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...?
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.
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.
Intrilligator's book on mathematical optimization and economic theory introduces the Euler-Lagrange equations to solve dynamic problems in economics, you are clearly clueless about this discipline.
@@leandrocarg i used to teach economy of law at a university, so despite your aggressive TH-cam comment I remain confident that I have some grasp of the field. Sure, it's harder than law, which is just sociology but with (very consequential) operational framework, but let's not delude ourselves. Political scientists can do complicated regression analysis in their sleep but none of us are putting cloned cats on mars anytime soon
@@j8000 sorry for the ad hominem but my first point remains valid, economics is a hard science, I'm not saying is harder than physics though. Also this depends on the depth of the knowledge of the field for each individual, I'm pretty sure not all economists know about Euler-Lagrange as well as not all physicists know about homological algebra.
“Hard” as in difficult, yes. “Hard science” as in a field where phenomena is not influenced by options, and results can be reliably replicated? I would think the heavy influence of irrational human behavior on economic theories would rule that out.
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
The comment about wishing a 'crackpot' would email you with a small problem, to me, highlighted a really stark contrast between the crackpot and the amateur. Despite (nominally) coming from a very similar place, a crackpot would never have an interest in a small problem, but an amateur would. Both are non-professionals in a field where they lack formal training, but one is doing it for an interest in the field, while the other is doing it for an interest in themselves. There are a small handful of fields in science where amateurs can make material contributions. Not necessarily groundbreaking, but useful and real (without applying any value judgement on "useful"). Astronomy, ornithology and entomology, and the ecology of hard-to-reach locations are big ones (not surprisingly, they are fields where making a rare observation is a meaningful contribution, which tends to favor those who spend a lot of time looking - especially in hard to reach places like caves). These are almost always 'tiny' problems, some might even call them obscure. And as such, whereas crackpots seem basically allergic to the literature, successful amateurs often require an encyclopedic familiarity: "I saw a bird that isn't supposed to live in this region" requires that you've read several books on what birds are endemic to that region. "I saw a comet that I can't find catalogued anywhere" requires that you are aware of the catalogues and how to use them. That requires a love and respect of the subject that crackpot fundamentally lacks, and what they have in its place is a grandiose view of themselves.
i think respect for the field is important. crackpots don’t respect physics and the people in it. they say things like einstein was a fraud or he tried to mislead people. one day someone might come up with an advance on einstein’s relativity but i am certain that the people who do will have the utmost respect for einstein just as he had for the newtonian physics he superseded
To be honest i feel like part of the problem is that the word "amateur" has taken on a negative connotation. Instead of "this isn't a day job", it means "this person isn't good enough" to many people. They view being an "amateur" as shameful. Maybe we need to put slightly more focus on the genuine contributions of amateurs to various science to help dispel the negative connotation?
@@Erowens98 It really is a shame that the word basically flip-turned in meaning. It's French for "lover". The word used to mean "this person is working on this because they _love_ it", but now it means "they couldn't muster up enough passion to be good at this if they tried". It's screwed up, man.
Also I think a difference between a crackpot and either amateur or professional is that they'll all have an idea that totally doesn't fit mainstream theories, but the latter two only admit it in secret to their besties while the former makes it their life goal to convince everyone they are right with no evidence. Its fine to have too many mimosas and admit something you know can't be proved but think is real, because you aren't going to go scream it at the physics chair on Monday 😂
@@Erowens98 The word amateur etymologically comes from "amor", love, an amateur is a person who is not an expert but has "love" toward a certain discipline, and that is why the amateur reads, is interested, and is trying to understand as much as a layman that has such interest, such "love" can do... Amateur is not an insult, but real amateur knows that he/she is an amateur, knowing how much one doesn't know is the start... Amateur, a good amateur knows that his/her interest is not professional, has no education and cognitive tools to be expert, or professional, and knows his/her place, such a person never tries to be smarter than the real thing, the professional, the expert.
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.
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.
