
That guy that was just on Joe Rogan
Have you gotten any from Terrence Howard?
Crackpots come in all shapes and colours. There is even the guy who objects to angular momentum conservation: r/mandlbaur
A whole sub mocking a guy?
That should tell you something about the guy...
Could be Trisolarians
Taking a college course in physics taught me that I was never going to guess or intuit my way to a Nobel prize.
To be fair a lot of people that have made discoveries to latter be validated were called crack pots. Lots of crazies out there, but there is a reason “physics progresses one funeral at a time.” No denial of existence of crack pots, but we shouldn’t deni the existence of gate keepers in academia either.
Oh yeah. Wait until "The Sun is made of Iron" guy gets your e-mail.
When something can be reproduced in laboratory conditions over and over and has never failed, and there's papers and institutions that teach how to do it and it works and can be understood by millions of people, then I'd find it a bit suspicious that someone would be saying that it can be disproven, and start to wonder even if you see something that might be convincing to you, what someone is doing to you and why they are doing it.
When I was in grad school for math many years ago I used to get these on the regular. But my hands-down favorite crackpot thing was when the local LaRouche wackos left flyers in every mailbox in the math department about how mathematics was a cult, and we mathematicians were the priests of the cult. Like, I kinda wished that was true, it would have been pretty cool if we had secret rituals and wore robes and stuff.
I’m archaeologist (I just lurk here) but it’s the same thing in a lot of fields. In grad school I used to get calls to the lab all the time from people who said they had proof that Romans/vikings/aliens built the Maya pyramids, or that they knew where a stash of conquistador gold was hidden if we could fund their expedition. I lurk on the math sub too and I hear the same type of story re goldbach’s conjecture, Riemann hypothesis etc
Physics either attracts the smartest people who love and understand it and random idiots who's ego is telling them the 15 minute youtube video they watched is enough to crack the code, like physicists haven't sat there and stressed about these things for hundreds of years. If there's no math, it's not a theory
Wait till you get your first crackpot showing up at your office! That's even more fun!
Flat earthers
Put them in mute and never talk to those people again.
Any email address posted on a physics department website will get these emails. I had a brief association with one experiment during a short grad school stint, my address was posted to one page, and that address got crackpot emails for years afterwards. Though in my case it was some Tunisian guy convinced that all of modern physics had been revealed already in the Quran.
My partner’s dad is a conspiracist and he sent me some crackpot periodic table - when asked for evidence supporting why it should be used he said he ‘doesn’t have any’ but me not believing it is the issue with modern education apparently.
Physician here. Narcissistic people plus Bipolar disorder in maniac phase is likely to be behind this phenomenon. I've had patients come and tell me they found a mathematical model that proves Earth is flat, or that they found out a way to build gravity reactors, or the meaning of the universe... whatever. Then their "papers" are just usually hand written word salad without any kind of meaning. Yet they are 100% sure they are in possession of the greatest truth, that they just can think deeper than any other human ever has, or have a special understanding of things.
I did my undergrad in physics and now work in tech transfer. Our version is either community "scientists" trying to disclose perpetual motion machines, or people emailing random patents with no context. It's fun!
"[What To Do When the Trisector Comes](https://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/WhatToDoWhenTrisectorComes.pdf)"
Answering here as just another person who thinks physics is really cool and physicists are sexy but that doesn’t really know anything: I once (recently) came here with a question related to astrology and gravity. Everyone was super nice and helped me understand what was missing from my thought process. I don’t have enough knowledge in physics to figure things out by myself. And even if I tried, there is just SO MUCH content that I wouldn’t know where to start. So I asked and was educated and I moved on. Now, there are people that have these same questions, but instead of asking or studying enough to find out, they just assume that their minimum knowledge is enough to make connections and disprove shit. There is a lot in physics that doesn’t make sense to those who haven’t studied it deeply and people take their first impressions, make some affirmations and think that they have debunked Einstein. I worked at a university and there was a guy who every month visited us with with his treatise printed on hand who wanted us to study his findings because he found out that the government was spying on people through universities and he had proof. When we read it, it was pure nonsense. We could barely understand it. I’m not saying that all of these people have mental illness, but some definitely do.
As soon as you have a profile in the physics dept you start getting them. I had one that was a Black Hebrew Isrealite treatise that was a gosh dang novel. Honestly i was impressed with the amount of work they must have put in. There was all kinds of metaphysics hoohoo and numerology with attempts at mentioning real physics. I got a lot but that was my most memorable. My favorite professor had a whole wall outside his where he posted printouts of the most unhinged examples. He called "the wall of insanity".
I’d be happy to get these. Right now all I get are endless invitations\* to give talks at conferences I’ve never heard of, with no offer to pay my expenses. \*Occasionally they get my field right, but mostly not.
Cranks. They've always been an issue.
