The thing that amazes me about Kip Thorne is that despite all the garbage and spam emails he must get, he took the time to respond to an email a dear friend of mine sent when that friend was 11. He'd run out of physics books at his local library as a kid, and started emailing everyone he'd seen in documentaries on black holes because he was excited by the idea of spacetime warping for space travel. My friend flatly states that his email must have had bits of crackpottishness in it, but the main topic was just asking for reading recommendations. Thorne was the only one out of dozens of physicists who replied without being disparaging (of a child). That friend then went on to become a physicist, and he told me that one of the first things he did when he started grad school was to email Kip Thorne and thank him for being the one person to reply and encourage his passion for the field a decade prior. A few months after that, my friend forwarded me the first crackpot email he himself received. 😂
Historically, until the 16th century most people thought the centre of the universe was the earth. The obvious complications were explained away with ingenius explanations. The truth or at least the current theory is much simpler but tred on peoples toes. Little wonder that ordinary people look in astonishment at the chaos in physics even today. The explantations are even more ingenious but you get the feeling that even physicists dont understand everything correctly. I still get lost by the correct explanation for a light beam. Is it a particle or is it not. Why does the earth orbit the sun. How does the earth know the sun is there? There are about 90 natural elements and yet so many particles that make them up. The simple explanations of my childhood reflected the beauty and simplicity of science. Today I get the feeling that while practically we can allow for intricate and tiny blips and correct for them, there is something very major still missing with our understanding of even simple things such as light and gravity.
@@jfryer485Is it a wave? Is it a particle? It's both! Welcome to the wonderful world of quantum mechanics! We know for sure of the wave-particle duality because of the ways light behaves in different situations. The photoelectrict effect is described by photons-light particles-while diffraction is described by light waves. It all makes sense when using the math of quantum mechanics, but it's not feasible to typeset math in youtube comments
@@jfryer485 Is it a wave? Is it a particle? To make sense of this, we must invent a new category that contains both waves and particles as special cases. Consider a graph, or map, of intensity vs. location, or intensity as a function of location. A wave will look wavy, of course, and a particle will look like a spike-shape. We can imagine other shapes as well, like for example TWO spikes. There's more, mostly having to do with how a thing changes from having one shape to having a different shape, but that's a good start.
I'm from the humanities and met quite a few people I'd call crackpot philosophers. I noticed that often times these people are clever enough to create this surprisingly internally consistent system, but not clever enough to notice that things referring to one another in a closed loop holds no ground for anyone but themselves. Sometimes it's pretty cool to probe their ideas to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. They can get really creative. It's as if Tolkien came up with his elven language, but now imagine that instead of writing The Lord of the Rings he started writing angry letters to his colleagues, scolding them for not believing elves are real. These people can be pretty smart at times, but they funnel their energy in all the wrong places. Instead of bothering faculties they should give world building and fantasy writing a go. I've read more than one crackpot idea on metaphysics that could create a pretty baller magic system.
Fantasy writing is fun, but sometimes you get real curious about the real world and there's not a lot of people who know enough to answer questions about it :D
As a recently retired engineer I want to thank you for the heads up. I don't have any crack pot ideas at the moment, but I will certainly keep an eye out for any signs of them in the future.
Me, just a dropout, due to the side effects of a head injury. In turn, I was classified as being the dumbest person in the class. But I always want to know what makes things tick, so when in my late 40's, I began to analyze "Motion". It turned out to be easy breezy to self discover the Special Relativity(SR) phenomena, and then just as easy to derive SR the equations independently as well. And then........you become classified as being a crackpot. Very annoying indeed.
@@sonpopco-op9682 I don't believe. I have always thought that "BELIEVERS", who stuck to their beliefs, were insane. A belief is only practiced if one is located at a distance from the truth, and thus one is located within the zone of less than truth. Sticking to beliefs means one chooses to stick to accepting less than truth only.
My favorite crackpot 'theory': Gravity doesn't exist. It appears that every mass is falling toward every other mass but in reality atoms are just expanding at C. They are not moving toward each other. Just getting bigger.
People saying more energy out than in doesn't exist should wave at a nuclear power plant next time they drive by it. Just sayin'.... Okay okay, it's a bit of a cheat but hey... WE didn't put more energy in than we got out. It was already there. So... yeah.... who's to say we have exploited every such principle in existence? And that's kind of a primitive system still. Using steam and strange copper windings in a dynamo and diodes and.... and... whaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!! Hell, we don't even know a bazillionth of what's out there to know yet, so... That's a thing which makes me annoyed. It's the same with the Bedini chargers. They work. You can build them. Or buy them. Meh.
what are the units of consciousness?? well, that's why i'm asking YOU. you have the math background to find out the units. don't forget to name the unit after me though!
Hey! I might have a math background buddy, but I'm not your conscience. I thought these things were just called units, then some physicists showed up and suddenly my plans were realized 😳 I'm a quasi-experimentalist, not a fairy godmother! What, am I supposed to eject Earth from the Solar System so I can study the afterlife 🤣
Here's the math: consciousness = h×f Planck constant is kg×m^2/s and frequency is 1/s, so the units of consciousness are Joules. Where do I get my Nobel prize?
Real physicists never seem to bother with units at all. In relativity E, p & m seem to be interchangeable, Planck's constant and the velocity of light are always ignored or set equal to one as are the permittivity and permeability of free space. If you try and actually calculate anything you can easily be out by a trivial factor of 9 x 10^16, which doesn't seem to bother theoreticians!
I am sad to report that there are so many crackpots in France that we DO have a unit of measure that could probably fit the bill. It's called a "Bovis"... Charlatans use it very seriously to measure the "energy level" of places with a pendulum or whatnot, and the term is also familiar to a rather large number of non-believers who routinely use it to make fun of all these self declared witches, mediums, sorcerers, ghost hunters, fake doctors, etc. There is no real arithmetic nor methodology, the only guiding principle seems to be: the higher the number of Bovis the better.
My favorite crackpot e-mail that I've gotten was one giving me a "final notice" that Earth is going to fall into "null space". This was followed by some "equations", which were just a series of ratios equal to 1/3. This apparently proved that Earth is going to fall into null space. The final comment was a list of previous notices - all of which were Bible verses - and then a (very generous) note that the author gives permission for me to reproduce and disseminate this notice to others. It made an interesting change from the usual "Einstein was wrong" stuff.
You never had a flat earther writing to you asking to redo the math of what distance can be seen at sea and if it's congruent with earth curvature supposed obstruction of any distant object, because those are next level crackpots, they are right.
@@thewizardsofthezoo5376 Improper height of observer, not using refraction, not taking into account mirages, misuse of cameras to name but a few issues most flat earthers will use to come to a mistaken max distance of observation.
@@JeronimoStilton14 BS you haven't got enough variance for the above to be consistently proven, it has a impact but not so significant that you can trump a good Nikon P900 into retrieving stuff that should allegedly be "behind" the horizon. You just googled a quick debunk and you fail, because of what you don't know you don't know. First reducing a point to it's author's credibility is unscientific, also it shows your lack of intellectual honesty. Second JTTolan did film Hawaii from New York on his plane, there is no refraction that makes you see through a solid body. The only thing ,you half brain need to figure out before all, is that your vision is spherical, and not because you eye is a ball, but also for that, but above all because it's a central symmetry equidistant in every direction of which you are the centre. Calling somebody "flat earther" with a smirk makes you the mentally warped that thinks he can actually see billions of light years away, whatever that is, or that the moon and the sun would be positioned in at the exact distance that offset their difference in size? I have a nice bridge to sell on London if you are interested, (see 2 can play that game) Good thing that nowadays to get a degree all you need to do is to parrot anything you are told and figure out how to use matlab and numpy, god forbid you start thinking and figure out how much impossible consensual axioms you take for granted. Science is not consensual it's adversarial, you belief in space, NASA and the rest of the bullshit reinventing the ether, rebranding dark matter, in case it escaped your sagacity is a religion, not science. You believe in stuff you mostly never seen, only calculated, but anything can be calculated, yer the flawless logic of a calculation can be falsified by its context. But it's worst than that, pose left is right and right is left and you hit a wall, that's the only certainty you can take to the bank. Not space bullshit! You are a functioning left-brain moron like most of your colleagues, because the good ones you have already weeded them out. Third get used to your "intelligence" being insulted, because your answer insulted mine.
I was a software engineer at a famously brainy tech company, and I was also very involved with the financial-planning/investing sub-community in the company. It was honestly depressing how many people who were objectively bright in one field thought that they could easily just run the table in another field. Even worse, because of the tight feedback loops, software engineering as a field FAMOUSLY frequently forces you to realize that your first intuitions on things are almost always grossly wrong, and even so, these smart people who were routinely wrong IN THEIR FIELD OF EXPERTISE assumed that they were smarter than trained people in investing. I can't even imagine how bad some of these crackpot theories are. Well, I'm on Quora, so I can kind of imagine it, but I'd prefer not to.
I'd assume this is related to how immediate the feedback loop tends to be in software. I don't have experience in high level software engineering, but when you're used to wrong ideas very quickly becoming apparent as wrong it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you must be onto something because it hasn't blown up in your face yet. But I've found that a lot fields have this type of bias that makes it easier to assume you know more than you actually do in a different field because it's not failing in the way that you're used to wrong things failing.