@@sterlingmullett6942 Hi Sterling, these are brilliant questions, thanks for asking them. I’ll try to answer everything in order. 1. 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? I’d say the root of the cancer problem lies in the difficulty of curing the disease, and not resources. (It seems like you already have a good understanding of why cancer is difficult to cure based on your question, but I’ll explain for others too.) The two big reasons why cancer is hard to cure is the 1. similarity of cancer to normal, healthy cells, and 2. the personalized nature of cancer. The first major hurdle that makes a cure to cancer challenging is that a cure needs to kill some specific human cells without killing too many other human cells. It’s easier when it is a bacteria or some other external source of the disease because the biology of you and the biology of whatever is infecting you is completely different. We can give drugs to you that do nothing (or very little) to your cells, but quickly and violently break the infecting cells. With cancer, any approach we would normally use to kill an infection would just kill the patient as well, given that cancer cells are human and have nearly identical biology. The saving grace is in nearly identical. Cancer cells worked the same as normal cells at some point, but something broke in them, and that means that something is different about their biology that can be targeted to treat it! This leads to the second major challenge in curing cancer. The key point that you mention is cancer is not one disease, it is hundreds, and even for cancers that are the “same disease,” every cancer for every patient is (almost always) inherently different. So, the thing that is broken in one cancer and gives us a route to cure it is unlikely to be the same thing that is broken in another cancer. Even if it is the same thing that is broken, it might be broken in a different way that is clinically significant and prevents the same treatment from working. Given this model of how cancer works at the clinical level, the similarity of cancer to normal cells and the personalized nature of cancer cases makes a universal cure to cancer exceedingly unlikely. We can’t predict if a research group will make a breakthrough in our basic understanding of cancer and uncover a strategy for a universal treatment option, so I will leave some room for that. Broadly speaking, the issue is not resources and attention. More money and research hours go into cancer research than any other type of health-related research. This work does lead to advancements in our understanding of cancer both generally and for specific types of cancer. More on that in the next question. 2. 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 to tackle them? Health research is broken up into three categories, and most of the time, labs generally stick to one category. The foundation to all health research is basic science research. In the context of cancer, these labs look at broad categories of cancer and try to understand, at the most basic level, how the cancer cells develop, survive, grow, and move. They do not look for a cure at all, but they are the only ones discovering things about the general nature of cancer. I am personally biased towards the value of basic research because I am a basic research scientist, but I think, practically, if any “cure all” ever comes to exist, it will be because a basic scientist discovers something about how cancer inherently works that is targetable by treatment. The second level is translational research. Translational scientists use the models that basic scientists make to find new drugs. To do this, they usually are looking for drugs to treat specific cancers at this point, but drugs are developed for one thing and turn out to cure others things all the time (Viagra was originally for heart disease). By the nature of how these labs work, it is highly unlikely that a miracle cure all drug would come from these labs without a theory first coming out of a basic lab, but it’s not impossible. These labs screen hundreds of thousands of drugs on cancer cells and disease-model animals to try to find one that targets something incredibly specific. They usually find a few drugs out of these screens, and these are sent to clinical researchers. Clinical researchers use candidate drugs and test them on healthy volunteers to ensure safety and specific-cancer-type patients to look at efficacy. It is very rare for a drug to pass all clinical trials and make it to the market, as they usually fail at this stage for one reason or another. So, to more specifically answer your question, I don’t think any lab is specifically trying to find a general “cure all,” for cancer, but the research we do still leaves room for finding that if it exists, mainly at the level of basic research. Cancer labs are usually based on general or specific categories of cancer (I.e. “pancreatic cancers” vs. “K-Ras negative Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma”). Labs that choose general categories are usually looking to understand how cancer works in the first place. Labs that choose specific categories are likely looking to develop and test cancer-specific treatments. With this research structure, we actually have cured specific types of cancers (see HPV-caused head and neck cancers and radiation, for one example). Though, not every cancer is equal, and some are way more simple, biologically, than others. Nowadays, progress in cancer research is generally measured in a 1 or 2% decrease in probability of mortality rather than the larger strides we made when modern cancer research first began, unfortunately. This is mainly because of how far we have already come towards treating cancer (1-2% is harder when you’re at 10% mortality than at 90% mortality), and unless we have more breakthroughs at the basic level, improvements on cancer treatment are likely to remain marginal. 3. Why are some diseases “gone” from our populations with vaccines, but others just seem to linger on? This is more of an epidemiology question, which I have a little bit of training in, but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert. Given that, take what I say here with a grain of salt. For viral infections, this has to do with a combination of prevalence, modes of transmission, vaccine effectiveness, and mutation rate. Viruses mutate very quickly for many different reasons, and at the amount of virus that is produced in an infected cell, this benefits the virus’ ability to stick around. It helps it evade our immune systems, our vaccines, and spread more efficiently. It’s also important to note that the rate at which viruses will mutate also depends on things like infection rate and prevalence. So, to quantify how likely a virus is to be eradicated, you would probably make an equation that includes prevalence, infection rate, the percentage of population vaccinated, and the rate at which the virus will mutate to evade the vaccine. Timing is another important factor related to mutation rate. We need to make effective vaccines fast enough to reflect the strains of viruses that exist, and we need to distribute it to the public fast enough that they receive it before they are exposed. One factor we can’t really control is whether people are willing and able to get the vaccine. With all of these factors combined, slow moving, slow mutating, low prevalence viruses are much more likely to be eradicated than high infection rate, high mutation rate, and high prevalence viruses. The last factor, related to cancer as well, is exposure prevention. The more we can prevent a disease from happening in the first place, the better. For viruses, this includes things like staying home when you are sick as to not expose others. For cancer, this is more on the lines of avoiding carcinogenic chemicals, avoiding sunburns, etc. These factors have a huge effect on whether diseases become eradicated-if we prevent them in the first place, we don’t have to work so hard to cure all the active cases. I completely understand the frustration the public experiences on these issues. I have lost family to cancer, and, given the statistics, we all have ~1/3 of a chance of experiencing it ourselves. We have countless examples of Pharma taking advantage of others for money. What you can trust in are the researchers, not the Pharmaceutical business heads. The people that are boots on the ground, actually do the work in the labs to figure this out are there because they are passionate about it. They care about the people they know that could benefit from their work. They care about the impact their work could have on the wellbeing of everyone. They don’t make insane money like the Pharma directors. They do, however, get recognition from society for their scientific contributions. They have every reason to do the best work they can to make those contributions, not for money, but for the sake of making those contributions. Some of the best and brightest scientists I have met work on cancer research, and they are doing everything they can to make the world better, whether they do it in government, academic, or industry research. I’ll reiterate, the problem of cancer really is just that hard to solve.