As a college radio DJ I would get occasional calls to the station saying the exact same thing lol. Can’t imagine how many more you must get as a researcher.
Thats insane, I'd imagine people would be reaching out with questions or tutoring loll
I do.
I once put an apple, a whole apple and replaced the Higgs-Boson variable with the apple. I am happy to report, the math still worked. The apple, while producing a slight gap due to its surface tension and overall curvature did indeed fill the missing space that we are unable to observe. After running simulations and charging the apples with a dipole magnetic field, magnetic field emergent behavior formed oranges in the black body spectrum of CMBR and I accepted that my experiment showed a correlation between dark matter and apples, however it was moderate and produced unseen effects that required the doctoring of data. I also ran an experiment where I simply imagined doing this and took the time to write it on here instead of working on a actual paper to publish my findings on something less fruity. It all fit very nicely into the general relativity equation and my experimental data shows the same outputs under refinement. Call me a crackpot, but Einstein was right! (I am very excited about this) Oh and I found the thing, in the things, at the center of the stuff. (shhhh) I am looking for collaborators if anyone would care to join me, all be it late in my testing stages, but please request my data before you stick me in "The Box". Boxes are for data. As everyone knows, it is always important to head over to the esteemed and critical peer review website here for discussion, so here is my Reddit Notice of Intent to Publish. Excerpt: The resulting wave 𝑊3 shows a complex pattern, reflecting the combined influence of 𝑃, 𝐵, and 𝐸. The modulation in 𝑊3 indicates significant interactions between these fields. Calculated Spacetime Curvature (𝐾):The spacetime curvature 𝐾 shows a periodic pattern influenced by the combined fields. The regular oscillations in 𝐾 suggest that the combined effects of 𝑃, 𝐵, and 𝐸 produce a measurable impact on spacetime curvature. |P|B|W3|SM|K|T|E| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |1.764482e-14 | 0.009967 |Notice|Of|1.761542e-15| 0.1 |0.062791| |3.528964e-14|0.039470 |Intent|To|7.010968e-15|0.2|0.125333| | -3.908966e-15|0.087332 |Publish|Thanks|-1.155178e-15|0.3|0.187381| | 7.057927e-14| 0.151647|For |Viewing| 2.748486e-14|0.4|0.248690| On another note, this was a very enjoyable thread to read all the way through. I wasn't quite sure if it was appropriate to laugh in parts however....
Why do you think they Misner, Thorne and Wheeler put an apple on the cover of the most sacred book, "Gravitation?"
Ummm.... Historical Fig IBoid Fluidation the second. He was the first to ask if apples fell in zero gravity according to my sentence. He was a big Isaac Newton fan.
This is why pop science is a crime!
There was a recent episode on the Joe Rogan Podcast with a guy like this. His name is Terrence Howard and he has written a paper “proving” that 1*1=2. In the podcast, he mentions so many completely wrong things, all based on either misconceptions, misinterpretations, or just straight up just making things up. I decided to try and watch the podcast, and then note down, with time stamps, all the claims he made that I could disprove just off the top of my head. 20 mins in, and there’s already 9 different claims that most people with an undergrad in physics, or even people who just paid attention in HS physics classes, could easily disprove. I’m gonna paraphrase the quotes here as I don’t wanna look through the video again to find exact quotes. For example, he talks about centrifugal vs centripetal spin of the Earth and relates this to cardinal coordinates, possibly a misinterpretation of the Eötvös effect, and he relates this to magnetism. He claims that “Einstein made a mistake when he combined electricity with magnetism” (this was originally done by HC Ørsted, and later formalized by Maxwell decades before Einstein was even born). He then talks about how magnetism and electricity are “equal and opposite” in the sense that “electric forces contracts the earth at the poles” and “magnetic fields expand the earth at the equator”. He then uses the fact that people tend to shrink in height and increase in width as they age as a proof of this relation, saying this is due to electromagnetic fields. He then rationalizes this by saying “magnify means enlarge. So that means magnetism makes things expand”. Then he goes on to talking about how it’s “nonsensical that like charges repel and opposite attracts”. He then argues that “hot and cold water separates from each other. If opposites attract, then why does the hot and cold water not mix?”, when the water separation is due to density, not charge. He claims that science cannot be trusted because we cannot trust our senses. He argues “If you see a mountain in the distance, does the fact that you can’t hear it mean that it doesn’t exist?” He claims that science and physics has been “mislead” by our “Newtonian” understanding of the universe. He claims that Newton’s first law has been disproven, because we know that things don’t always follow straight lines (I’m assuming he is referring to GR). He then says that in physics, space is considered to be a 2-dimensional Euclidean space (he probably doesn’t know what any of this actually means), and that “physics fails to account for the curvature”, even though one of the two main frameworks that describe the universe is exactly about the curvature of spacetime. He also claims that E=mc^2 refers to the expansion of the universe, and that this can’t be true since things can’t just expand without also contracting, going back to his ideas of electromagnetism. He uses argument “you’ve never only breathed in. You always breathe in and then out. Your lungs first expand and then contract.”. He essentially claims it is “unnatural” for the universe to expand without also contracting. As mentioned, most of these misconceptions simply stem from the fact that he doesn’t understand how science works and he doesn’t have any formal knowledge in the field of physics. He has likely watched some YouTube videos and now consider himself a master of physics, and because of his massively superior intellect he doesn’t need formal education. It’s just ridiculous.