There's plenty of crackpottery in software, too. I'm old enough to have seen CORBA and EJBs get touted as the next wonderful thing and embraced left and right, even though it was obvious from the start that these technologies would just lead to fragile systems and crazy network overhead. The obvious problems were ignored, and here we are. Now nobody uses them any more except in legacy systems where nobody cares enough to remove them. The current Agile hype will have people in the future rolling their eyes as well, I'm sure.
As a seasoned Senior Software Engineer, I've directly encountered the ramifications of misaligned technology assignments. For instance, I've witnessed proficient embedded C developers being designated as C# web application 'ninjas' without the requisite Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) background. This recurring pattern, while affording me consulting opportunities, underscores the inherent counterproductivity of such choices.
@@KeroGero89 That's my point - they don't know what they don't know, but since the world has fabulously rewarded software as of late, they assume that they're doing the right stuff. The reason there are so many financial things of this sort is because it's the intersection of software (infinitely malleable) with finance (just shy of infinitely malleable), so it feels like you have infinite leverage. Unfortunately, they all seem to solve problems which only exist in the first place because nobody is willing to solve the problem in the first place (because there is no margin in solving the problem).
@@AlienScientist More like "only surgeons and medical personnel allowed to perform surgery". You don't have to be associated with academia to be a physicist, but you do have to apply proper scientific methodology and be able to competently handle the necessary math. Crackpots are usually convinced they fulfil those criteria. The problem is that they rarely ever do, and also that they reject valid criticism by categorically denouncing whatever they deem to be "mainstream". Take the electric universe crackpots for example. They claim gravity does not exist and that coulomb attraction is what pulls stuff towards apparent centres of gravity. Yet they have no valid response to the observation that this would require net charge; which is incongruent with how matter behaves in magnetic fields. If I had enough net charge to simulate 200lbs of mass, then I should be able to generate current by moving my body through even a weak magnetic field. This is obviously not the case, and EM universe "theory" is obviously fundamentally cracked. Also, the electric universe crackpots usually assume that the theoretical framework Maxwell, Faraday, Tesla etc is true, while they reject Einstein's theories. But they are all classical theories built from the same axioms and observations. It is incongruous to reject Einstein but not Maxwell! This sort of stuff is why these crackpot theories are usually just a huge waste of time and effort.
you want to question the methods of the chefs in the kitchen? become a chef and get your ass in the kitchen no need to have this whole angst against scientists.@@AlienScientist
Great analogy. The chef analogy really illustrated it perfectly. I'm a lawyer. Our crackpots would have to be the "sovereign citizen" types who think things like if you never step up past the banister in a courtroom, then the law can't be applied to you, etc.
Oh, sovcits and FOTLs are super interesting, and I'm kind of thankful that they caught my attention and (indirectly) taught me a lot. I read some of their arguments and _knew_ that they were wrong, but I didn't really understand _why._ I wanted to rebut them for entertainment, but I couldn't do it properly unless I could confidently state what is true, not just assert that what they say is false. So, I started reading the statutes, reading the decisions, reading the (updated) legal dictionary at the library, and built a real picture of law. This has helped me a lot in other ways, too, because it's strengthened my research skills, abstract thinking, and humility for any subject I want to learn more about. (And his is how I really understand why "it depends" is almost *always* the right answer.) P.S. My favorite Supreme Court case is _Griffin v. Oceanic Contractors_ (1982)
@Nupetiet you know, several of my law school classmates had just had their children move out and they wanted to pursue law as a lifelong passion and were ready for a second career. It's never too late.
You have to give some of those folks credit though. Much like any group, not everything they believe is false. I think that ideology originally came about because of tyranny. Unconstitutional law and oppressive unchecked power. Of course Hitler hated communism and Stalin didn't think much of fascism.....even though he was like a king lol 😂 Both were nut jobs. In you're opinion as a professional, what do you think is the most unconstitutional thing ever done in the US?
@@alexashworth3119 No, they don't deserve any credit. It would be one thing to hold radical political positions, or even to assert that existing law should be abolished or replaced. After all, the Constitution was written by radicals who rejected the legitimacy of previously-existing law. The trouble with FOTLs and sovcits is that they believe things that are not true, and will repeat false statements until they're blue in the face. Usually, their entire involvement is based on money (usually not wanting to pay debts or taxes) or resentment at having to do something else they don't want to (like getting a driver's license). They don't believe things because of logic or evidence, or on the advice of people who've studied law-they believe whatever would need to be true for them to get their way, or whatever they're told by a guru who promises to erase their credit card debt with the Three Letter Scheme (only $49.99!). They're like Flat Earthers, QAnons, and germ theory deniers. They don't care what's true, only what agrees with the position they've already decided *must* be true. That's why it doesn't matter if you completely debunk one of their arguments with independent data. They don't care, they do not process the evidence, they just leave and make the same argument somewhere else. They are not just seeing the subject from a different perspective; they are suffering from a mental defect of reason.
@alexashworth3119 I'm not sure I understand your question. If something is constitutional or not is binary. It is not a sliding scale. So "more constitutional" or "most unconstitutional" don't make any sense to me. Plus, whether something is constitutional is not the be-all and end-all question. The thing that sprang to mind was *Dred Scott v. Sanford,* wherein a slave was brought by his owners from Missouri to Illinois and back again. He sued for his freedom, arguing that because he had been in a State where slavery was illegal, his status as a slave terminated by action of law, and he must be free. In the lower courts, they reasoned that Missouri law applied because he was property in Missouri when he began his trip. The Supreme Court ruled that because Scott was a slave he did not have standing to file the lawsuit, and therefore, his case was barred on technical grounds. This decision completely enraged the "free" States and is widely regarded as a major contributing cause of the American Civil War. After the war, the decision (which was good law and "constitutional" for about 7 years by that point) was rendered obsolete by the 13th amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, and the 14th amendment to the Constitution, which made every person born in the United States a citizen. So, was it constitutional? Well, yes: by definition, the Supreme Court decides what is Constitutional and what isn't. But it was *wrong,* and fortunately, because no part of government has absolute power, and because the Constitution is a living document subject to change and revision through amendments, the Supreme Court's decision was overturned, as was proper. Our system is far from perfect, but it's still in place because it takes a good stab at being fair and at being balanced. I encourage you to audit a Constitutional Law class if you'd like to gain a deeper understanding of how it works and operates. For example, Harvard offers a number of free online courses that might be a good place to get started.
Hahaha I watched this when it first came out. Since Terrence Howard happened I haven't been able to stop thinking about how it describes him perfectly 😂
after 10 years in the military my own crackpot tendencies started showing, but instead of getting lost in the wilderness(both literally and figuratively) about halfway through a way too high level explanation of relativistic doppler shifting and realizing that I was out of my depth I said to myself: "hey...you know they literally have schools where you can learn this kind of stuff and then get a piece of paper so that you can prove you actually know this kind of stuff right?!" 3 years in and at this rate I'll definitely be graduating next fall with my undergrad in physics...everything is much more rewarding when you understand that a whole community exists out there so that you're not just mumbling to yourself in your cabin wishing you were better at math
@@BM-rm7vr yeah it was more of a testimony on how to not be a crackpot. My initial problem was a weak math and physics background so even though I was plugging numbers into the formulas I found on Google, I had no clue why the numbers I was getting were so extreme compared to what I expected, especially since I didn't really understand the hyperbolic properties of spacetime and objects traveling near the speed of light. I've come very far since then thanks to traditional education
@@psychohist the hardest part is getting people who didn't struggle with math and physics to deal with me lol. Building rapport with professors and my piers has been hard but once they see I'm willing to put in the work everyone relaxes and we can just nerd out and marvel at the problems together. Communities are good and physicists are smart, good smart things are a rare combination in this world.
As a physicist in Cambridge, I received crackpot emails but mostly from proponents of "non inertial propulsion", i.e. violating Newton's 3rd law. All of them were based on friction ratchet fallacies. I actually persisted with one who seemed quite open to learning and after about 10 emails they agreed that their theory was wrong and thanked me! But they were the only one.
It's actually the cooling issues and hard gamma rays/neutrons (side reactions) that are the problem for space craft, i.e. power generation. Non-inertial propulsion is a non-starter, since this isn't the core of the many issues. So many people don't get this.
@@nehorlavazapalkaWhat do you mean by non starter? Just a hilbilly researcher asking out of curiosity. 😂 From what I've seen, no energy is in a literal sense "generated". But I guess this may just be an argument about semantics and depends on one's definition of "generated". Haha 😂 It's all interesting for sure.
The title for this video should really be : Physicist / crackpot psychologist explains the psychology of crackpot physicists with stunning lack of self awareness. 🤦♂
As a current mechanical engineering student, I solemnly swear to never become a crackpot physicist once I retire. I am now afraid of a future for myself which I didn't even know existed
I won't hold you to that promise. but I respect the intention. I have a crackpot who is about 30 years old, I am quite his senior. It's pretty funny. The dude is also into those "Psi" gadgets. The value of such loony tune friends is they can give you a few tips on nice blog articles to write about real physics. Or ... wait... is what I think of as "real physics" all just a collective mass delusion...?
I’m in Biology (NIH and Johns Hopkins) and I used to work in cancer research. There were countless times I would mention cancer research to someone and I would immediately be bombarded by an explanation of why 1. cancer has already been cured and “they” are hiding it, 2. therapeutics like chemo are not meant to cure cancer and are for insurance companies/pharma to make more money, or 3. they know the one thing that cures cancer (hint: it’s just a vitamin, some oil, or an unusual exercise) and they personally know people that have cured their own cancer with it (irrefutable evidence!). It got to the point where I just would say “biology research” if someone asked what I did for work. There’s a lot of obvious crackpot theories in medicine, but everyone and their dog seems to have a crackpot cancer theory.
Is the cancer problem one of resources and attention, or is the problem just so difficult because all cancers are different, and a universal option is not possible? Is cancer research working on the universal "cure all" for cancer, or are there pockets of cancers that can be solved if given the resources (funding, people, etc) to tackle them? Why are some diseases "gone" from our populations with vaccines but others just seem to linger on? I'm not a biologists so I'm confused by this topic. If it's so important and affects so many people, even billionaire CEOs of Health Care / Pharmaceutical and Tech (Apple) companies, with the lack of progress beyond chemo, surely as someone in the field can see how frustrating at a public level this topic can be; especially for people who have lost loved ones. I'm genuinely curious what is your, as someone inside the research world, perspective on this? Thank you. Be well.
My boss told me the speed of light is the frame rate of the universe. I told him the units don't match. He repeated that the speed of light is the frame rate of the universe. But then, he was deeply intransigent in other ways, too.
The "frame rate of the universe", if it can even be described as such, would be Planck seconds; the speed of light only determines the duration of those "frames", not their rate (and here we stumble upon the frontier wall between gaming metaphors and complex reality) I see a constant here where people whom are scientifically illiterate try to reduce complex reality to easily digestible metaphors. I mean, we're in 2023 explaining people how viruses and vaccines work, NONE OF THIS should come as a surprise to anybody...
I'll bet that if you'd pointed out that, actually, it was his brain that has a "frame rate" (in the form of the thalamocortical cognition cycle), his head would have exploded.
@@dreamdiction I believe you are referring to the derivation of the speed of light from Maxwell's Equations, based upon the permittivity and permeability of free space: c=1/√μ0ϵ0
I'm not a physicist or a mathematician. After I retired I joined Khan Academy. I've been taking courses for the past eight years (math, physics, chemistry and I'm sometimes blown away by the fact that I'm actually capable of understanding things that I shouldn't be able to understand.(Based on past experiences) It's a great place to learn and the one thing I've learned more than anything else is just how much I don't know!! I'll never make it as a crackpot!
It's necessary to understand your limitations and ignorance in order to learn. Any physicists or youtuber who claims to know it all isn't somebody I can learn from.
Not sure if you’ve read “Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman. Edited by Michelle Feynman” in it are letters/correspondence Between crackpots and Feynman. It’s amazing to find out that Feynman read these letters, and in some cases answered back. I love the letter between him and a machinist, who is very critical of him about some of the things he said in an interview. In the end, he kind of agreed with the machinist. In another letter, Feynman ended up doing the experiment with his washing machine proposed in the letter. Feynman pointed out that there were more standard explanations for what the letter writer was seeing. I would highly recommend the book to anyone who hasn’t read it.
Feynman also mentions that he reads all crackpot mail in his public lecture. "On the character of the physical law". There is a video recording. The relevant section was on RU-vid as a video titled "scientific method explained by Feynman", or something like that. He says: "so if you think you have a novel idea, it's very likely an old idea known to be wrong, so don't write about it to me. Though I read all such mail anyway, just to be sure!". Or something like that. It's quite amusing.
My wife is a composer and music teacher and she regularly gets people who have "the next big hit" in their head, but they refuse to learn how to use recording software, read music, play an instrument or... do any work. They just want her to write down whatever "vibe" they have in their head, and get angry when she tries to gently guide them to the real process.
I've had to turn away some very lucrative teaching and playing gigs for this very reason, which anyone who knows the reality of the music industry will tell you is an INCREDIBLY difficult thing to do at times; there have literally been instances where I went hungry for weeks at a time rather than take gigs trying to tutor a self-proclaimed musical savant who couldn't be bothered to learn how, y'know, music works. Often just as bad are the retired corporate types who maybe played a little in their teenage years, always dreamed about making it big but life got in the way and they got caught up with work and kids and blah blah blah. Now they're retired, have extra money and too much time on their hands, so they bought themselves a home studio they don't know how to record anything with and spent thousands on instruments they have only the most rudimentary knowledge of how to play. And now it's your fault they still suck after multiple lessons, because they threw all the money at it and got the guitar their hero played so they should be great at it by now. It legitimately disturbs me how many people think that, despite never having shown itself in the entirety of the previous 60 years of their existence, some latent genius and natural ability is just lying dormant within them. No, sir, you're not a misunderstood savant. You're just an asshole with an unearned sense of entitlement to acclaim and adulation, despite putting in none of the work to do anything worthy of praise.
I have had dozens of great ideas for a catchy,nice hook and yet literate composed type of music. I'm suppose to...well, I use to. I was a drummer for 20 years. But that was another millennia ago. Now-a days I'm trying to end my cynical era and carefully learn.
I think the biggest concentration of crackpots is among amateur guitarists (although they don't even practice or have any music videos to share). If you open any YT video of a well-known professional guitar player there are hordes of *much better* guitar players commenting, sharing their opinion about their own brilliance in their technique and musicality whilst the professional they comment about "is not even holding a pick correctly" or "does not even play music, just showing off and nobody will remember them in 2 years". I might be wrong, but I think a lot of them are middle-age low-level ex-engineers too. Hopefully, there are fewer of crackpots in academic music. I don't think there are many engineers classically trained in music, but almost every single one of them owns an electric guitar.
Dan Olson at the channel Folding Ideas made two really excellent documentaries on contemporary Flat Earth and Geocentrism, where he connects these communities to other kinds of science crackpot throughout modern history, and then to stuff that you might not expect like QAnon and apocalypse cults; and points out the underlying political, social, and religious ideologies that often drive these would-be science debunkers. They’re both a bit on the longer side, but they’re really terrific and deeply insightful. When you drill down, a lot of these “grand unified theory disproving everything” guys are low-key trying to perform apologetics for their own personal interpretations of the Gospel-they’re trying to “debunk” entire fields and famous scientific shifts/etc that they see as contradictory to a Biblically-literal explanation for the universe, and they often see real scientists and educators as working on behalf of various atheistic/satanic “cabals” to hide the true nature of the universe and turn people away from God (would it surprise you that a lot of these guys have really, really terrible opinions about Jewish people, or that antisemitism aimed at famous figures like Einstein drives a lot of the “alternate science” community?). The irony is that a lot of this ostensibly science-related thought is often driven by social fears: fears of a secularizing and liberalizing society, fears of broad cultural change due to globalization or climate change action, fears about LGBTQ people and political/economic instability, etc. They believe that by conclusively disproving contemporary, post-industrial science-by finally driving a stake through the heart of evolution or relativity or heliocentrism-they can finally prove that we live in a Divine Fishbowl in the arena of science, like “the way scientists did back during the Renaissance” (that’s not what they actually did, but don’t tell them that) and wind the clock back on the past ~200 years of cultural development.
This is a really interesting comment! I have noticed the relationship between crackpots and religion. I had a whole section I cut from this about the three christs of Ypsilanti and comparing that to an event where crackpots were introduced to each other. Fun fact: Crackpots can recognize crackpots. At crackpot conferences they all think they are the lone sane, genius in the room. Also, I notice a lot of anti-semitism in the crackpot community ( a lot of talk of reptilian overlords and the like) which I did not feel capable of getting into during this fun little video. I love Dan Olson and have seen those two videos so many times haha.
@@hellraserfleshlight correlation isn't causation, but if someone with enough insight realizes ongoing tendencies in some area, this individual can then significantly contribute to those tendencies.... Without actual scientific research on its influence(s) one can only speculate. Anyway, thanks for your useful remark.
I love the implication that dealing with the social issues of ~200 years ago would somehow be less stressful. Wasn't there a so-called Age of Revolution in Europe around that time?
Years ago, we used to have a crackpot appear on our local public access TV channel who thought that the physics community actively hid the "fact" that magnets could power perpetual motion machines. Every month he would present a different contraption composed of plywood, magnets and wood glue that, he thought, almost produced perpetual motion having the perennial excuse that the device failed because, as he put it, "the angles aren't quite right on this prototype." Despite that this cycle of failure went on for decades, he still held the conviction that he was just on the verge of a perpetual motion breakthrough. The spectacle was both entertaining to watch and simultaneously quite sad.
It's possible that, by progressively demagnetizing them, some magnets might be able to power a wheel (if it's mounted on near-frictionless bearings!) This is especially true of neodymium magnets, which are easily weakened by proximity to similar magnets. Imagine what would have happened to that poor guy if he'd got his device to keep moving for an hour or two! On the other hand, what a toy that would make. Little cars, where magnets are the fuel. Bigger than Dipping Birds and Crookes Radiometers.