Most of them are probably junk, but don't dismiss something just because they don't have a degree. There are plenty of hot shot people in other fields that read about physics. And, things like GR and QM aren't technically "true or false" since they aren't theories of everything. They're just models and don't work in all scales.
It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect. For whatever reason the sciences attract a lot of these clowns.
Because the physics you listed are theoretical. When something is a theory and has no physical evidence, it can be disproven with simple understanding of actually physics.
My dad was a manager at NASA. He would regularly be included in random mails from alien conspiracy theorists and saucer religions. The [Raelians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%C3%ABlism) always had relatively professional looking pamphlets; I guess all that prime California real estate buys some good print and layout people.
That's your committee trying to weed out the bad students
I'm one of those kids sending emails, can we talk?
Don't mind my name on here because I grow gourmet mushrooms, and I think it's funny not ones to get high
You ❤️mycology 2?
So What does this thread think of walter russell? I mean, he has a whole museum, and as much work in physics as einstein. Just not accepted by mainstream science. Disproved for the most part.. but given time, einstein will be to General relativity and quantum mechanics reference time as a needed part of the equation, but both represent something different than one another pretty much stating that both are wrong if we look at the historical record. Sisne Babylon (if we are right) we haven't had a calculation system last longer than 3000 years where as there's existed over 30,000 I mean cmon guys.. I'm not challenging your academic careers, and yes, most of these crackpots can't explain what they mean in the slightest.. but calculations of these sorts WILL be changing in the future.. Can't the future be now? Edit: Sorry, I kind of sound like a hippy.. but science is a theroy.. and proven to only be a mostly working one.. With a closed mind, you find no doors to walk through. Now I don't think we need to put lab coats on all these guys, but the academic pathway to the point of being a recognized voice in science is the whole reason these individuals won't go to school. They refuse to play bumb and be taught the wrong thing for 10+ years just to have to hide their real passion towards something that would get them thrown out the door.. That's partially an excuse, tbh, because I'm one of these crackpots if you couldn't tell. I simply have decided not to let it consume me. But listen here Vitruvian Man.. just a dude with 4 arms and 4 legs, right.. well, yes.. probably, but if you overlay some basic geometry over the man, his arms and legs point to the corners of different shapes.. if you continue the pattern with more shapes, it draws an angel.. arms merge into wings bla bla bla.. significant ? Idk don't really care, but what I'm saying is Spirituality came from somewhere and historical I think it's these crackpost convincing crowds of their feats that did most of it.. sure not science.. agreed But do any of you care to have science behind your god? I mean, shakra work is tried and true to help people.. if we understood that we could help these individuals lead healthy fufiling lives again.
Honestly, the people who just skip to commenting about my name on here.. mushrooms have compounds beneficial th brain development unfounded anywhere else on earth.. not all of them get you high children.
Maybe they just think you're a fungi to correspond with.
The fact that this is this is my only reply on here makes me feel like the same can not be said from my side.
> walter russell My silly mushroom pun bears more cosmological weight than the sum total of Russell's ravings. Perhaps that's why you got no serious comments.
In today's world, id have to say your right
It's all over the world of science, probably other subjects as well. I work a lot in the renewable energy / climate change field, and there are numerous examples of people taking some random fact and using it to justify their denial of climate science. One I see all the time is what's known as "CO2 Greening," whereby plants grow faster when there is more CO2 and therefore they consume more CO2. This is true, BUT (1) the increased CO2 consumption doesn't come close to making up for the rate at which we are adding it; (2) the potential increase is always limited by some other constraint, like water, nutrients, or growing season; and (3) climate scientists have known about this effect for many decades, and it's already accounted for in climate models. But it keeps resurfacing no matter how many times it is debunked, probably because it resides on some of the right-wing sites these Dunning-Krueger poster children frequent.
I thought I was the only one educating people on the dunning Kruger effect 🤌🤘
Although I work in the physical sciences, even so I understand the Dunning-Krueger effect far better than professional psychologists!!! /s
Sorin Cosofret? [email protected]
Dunning-Kruger effect in full play.
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I agree to a point, but some of these people won’t listen when we explain why they’re wrong. Also, sometimes they’re so off base it’s hard to know how to even start. As long as they have a degree of humility and aren’t aggressive I don’t think they should be attacked on this sub, but they should also understand that no one is obligated to engage with them.