@@wbeatyplease no, that would just make the price of rare earth magnets to shoot up through the roof. It would be as stupid as the current use of helium in balloons and people making funny voices.
@@carlosdgutierrez6570 When they burn out, you have to buy the HASBRO PULSE MAGNETIZER to re-fuel! Or is that Mattel? With some R&D funding, maybe we can come up with a magnet alloy which the magnetization is easily harmed, easily restored. Kilotons of neo magnets are already used widely in electric toothbrushes and makeup-removers, and in toy airplanes (low-weight high-wattage motors for non-gasoline RC planes and cars.) But all this neodymium comes from China. They seem to be in the process of raising prices. It may already be too late for you to buy a few thousand pounds of raw neodymium metal, once the Chinese prices go through the roof!
We even have some of these in ethnomusicology and music archaeology, of all fields. There's one 'music archaeologist' crackpot in particular who I've come to consider my academic nemesis, though fortunately I've only had a few, easy to manage real life encounters with him. He inexplicably has a lot of cache in real academia if only b/c: A) It's a small field and he publishes A LOT of stuff, all of it on his own publishing company that he set up precisely so that his work never ever has to go thru any peer review. Or editing. >:( B) He's such a bad writer and he writes on really arcane topics, and makes them so nonsensically imcomprehensible that many naive postgrad students buy his line that he's the only one who knows the truth about Mesopotamian music theory texts. C) Most teachers and professors feel they have to abide that academic politeness thing, so no one ever openly calls him out or tells him to f--- off. Academia can be really enabling that way. I used to have his main book, back in my early postgrad days. But the writing tutor/English teacher in me got so livid at how badly written, edited, proofread, and formatted it was, not to mention the obtuseness of his 'ideas', that by the time I graduated I just threw it in the recycling bin. :P
i did my first degree in audio technology, it was a mishmash of music theory, creative, technical and introductory levels of college maths, acoustics, electrical engineering and electronics. got a job in the field, interacting with a lot of musicians and self proclaimed "audiophiles"(some well famous). even me with my limited understanding, the level of crackpot broscience bewildered me. ended up doing second degree in maths cause got annoyed at not being able to read more serious papers and literature on those subjects and felt like a fraud. crackpots exist in every field, and in some they are allowed to roam free unchecked.
Oh boy... Putting CDs in the fridge, 48 bit audio, gold plated cables, all the nonsense with vinyl, etc. As an electrical engineer and music enthusiast working with audio I feel like that field is pretty much all quackery.
"One day a crank came into my office. He seemed nervous. I asked him why. He said, "I'm afraid you're going to throw me out of your office.' I was in a good mood, so I assured him I wouldn't. So he started telling me about his theory... protons were discs, with a dent in the middle, or something. After a while I said, 'You know something, you're right.' He brightened and said 'You think my theory's right?' I said, 'No, I'm going to throw you out of my office."" -Caltech Prof. Tom Tombrello
1.) doesn't listen to the man 2.) doesn't refute the man 3.) literally doesn't know if he IS a crank, because he didn't listen 4.) kicks the respectful, non-overbearing guy out like a bum Sounds like a thoughtful, intelligent scholar worthy of respect to me. /s
@@jadedandbitter Did you watch the video here? It's like the chef in the example 1) didn't taste the playdoh 2) didn't tell the crackpot that it was playdoh 3) literally doesn't know if the playdoh is actually delicious, because he didn't taste it
@@lepsy4If someone made something out of playdoh passionately and wanted me to eat it I'd find that incredibly charming and I'd want to help them understand cooking better. I don't know why everyone here is so mean spirited...
I used to be the editor of a popular science magazine, and I had a hefty folder in my bottom drawer dedicated to crackpot theories that were mailed to us - usually be retired engineers who had been unsuccessful at getting practicing scientists to respond to their work, so were bypassing "the establishment" by going straight to the media. I felt sorry for them in a way. They had often spent years working on their projects, and even though I was only a generalist science journalist, their incorrect assumption or step in their theory was usually pretty obvious even to me. One of my favourites was a "proof" that the Earth was actually hollow, and there was a gigantic metal cylinder rotating at its centre which was responsible for the tides because - and this was like the third line of a wad of paper - the Moon obviously couldn't be responsible for the tides because the Moon's gravitational pull wasn't even strong enough to lift a leaf off the ground. It was really that sad/funny. My hypothesis regarding their motivation is that most of them are smart people but they have an overwhelmingly intuitive understanding of the world, and they just cannot get their heads around counter-intuitive theories, especially things like relativity, quantum theory, the Big Bang and stuff like dark matter/energy. So they work furiously to bend the theory to fit their intuition. Add in their need to be recognised as smart people, and it's a heady mix.
I took 2 years of physics as my major. It still hurts to this day that I couldnt make it. I was very good at math though, got As and Bs on all math classes except Discrete Math. Nearly got a Math minor. I think I just didnt study and practice hard enough, looking back. I also had to pass a whiteboard test in front of four physics professors. I managed to get 3/4 right, but needed all 4 to get through. The one problem I couldnt solve was a physics 1 problem. I just kind of couldnt think anymore when I got to that problem. It sucked. I literally cried in front of my TA in her office. It was awful. Thats when I realized I needed to switch majors. At the time, I was in Modern Physics II (lots of QM) and E&M (Maxwells Equations). I plan to, one day, go back and get my bachelors in Physics. And I want to start at the first class. A crackpot, I will not become.
Good luck you definitely sound capable and talented enough to do it, some folks have trouble in that format in front of others definitely not cool on their part to care so much about that
How beautiful to be so smart - you're not a failure at all...I'd love to "fail" the way you did ! You're way past most people ! I'm so glad you're going to try again. Best wishes 🧚🌞🧚🌞🧚
I think you touched on something really important right toward the end ... and I think it's important in understanding crank thought processes: Low Hanging Fruit There was a time not terribly long ago (say before 1900?) when we still had so much to understand/learn that a lone maverick working in their garage / workshop could discover new chunks of physics / chemistry / materials science etc.. Tinkerers and "renaissance types" .. amateur bodgers etc.. However, as science has advanced, as our knowledge of the universe has advanced, all that low hanging fruit - the stuff that one lone person can work out in their hobby time - well, all of that is already pretty well settled - as you mentioned about how particle physics papers have hundreds, even thousands of authors - because the tools and resources needed for experimental evidence are so mindbogglingly expensive and complicated. I like your play-dough analogy a lot. Mathematics is the language of physics. I am one of those lay persons who does find theoretical physics, cosmology, particle physics, quantum theory etc.. fascinating and I do read up on it as much as I can. However, I also know I do not have the mathematical knowledge to understand more deeply... therefore, I trust the experts such as yourself who have spent careers / lifetimes building the skills and knowledge needed. The days of "lone maverick in their study uncovering fundamental pieces of physics" are long gone.. these folks were born a couple hundred years too late to have a chance at that kind of "f**ed around and discovered a fundamental thing about the universe ... on my own ... in my spare time"
garages, workshops, and patent offices. I'm not sure that is not still possible, but anybody thinking of trying it has to remember that that patent clerk actually read and understood the literature up to that point. While Einstein was a bit dismissive of math in 1905, it wasn't like he didn't know or use any, and by the time he did General Relativity, he had become much more reliant on it. I do think that physics has moved too far in the math-only direction and that gedankenexperiments seem to be becoming a lost art, but that doesn't mean everything is wrong. It just means, if anything, that it's shortchanging one avenue of future innovation.
I have little trust in experts, and I like to speculate about cosmology, but my saving grace is that I know I am totally incompetent, lol. Hubris is the enemy of science.
Certainly the cost of bashing particles into each other has become a bit of an obstacle for the hobbyist, but perhaps on the "shut up and calculate" front the costs could come down and a hobbyist might one day be able to show an experimental result of consequence.
It is 'crackpots' that actually advanced the field, whilst these 'old guard holders wish they could be Einstein, so they just defend the old guard and call anyone that challenges this a 'crackpot.' The scientists who pushed science in the modern era would literally be considered crackpots by 'modern notions of what a crackpot is.' That is, until the old guard dies off and the new blood come in with the new ideas and make it mainstream. Max Planck said: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
"CRACKPOTS" are common in nearly all topics in social media. I've likely been been guilty myself. Thank you for helping us understand a safer role in social media.
I must admit that I've been a crackpot for some time, but I had a different approach, I was humble and I was always asking to physicists: "Is that possible that...?" and then I tried to build block by block with their help. I remember going to University and talking with a great teacher that was very hard on me but let me go and tell what I was going to ask him. I didn't know why he was so compelled to listen to me, maybe because I was so humble to him. At the third visit he did spot something on my ideas that could be revolutionary but he started to smile saying: "Heh heh!!! I know what you're trying to make me do or want to work on, but I am too old for that". After some years he stopped me on one road and asked me for the progress of my study and my theory. His name was Bergia, a great italian teacher and physicist. This video is encouraging me to pursue the hard task of learning!
It reminds me of when I attempted to become a paid singer. After some time on the karaoke circuit, I tried to enter some singing contests. I won a few in a local area and then broadened my horizons by entering a contest in a much larger venue. I immediately realized that there were folks who simply had way more ability than I did. Be it experience or genetics, they were just better. I found a plateau and paced myself and improved my abilities, but it was very slow going. As I am doing this and researching how to improve even more, over and over again I was beset by "newbies" who couldn't even carry a tune who were convinced that they were the next Elvis or Whitney Houston. When I only rated myself as maybe 35 out of 100... 0 being mute and 100 being good enough to make money. These folks barely made it to 8 or 10 on the scale. I can no longer sing karaoke because of stomach pain, but I can still carry a tune better than any of those folks
"American Idol" used to make a mint off of the early-season episodes where they were just letting people who couldn't carry a tune in a bucket but were convinced they were the next Whitney Houston or Freddie Mercury have at it. Quite a spectacle for ratings. Hard to watch sometimes, though, and not (just) because of the bad singing.
@@michaelblacktree That was never a real thing. It was partly political-based propaganda, and partly just a meme/joke. But the irony is people who think the "tide pod challenge" was/is a real thing and believe it without looking at reality, who criticize others as being "sheep".
Unfortunately what you have described here is extremely common in many fields. And whats worse, they tend to garner the attention of the average person.
A funny variant of "the dropout" crackpot we have in mathematics: Someone who learned *some* of the math, but decided that the *rest* of the math is wrong, and is setting out to prove something that is false (and often easy to prove false!), often to spectacular ends.
It's very funny to look at non-mathematically rigorous mathematics. It's like trying to read gibberish without your glasses on. It's also a little bit sad, but these crackpots spend a lot of their time calling established mathematicians idiots, so I don't feel so bad for them.
@@OwenEkblad Logicicm was thoroughly debunked by Gödel, Kleene and Turing. That leaves constructive and intuitive mathematicians to answer the question. Postmodern language games of Hilbert's Formalism do not deserve to be called mathematics, because reasonable math is not supposed to be reduced to circular reasoning and begging the question.
@@santerisatama5409 Sounds like you knew the answer to your question before you asked it. In any case, my sentiment is that there are some people out in the great wide world who think about that stuff and that is well and good, and I sleep easy knowing they're hard at work resolving those questions (which I personally find totally uninteresting) so that I can spend my time on the math that I enjoy doing myself.
Angela, I feel your pain. I have a physics undergrad degree and I love the topic of special relativity. I also answer a lot of questions about SR on quora. I also have had to deflect relativity crackpots. My technique of working with these people is to challenge them to do real science, not rebut their pet theory (I have a few of my own that I keep on a tight leash!) So, real science says that SR is well-settled and supported by over a century of observational/experimental EVIDENCE. The first challenge for a pet theory to overcome is to propose an experiment that: a) falsifies SR and b) supports the pet theory. If the pet theory only reproduces SR results then it is SR in some sort of disguise. What most crackpots don't understand about Einstein is that Einstein showed how SR converges with conventional low energy physics and proposed observations and experiments that support SR and falsify Newtonian physics. Crackpots tend to lack the ability to be their own harshest critics - something that has been the hallmark of the scientist since Kepler. Crackpots don't understand that Einstein didn't just falsify NP, he extended NP into the high energy realm. But I preach to the choir. Crackpots never embrace a disproof of their pet theory and say "oh well." Instead, the crackpot will engage in debate techniques to try to overwhelm or outloud your objections. Science is not done by debate! Alas, I have had to block certain people on Quora who will endlessly debate their pet theory. My apologies for a rambling comment. I support your efforts to bring attention to this problem.
what people like you or modern physicist lack is common sense. you make the fatal mistake of confusing the maths of physics with its verbal interpretation. Quantum Mechanics and Relativity are both wrong. but its not that their math is wrong, its the semantic interpretation, which has nothing to do with the math. Modern physicists confuse math and abstraction with physical reality, and think that the mathematical validity also proves the validity of the taught interpretation, which is irrational. Interpretation of math can not follow from math. the issue is not in the math, its in what the math means intuitively about the universe. For example, all of Quantum Physics and Quantum mechanics is based on the premise of particle wave dualism, which is logically fallacious. it breaks causation, and treats abstractions as physical entities to intentionally deceive, and so does relativity. the claim that waves can be interpreted as probabilities of the undetermined state of a particle is nuts, and has no correlation to reality. "particles" are just waves, and not tiny balls, which is actually what the double slit experiment shows. there is no logical reason to uphold any other image of particles. of course attempting to measure their location will result in uncertainty, because they dont actually have a location in space, they just have an area of influence, so of course when you try to measure a fixed location of where the thing is, you will always get a probability distribution, because it has no coordinates. measuring an exact location of its actions has to result in uncertainty because your trying to assign coordinates to an area of influence of a pressure differential in a fluid. that can never produce an exact result not because the location is undetermined until measured, but because it never had a single location to begin with because its not an entity with a location. Quantum Physics is a huge misinterpretation of what is being measured, but you can not find its error in its math, because the issue its its interpretation, to find the error, you have to logically examine the semantic conclusion. that is completely absent in modern science, which is why its easy to introduce falsehoods without people ever noticing them. even if you produced something like a quantum computer, it is not actually based on the interpretation of QM, but on its maths, so the computer working doesn not prove QMs interpretation, only its maths. the point here is that the math showing up as a probability does not mean that there is a probability to a state of a particle, its an illogical misrepresentation of what the math means.Any modern physicist debating this will always point to the math working, and will act like the interpretation is proven by the math being correct, never questioning the interpretation of the numbers. Math can not prove an interpretation of math. t
A perfect "math" analogy will fool you forever. Light speed is never OBSERVED to be constant. It was DECLARED to be constant. Then, if you move your head, the entire Universe instantly changes shape JUST FOR YOU? It is too goofy to be ONLY TRUE ON PAPER AFTER THE TRANSFORM EQUATIONS CHANGE THE NUMBERS! A transform is based on a number between 0 and 1. There is no mechanism to that! FACT is that YOU BELIEVE IN IT! Show me time outside of your brain.
@dinamosflams that would be a tall order. Looking up thermocouples on Google years ago ( wanted a few numbers ) lead to a rabbit hole of interconnected web pages by one author. Can you top, free energy, a dinosaur civilization on Venus wearing thermocouple space suits and GE leading a cover up to keep the world from knowing?
@@Smo1k not at all if we enter in a buble isolated enough it might even acceletaring the crackheadess if we only feed ourselfs with our own opinions for years!
As a Computer Science guy I've met a lot of people in my field with some crazy ideas about physics. I myself low key wish I'd gone down the physics/calculus route because the most satisifying calculus problems to me were always the kinematics ones. But I reasoned that I'd make more money being a software developer than a physicist so I majored in compsci which involves a lot more discrete maths than calculus, and I also found out from this decision that I really love discrete maths. But if taking some introductory physics courses and going down that route meant that I could properly engage with some of my friends' wacky physics ideas then that would also be great.
That is absolutely fascinating! How do you become a recovering crackpot? I thought, once the pot is cracked, there is no gluing it back together again. How did you get out of the fourth dimension?
@@laurentdrozin812 Well, I'm really probably not the most objective observer to analyze. But I'd credit several things. First, was discovering that my own personal quack idea was actually already a part of basic GR that just doesn't get talked about in popular science presentations much. That made me realize that I really had no idea what I was talking about and needed to learn a lot more about basic physics. And going down the road of reading actual text books instead of popsci presentations gave me a more realistic perspective on what physics actually is. Second, my crackpot period predated most social media. By the time social media became more of a thing I had already had the revelation above. And the combination of that realization along with seeing what other crackpots said and how they thought gave me an outside perspective on just how crazy they all sound. And that led to some introspection on how crazy I sounded. Now I don't worry about trying to theorize about anything much myself. Just try to read and learn as much as I can.
@@johnreford Whew, you really dodged the bullet there, imagine you actually broadcasted your revolutionary theories all over the internet! Congrats on recovering and good luck with your studies.
You have no idea how much this video helped. I actually left 13 years in tech to teach middle school, and I've been wanting to jump back into... ALL THE MATH! I hit the limits of my understanding having only gone through college calculus. The fact you called out the math, the most exciting thing for me to learn, gives me hope! I'm genuinely stoked to get through diff eq!
I've only ever received one crackpot physics paper, which means my meager work in particle accelerators hasn't attracted much popular attention. However, that one paper does have one of my favorite sentences in it: "this may seem confusing, until it is understood that our universe is literally blinking off and on." There's a great essay on math crackpots from 1983 by Underwood Dudley called "What To Do When The Trisector Comes" with many of the same observations, though the author claims some success in curing a few letter writers of their crackpotitude, so there may yet be hope for the physics crackpots.
Okay.. "this may seem confusing, until it is understood that our universe is literally blinking off and on." is an excellent sentence. Far better than most of the crackpot material I've come across, though the paper claiming that a biological red being kinda similar to a red from some NASA image meaning something utterly implausible (I think it required faster than light movement of bacteria) was close.
Thank you for this. The thing which keeps me from being a type A crackpot is knowing that the language of physics is math, but science educators use words to speak in metaphors. When something appears to be an error, it is usually the result of extending a metaphor beyond what it was meant to convey. Also, I don't have the chutzpah to think that I've spotted something which has been missed by thousands of professionals who've spent thousands of hours on that topic.
I could be one of these people, as someone who has long been fascinated by science, but lacks any formal training. I think you’re very right about science communication playing a major role, particularly very conventionally hard to understand concepts being boiled down for a layperson like myself. I also don’t really blame the communicators though, as to adequately convey very math heavy concepts in an easy to understand package is an absolutely Herculean feat. That being said I really appreciate your no nonsense approach to science communication, and I especially love the meta analysis of both the communication itself, and the broad public reception of it. Your videos have made me smarter and taught me things, but also helped me to be a bit more discerning of my own bullshit, and that second bit something many educators struggle to achieve, so I just wanted to thank you for that.
Every once in a while, I mentally wander down this road, too. I don't why it seems so important sometimes to want to be someone who solves a big problem.
I think that the _aesthetic_ of the "physics genius" is often informed by actual physics geniuses. Feynman is known to have been "mistrustful" of textbooks, for example, and recently we're seeing "crackpots" in cosmology publishing papers about how their theores are now vindicated after James Webb. I think there's an idea that is fair, that motivates crackpots: that physics ought to be accessible, or at least as accessible as the real world is to everyday people. To foster a community of accountability is all fine, but I think here is a good example of the golden rule - when we have to apply a moral standard to ourselves, in order to apply it to others, because the right answer here is that we can only compare apples to apples - you cannot issue accountability to a community if you can't issue that selfsame accountability to yourself. That's what the actual difference is between a crackpot and a scientist.
I'd modify what you're saying slightly: I don't think crackpots believe physics should be accessible to everyday people. I think they believe that they are *not* everyday people, but instead very smart people, and therefore physics should be accessible to them.
I have the same problem in reverse - theoretical physicists keep sending me their latest paper on their pet theory of 11 dimensional super symmetric string theory describing a landscape of potential universes in which our own universe cannot be found. Apparently as a community they have been publicly funded to work on this for over 50 years without any new experimental predictions to show for it.
@@acollierastro Good. We now insist on steampunk dressed Ada Lovelaces and Sophie Germains exploring process physics a la Whitehead, cognition embodied (in corsets), generative universes and...well it's a good Stable Diffusion prompt anyway!
@@EvonyNinj Not necessarily, infinite doesn't mean all permutations. Consider this analogy: each natural number represents a different state of the universe. The set of even numbers would be a infinite multiverse but it doesn't contain every possible state.
I came here from the recent professor Dave video “Science isn’t dogma…” and I did not expect to be completely blown away like this. You’ve managed to articulate what makes these weirdos so fascinating in a way I never could. It’s also a bummer to realize how much scarier these guys must be for women physicists to deal with. I had never heard of the murder at APS and that definitely casts these cold emails in a less fun light.
that video literally proved Science is dogma. If it wasn't, a moron wouldn't call an idiot stupid on the internet over it 🤷If you can't understand science is just a collection of knowledge to be questioned always, then you're probably balls deep into the dogma too. 🥱 A Catholic priest is just as wrong as a physicist, and I'm not gonna take either seriously when neither has concrete evidence for their claims 🤷 "trust me bro" only works on idiots.
idk yo just think about the equation of his statement. it's predicated on science not being dogmatic but if it is as so many wildly upset people try and fail to point out then we should probably reflect if we really want to be inclusive. not saying to start teaching expanding earth lol people who don't mesh with hierarchy get lost but that doesn't mean we aren't either.
@@aldunlop4622 i mean the way he lays it out never admitting to the possibility of serving say, capitalist hierarchy through the work is shushed and kicked aside to praise the lack of dogma. a very dangerous position to take if you're not actually sure you're genuinely independent of harmful incentive and influence which /doubt corporations are the ones funding everything.
I remembered that a Chinese colleague once told me an interesting piece of their history, probably in the 1970s. At that time the mathematician Chen Jingrun advanced the proof attempt of Goldbach's Conjecture to Px(1,2), the closest we've ever come to a real one. Then a series of popular science articles made him famous in China. Coupled with the fact that the expression of this conjecture seemed so simple that it didn't require any advanced mathematical tools, there was a wave of nationwide attempts to prove it. It then reached the point where the Chinese Academy of Sciences printed letter templates for quick replies, something like this: Thank you for sending your proof of GC, the first error occurs on line [__] of page [__].
I think you used this in another video already, but I think Pauli's "not even wrong" gives a good way to evaluate a general crackpot theory. It is a word salad that uses popular physics terms and links them in ways that seem intuitive to the theorist. In terms of everyday language, the statements might seem plausible, but upon further inspection there is no substantive mathematical claim, let alone empirical prediction in the supposed theory. It is just linking concepts in a nice-sounding way that is nonsensical within the actual mathematical formalism. It is not even wrong.
As a layperson, I feel the crackpot tug. The whole multiverse thing bugged me. Seemed like maths overtook commons sense. But the difference between me and an actual crackpot is that in the end I know I don't actually know much and that my gut feel or impression is just that and nothing more. The problem for people like me is that we have are more vulnerable to crackpots and from the lay perspective find it hard to tell the difference. Your four criteria are helpful. I think I'll write them down on an index card and be unable to find it when I next need it.
The beauty and problem is that physicists (like Sean Carroll) claim that it comes out of the math AND it seems there is no way to test the multiverse hypothesis.
I understand physics, but not the math is what I said in 6th grade. And by the time I got to 8th grade I still felt like I was bad at maths, but I also understood that not being able to do the math meant I didn’t get physics. I worked really hard to understand the math, because I wanted to understand physics. I’ve always been a space nerd and wanted to be an astro-physicist.
Wow I had no idea that the ocean was just _sand_ moving away from the shore so fast that it turns into liquid 🤯 These dialogues are awesome! please keep them coming ✌️
math crackpots are super wild too. they've got an incredible range, from denying the value of famous mathematical constants to weird spiritual claims about numbers
ive also got like, anti-imposter syndrome. im afraid of becoming a crackpot myself. i'm not a physics person and i dont think i ever will because i enjoy pure math so much, but i'm a butcher working 60 hours a week and so almost all of my free time is spent working through math textbooks. i don't think i'll have the opportunity for formal education of higher mathematics so the best i can do is just start with what i know (which, granted, is a lot more than anybody else i know personally) and work up. but that kinda shit is just the perfect crackpot breeding ground: imperfect self-study
@@wyboo2019 It's definitely possible to self-study and not be a crackpot. And the fact that you're afraid of becoming one says that you probably won't :P
@@wyboo2019 are you able to solve some of the exercises in these textbooks? if you are, then you don't have to be a butcher, you can get other jobs that will pay better (eventually) and allow you more time to study.
To lighten up the crack-pot darkness I have to mention that there is a way to do research outside institutions right - in my field of science we work with collisions between particles in gas mixtures and low-ionized plasmas, and the theory for properly accounting for the collisions was developed by David Enskog as he worked as a high-school physics-teacher. Proper mathematical treatment of a small-ish but important physical problem, properly communicated with one of the big guns in the field (Sydney Chapman) and made a lasting contribution to physics.
Economics is weird because it's like multiple fields in a trenchcoat. Econometrics is empirical and uses math to model observations. Micro is still stuck in the early 20th century despite attempts to move away from simplifying assumptions like perfect information and rational expectations, and Marco has growing pains as people debate over the value of equilirbirum models which also have simplifying assumptions in policy. In some ways math is both a friend and enemy of the crackpot in Econ, and sometimes Econ enshrines that crackpottery.
Great video! I like how you basically summed it all up by saying "Crackpots dont want to do Physics. They want to be famous physicists." Also I feel that a crackpots tale is a cautionary one for serious scientists. It's important that we don't become obsessed with our ideas since nature doesn't really care all that much about our thoughts on how it works.
I think the main red flag for me is an emotional attachment to your ideas. I work with engineers and if I come up with a solution, they will immediately study it and if there is a flaw, limitation or it is just not a good idea they will say so (in often quite blunt terms). They are not doing it to hurt my feelings, because they see wasting time pursuing something that is not going to work is a waste of time and they are sparing me. I do the same to them of course. If I think the idea has merit, it is up to me to gather more evidence and re-present it. I think the issue with crackpots is that they get so emotionally invested in their ideas that they feel personally attacked if someone points out flaws or something else that they have not considered.
@@sirmclovin9184 I think there's a lot of joy in the pursuit of problems and their solutions. I also think the end goal is to develop an understanding which may or may not also lead to useful technological advances. We develop this understanding by creating models and testing our models, but my main point was that nature just exists regardless of our models or ideas of how it works. It is therefore dangerous to get too attached to our ideas on how nature works and instead be open to what nature tells us. The first comment here sums up that process very nicely.
@@thomasdee1980 Wow Im jealous that you have such excellent colleagues. Thanks for sharing -- I think your story illustrates very clearly the impracticality of emotionally attaching yourself to your hypotheses.
The wildest one I ever got was a reply tweet of a guy arguing against angular momentum. Honestly I found that more impressive that trying to make a ToE
I got a PhD in applied math, got a job, then tenure, then started doing nothing but physics. This was a great route to take! Possibly the best route to take!!
In comp science, most of our seniors seem to be either mathematicians, physicists or both. Like for many of them when they went to uni our department didn't exist yet, closest was probably some sort of applied maths or discrete maths department. Though you can usually tell if they come from physics because all their example are from physics.
@@fizzy4149 nope, though some of my ancestors are from the main island. I study in Germany, my family background involves a German woman and an US-american man, then shenanigans ensue.
I did the exact same thing!! You're right, it's a great route to take!! How many times, while doing either GR or classical field theory, did a thorough understanding of the multivariable chain rule was necessary?? Or how about various ideas of linear algebra?
I love the play doh analogy, because while it certainly isn't food, it's technically safe to eat, which to a baby means you can put it in your mouth 😂 basically the same as crackpots throwing out buzz words and someone going, ooh good point 😂
Here's something I really thought as I was learning in the university. I'd just found out that light is a transverse wave. By comparison with circles on the 2d surface of water making bumps into the third dimension, I'd just assumed that a transverse wave always manifests into an extra dimension, perpendicular to the space in which it propagates. So, I imagined that light, propagating in 3d space, means the direction of the "bumps" is 4th spatial dimension. Hold my beer while I give my Nobel speech.
I can only say that as a retired engineer, I am smart enough to know that I definitely not skilled to do PhD. level physics. Thank you for a well grounded video.
The great thing about the arts is that there are no "crackpot" artists, only outsider artists, and they are very much so appreciated after the fact by the art establishment which they were not part of because of entry barriers. Because outsider art is ... just art. It actually is tapping into the very same creativity as established art.
@@geoffwales8646 I'm note sure there even is a surefire way to differentiate art from other outlets of creativity, but if there is, "reasonable level of control over one's medium" isn't it.
We don't have crackpot artists because there isn't any theory of how the universe or aliens works coming out of art. We have a bunch of other problem people instead. For instance, I think bad clients meets like the crackpot equivalent in terms of email volume. They dont understand things like design and time, but they will turn around and expect things done for cheap, things done ridiculously fast, entire redesigns in less than one day, or print things at a completely different without thinking about how that effects the way it is designed.
I remember that someone once glibly said (and XKCD subsequently referenced) that biology is applied chemistry, chemistry is applied physics and physics are applied mathematics. So while that was a joke, it's true enough as a generalisation to make me confused why, as you pointed out, people expect to be able to do physics without maths.
I recently saw a thread on twitter of some crackpot (and legitimate academic in another physical sciences field) who wrote a (non-peer reviewed) paper deriving Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle from the gravitational force. One of the first, of many, major mathematical errors was equating a change in position (delta x) to an infinitesimal (dx). While it is definitely an understandable assumption for an undergraduate to make, like they both can be described to be small changes in a value, it very much shows that a proper command of the maths helps catch crackpot theories of the physical universe.
It's called Conquest's Law (named after Australian historian Robert Conquest): "Everyone is a conservative in their own field, and a reductionist in all others". Crackpotism is just a normal human tendency to reduce complex matters to understandable concepts, mixed with narcissism and a lack of a critical environment, and turned up to eleven. Also, it's not limited to physics. I used to be the editor of a history of science journal and boy, did I read some nonsense.
I have been working in archaeology for a decade and have a similar experience in getting random contact from people about aliens, and Bigfoot and angels etc. It's a strange thing. There is kind of a burgeoning subfield in anthropology that studies this phenomenon specifically in the context of Archeology and anthropology but it considers other fields too. I was following the research and literature a few years ago, but life moves on and haven't been keeping up with it. You might enjoy looking into it. The next thing is I fell down a rabbit hole thinking about physics in 2d space during the pandemic and emailed some physicist I found on line. i really had to stop and think "am I a Crack pot now?" I realized I am not trying to prove anything just trying to figure the stuff out so that made me feel better and we had a nice email exchange. i got a few book recommendations. But the first email I wrote was a bit more crackpot adjacent until i stopped and toned it back a bit. sorry for the dissertation, but I think I have experienced this phenomenon from all three perspectives. It's a very interesting topic.
I love to hear about crackpots in other fields. And I also love that you got a positive response from a physicist, I hope you keep learning because physics is cool.
@@acollierastro @acollierastro I mean part of it is that archaeology is full of mainstream Crack pot theories. Ancient aliens has been around for decades, then alot of biblical stuff like giants, lost tribes of israel, antideluvian floods. I think the other part is the nature of archaeological data. Experiments are difficult and it comes down to data collection and interpretation. we can never say "yes we know definitively how the pyramids were built" we know where the rock was quarried we know how it was most likely transported and constructed but there is no way to say with certainty this is it. And truth be told these "theories" are just more fun then reality.
this has been humbling. i had a few courses of physics at university and failed due to math. i had that exact thoughts "i got the physics part alright, its just the math man" well thank you for helping me to understand this. and thank you also for the amused tone of voice when you declared economics a hard science
As a physicist myself, I find nothing wrong in the comment that said "dark matter and dark energy might be a reiteration of the ether ideas of old days". Physicists have messed up before by being overconfident about assertions and history might repeat itself. Remember, science is built upon learning from our past mistakes/hypotheses.
@@DivergentDroid No, it wasn't. It was just a name for an UNEXPLAINED observation. It was not an explanation, just an OBSERVATION that mathematically there should be more mass then we observe, but we have no way to see it, hence it's "dark". The error/unexplained phenomena needed a name, so they would know which unexplained thing they were all talking about so they came up with "dark matter". Dark matter has never been confirmed or denied, just as ether back in the day was not confirmed or denied, yet people in BOTH scenarios were unjustly confident in assuming it as fact. It was not able to be tested.
Could just as easily been called invisible or undetectable matter. But intriguing non the less ... suggesting there's more to learn about our universe and to account for in our math formulas so as to bring about higher accuracy and yes new math solutions that beg investigation. I only wonder if you as a physicist have all these crackpot ideas floating arround in your head as many of us layman do ...lol
@@phillipcoetzer8186 I doubt Rose is an actual physicist. If true this means she would have to deal with actual physics laws which are a description of phenomena that is always observed to remain the same bar none. Known physics does not deal with imaginary concepts such as dark matter dark energy or even Einstein's garbage ideas of spacetime. If you have a claim that goes against established physics such as the heliocentric model does, (including dark matter dark energy and spacetime as well as atmosphere an oxymoron because gas cannot form a sphere in a vacuum nor fail to expand due to entropy into the available volume) one must then validate said claim via the scientific method showing what we thought was our observation was faulty. This cannot even be done on dark matter or dark energy because concepts cannot be tested via the scientific method.. those junk ideas don't even have an observation.
Like you I was an astrophysicist in my graduate and faculty years. (I have since wound up in the private sector.) As you state, I would get a high volume of unsolicited crackpot contacts. In fact, in graduate school it was a right of passage for the High Energy and Astrophysics students to get added to the rotation of who the crackpot phone calls got forwarded to. I think your presentation of what is a crackpot is on target and well presented. Thanks for doing it, and keep up the work. I've long been friends with Jack Whidden at Morehead State, and plan to point him to your youtube channel since I think he may be happy to see it.
I think what you describe can be related to the Dunning-Kruger (Mount Stupid) effect. This is fascinating indeed, and it's something I worry about a lot because it seems it can be very easy to fall into
persistent d-k behavior is typical for smart, but not too smart, people. really smart people climb mount stupid very fast and slide down to despair valley, but can keep going on.
Fun fact: the original study by Dunning and Kruger has really nothing to do with the "Mount Stupid". In fact, it has not that many things to do with what people say that it supposedly claims, ironically making it one of the most misunderstood studies in social psychology and a borderline pop psych myth.
It is very easy to fall into. Fear of falling into it has often been a big inhibitor for me from pursuing certain things I'd really like to pursue more ambitiously.
@@icipher6730 yep. some of the typical mount stupid ideas (not with that name) are presented in another paper by d-k. i read them (more or less well, i am stem...) a few years ago.
I often wonder: if a creditor tries to collect a debt owed by Freddie the Sleep-Demon of Elm Street, and sends a letter to Freddie warning that his credit rating will be damaged if he doesn't pay up, would that creditor be ... (drum roll, please) ... DUNNING KRUGER?
Electrical engineering is a very broad field. I’m an electrical/optical engineer and I have had a lot of the same quantum mechanics and electromagnetic grad coursework that someone in applied physics will have. However there are many areas in EE where the physics education will be limited to the undergrad core classes because what they do has been abstracted away from the underlying physics.
Someone just sent me a link to this because we've been having conversations about unsolicited physics book donations to libraries, and it was very insightful. Thank you so much for this! I died a bit inside at the clip from the guy saying that gravity can't exist with Platonism (if indeed that's what he means by "Platonic logic" with a capital P). Almost afraid to ask how he got there from any of Plato's dialogues, the Platonic commentary tradition, or Proclus' Elements. I've been studying that philosophical system for years at this point, still learning tons of nuance, and I think he gave the same care and attention to it that he gave to learning math.
That video is wild! And it's surprisingly common to see the mash-up of physics crackpot & philosophy crackpot. It seems like some people think you can enter either field without developing a background. I am cringing a little at the idea of someone dropping off their self published physics text at the library. Are you a librarian? Libraries are the best!! Thank you for all you do!
This unfortunately happens everywhere, I do transportation logistics and we have to take into account a huge number of variables. Arrival and departure timing, how to move equipment in a coordinated fashion from sources to sinks (abstract view) in a way to get it where it needs to be and where needed, capacity constraints, making sure things get where they're supposed to be at the time they're supposed to be there, fuel, crewing, maintenance etc. etc. etc. Some plans take literally months of coordination between teams. Then I happen to talk to a person out in the operations itself and they try to tell me about how something is silly and we could just do it this or that way cause its "so obvious...". Like other comments, at first I was all doe-eyed and naive and tried to teach them. They don't want to learn, they just want to be right. It REALLY engrained in me the mindset that, EVERYTHING has a HUGE amount of details that play into it behind the scenes. If I knee jerk feel like "Well It's obvious that.." pretty much 100% guarantees that I don't understand or I'm not seeing the whole picture. I don't catch myself 100% of the time, but now I definitely learn to just ask "Why is it like that?"
Logistics is truly one of those disciplines where it *seems* like it's easy but turns out can be extremely complex. There are so many hidden constraints in almost any logistical challenge that I am amazed it can be done at all. A mundane package delivery is an immensely complex problem space and when you think about launching a rocket into orbit it's again like a factor of at least a 100 more. Yet it looks simple because when everything is well planned the outcome just comes about so naturally. Logistics is awesome.
The problem with this is that physicists are in general very bad teachers indeed for normal people. When they want to make things intuitive to people, they make it more distant from the truth than normal intuition already gives it. That is what makes madmen. For example, videos made by physicists explaining the twin paradox fail to get to the heart of the problem: nobody really cares about the return. Some say the problem is due to acceleration and others due to change of system, and in fact it is neither: just side effects. Physics cannot understand what people do not understand. They are very bad teachers indeed for ordinary people. Let us take the example of the twin paradox. Nobody cares about the return. People think like this. When twin A sees (or thinks) twin B reaching the star, he is frozen, and when twin B sees himself reaching the start, he is frozen. Each thinks the other is younger. When they meet, when we compare the frozen bodies, who was right? I know the key is simultaneity, but you have to explain this. What is the twin's mistake? Forget about the return, nobody cares about the return. How can you theoretically not see that nobody cares about the return, and you just explain the return. It is unbelievable. It looks like they are avoiding something. As we can see above, the key to the difference is neither the acceleration nor the change of system, but that one has moved "inside" the other (the reference points of the journey were all of one system). Let us imagine that the moving twin comes with a star behind him (with the double of the proper length of the distance). When he reaches the fixed star, he thinks that the other star has not reached the other twin, and the fixed twin thinks that it has just reached him. (g=2) The fixed twin calculates things on the basis of his reference system and the fact: when he sees MY star (at distance 0) and at the end he corrects the time. The same result (age for the fixed twin) is given if the other twin does the same. He knows that the other twin will commit suicide when he sees the moving star (at distance 0). If he calculates the time for the star to reach his twin (according to his reference system), he gets the same result (4x1/2=2). The whole problem is non-simulataneity and reference points (length contraction). "But where is the asymmetry?" people ask. In relativity there is no such thing as a "simple point in space", only points that belong to a reference system (if you understand this, you'll understand everything). The asymmetry becomes clear when events occur at points that belong to the reference system of one twin but not the other. Changing reference systems and acceleration are only side effects of this, not the cause, as we proved above.
Interesting video! One of the reasons I dropped out of physics is that it turned out that actually _doing_ physics (hundreds of hours running a radio telescope to produce papers on very narrow topics) was much less fun than reading about physics (grand theories of everything!). Another is that there came a point (somewhere around quantum field theory) where I finally had to admit to myself that I just wasn't good enough at math to hack it as a theorist. But I have a longstanding interest in crackpots, because I see them everywhere, not just in physics, and I think understanding them helps you understand the world. I'd already come up with a lot of what you had to say here, but you said it very well, and added things that hadn't occurred to me. (E.g., I hadn't really appreciated how scary crackpots could be). Good job!
I generally never comment on RU-vid videos, but I feel compelled to comment on this video. THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! I know we need science popularisers to help inspire people to take up science, the dark side of this is that it makes people think physics is simple and you don't need to put in the painful hours to truly understand what the physics is actually saying. Please make a follow up video to help people know when they are venturing into becoming crackpots, cause I believe some may be honest people, who honestly believe they are doing 'meaningful work'. Knowing that they are venturing into becoming crackpots may help them stop wasting their time. I will send this video to everyone who believes that they know physics because they can say 'Quantum physics tell us...' P.S. Your analogy of the 'play dough' meal is perfect.
I love all your examples. It's refreshing to have "references" supporting your conclusions. I don't see that very often in these dark days of social media.
There are a lot of such problems. Here is one example - many theories of dark matter have never really been worked through, and so they might be viable but we just don't know. (Many of these theories are effectively toy theories, where someone thought them up to explain feature X or co-exist with measurement Y. but never worked through the effect on _all_ DM signatures, and so we just don't know if they would work on all of those, or not.) It would be useful if someone could ring the changes on each such theory.
We have these people in military fields as well, and they are almost always "outsiders" or people who only spent a very small time in service but of course know how to conduct operations better than anyone. It is just common sense after all but we are all too blinded by tradition to see it! They usually get called armchair generals.
I managed to struggle my way up to early-years college-level physics and math before realizing it's just not for me and switching to computer science and linguistics. Though not quite retired, a few years back I had a tiny tingle of the "type A" moment: Hey, I've studied this stuff, I want to get back to studying it, but can't dedicate myself full time. The "Theoretical Minimum" books and RU-vid courses by Leonard Susskind (yes, the strings guy) are perfect for people like this - they use just enough math to let us "physics-adjacent people" understand the concepts properly (not at a pop-sci play-doh level), but then also enough to show what level of math is required if one *really* wants to dig in properly and do actual work in the field. My personal limits lie somewhere mid-classical field theory. 😢
This happens to everyone’s profession. It’s one of those things that if you experience something and you think you’re smart you think you know better than the people that do it professionally. This real estate. I’ve encountered it when I was in professional education. I encountered it when I was in computer technology. There’s just a subset of people that think they simply know better than anyone else they encounter.
I started watching this video with a physics mindset, but then you said “they don’t want to do physics, they want to be a famous physicist,” which reminded me that the poetry world and creative writing in general is besieged by crackpots of the exact same ilk: entitled, conspiracy-minded, immune to criticism, and seething with barely restrained rage. That story about someone barging into your kitchen with a plate of playdoh is so relatable. Except in the writing world, the plate of playdoh is a thousand-page, unreadable, ungrammatical, unformatted, vaguely pornographic, semi autobiographical roman a clef/coming of age story/allegorical screed. Meanwhile, the people that send them are so poorly read that they have zero awareness that their magnum opus is not just cliched but a cliche in itself, the worst cliche, the most legendarily malignant cliche in all literature. Unfortunately, for literary editors the threat of violence and harassment is just as pertinent.
Your words made me question my behavior regarding physics. Unfortunately, I became seriously interested in physics right after I finished physics classes in school. Similar with math. I love reading and listening to podcasts about physics, but my mathematical understanding of it is very basic. Calculus at a very basic level is the most I can do I believe and to solve something in a reasonable time, I always need to use a computer. That never stopped me from talking about physics and trying to correct people who in my view understood certain things wrong. For example, when I hear somebody talk about gravity in a classical way where it's apparent they don't even realize that gravity is not a force and they're drawing wrong conclusions from such approach (not trying to prove I'm right to anybody, that's not my motivation, I often talk to programmers and getting it right is important sometimes), I'll interrupt them with no hesitation and try to explain it's an apparent force caused by spacetime curvature and so on. The problem is, I don't understand almost any math behind relativity. I believe I know what geodesics are, I believe I know what tools can be used to measure surface's curvature, but in reality I can't apply this knowledge and I only know that curvature and metric tensors exist. Given a hell lot of time maybe I would be able to come up with a description myself, but I don't really know. Similarly it looks with quantum mechanics. No math except maybe Born rule, but I just can't remain silent when somebody talks about "parallel universes", they always get it so wrong. But how can I get it right, when I don't even know how decoherence or Hilbert space works? Well, I've just realized how often I like to use smart words without realizing what they mean... Some part of me still wants to talk about it as much as possible tho. By continuing to do so, am I doing more harm than good?
I think you acquiring a basic conceptual understanding of "physics" without the mathematical empiricism is absolutely valid for a regular person who isn't working in academia. As long as you don't believe your conceptual understanding to be foolproof let alone superior to the understanding of people who did the math. I think the women in the video is being a bit reductive as a consequence of feeling insulated and invalidated, which she even admits around min 20. Tbh she feels pretty bitter in general, behind her pseudopoliteness, just listen to her "why do male colleges get more emails than ME, despite being SAME AS FAR CAREERWISE", it hardly manages to conceal underlying insecurities and frustrations. The video is a good video and her message makes sense, but I'd disagree that any person wanting to aquire a conceptual understanding of physics at least, would be doing "baby physics".