@@dpboydston Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to my questions and fill in some of the blanks. I like your idea that if a break-through is to be found on a universal level it will be through base research; finding that one moment, that one glitch that sets the whole chain unraveling, or is it rewriting? I wish that as a society we could prioritize these areas of scientific research. And if most of these people are, as you say, in it for the research and the passion of learning and science, I wonder how much it would cost to simply pay (put them on the government payroll) to do this full time as a national project? Pull the monetization out of the equation, and simply fund it. Would be it a 1/4 of the USA military budget, 1/2, 10%? NASA got 1% of the national budget (in 1990s) and look what they accomplished? But if these educated, dedicated people could simply be freed to do the work, how much could be accomplished in ten, twenty, thirty years, one person's career multiplied by thousands? How much good and discovery would there be in the world. I'm a dreamer I suppose. I do appreciate your reply and the insights you've provided on this topic. All the best to you and your colleagues in the field. Be well. -Sterling
My brother unironically believes these things, and his version of the cure is smoking weed. That THC is a wonder drug, and it's kept illegal in the states to make money.
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.
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.
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.
@@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).
@@KeroGero89have you watched Dan Olson’s “Line Goes Up”? He explains why that concept of programmers thinking they can fix the issues of society is horrifying
@@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
As an engineer, I've had several marketing managers, after explaining why their idea would not work, would simply reply that they "BELIVED it would work". I started referring to this as "faith-based engineering". I've never seen one of these ideas work, but did watch one pursue it for three years before he finally gave up.
As a machinist, I always enjoyed grease penciling a drawing, sending it back to an engineer, tell him to break out his crayons & slide rule. It aint gonna work.🤣
@@roberttyrrell2250 it is interesting, senior engineers have noticed that younger engineers will design things that cannot be built or are impractical. Shop classes have largely been removed from the school curriculums that most of us had taken. I've also seen this in engineers from foreign countries where working with your hands would be considered below their social status. They just don't have the Hands-On skills to develop the intuitive sense of what will and will not work.
@@roberttyrrell2250 Oh man, being a guy that designs his own stuff for fun, yeah. The older my schematics, the more impossible they are to machine, lol. I love simple, elegant solutions. If I can walk over to the hardware store to buy 5 bucks of things and that solves a problem, then that to me is genius. If I have to break out the damn lathe, then it's a necessary evil and not "ingenius".
@@Incandescentiron yes, it's the lack of real-world experience, intuition and proper education that is the root problem. Students are led to believe that if they want something than that will somehow become a reality, despite the ideas breaking some fundamental laws of physics. It's the quality of the education that is the real problem.
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. 🤦♂
when at 16:59 Angela describes how a crackpot shot a physicist in 1952, because his paper was ridiculed, that changed my view of crackpots entirely. I had noticed that a lot of them have a massive chip on their shoulder, but this shows where it can lead. Crackpots can be scary.
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.
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!
I once worked in a Physics Department at a university. I was only there for a brief time, but I did encounter a handful of crackpots who needed to talk to someone IMMEDIATELY about something that they had discovered. My favourite may have been a man who told us that he had discovered the theory of everything. After not getting what he wanted from our front office (I assume adoration and a Nobel Prize), he began wandering the halls, looking for someone else to impart his wisdom upon. He found a professor with their door open and barged inside, declaring once more that he "had discovered the theory of everything!" The professor's response? "Well, right now I'm just working on the theory of one thing." Suffice it to say, we eventually needed to call security.
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 😂
The topic of this video and the expression "non-mathematically rigorous" reminded of one of my favorite scenes in a video game, where you find a ... strange person running a nuclear power plant: "They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard."
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 TH-cam 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.
I've had many arguments with crackpots on the internet. Most usually just dissolve the second you pushback, but I once had a very long argument with a man about the twin towers conspiracies; he was saying it's impossible for all the floors to collapse at the same time, and also impossible for all the beams in a floor to collapse at the same time, or that engineers couldn't write an accurate simulation that proves that the towers fell that way. I said "hey I can prove it to you with some very intuitive math" 3 or 4 times in the Convo, but he ignored it every time, relying on what I can only explain as stories of how the physics should work. I think he meant well, but damn bro you have to actually understand the math. You can write a story about anything, but if it doesn't yield some math that makes sense then the stories are just creative fiction
As a (semi) retired engineer, I can relate to that aspect of crackpottedness. It results from the basic difference between scientists/physicists and engineers - scientists discover and describe the physical principles of the universe; engineers put them to practical use. Consequently, engineers tend to be much less interested in the "theory" and more interested in the recipe to follow to enable their practical designs. In fact I can't tell you how many times that professors at my school went on random rants about how students aren't interested in the theory, they just care about how to use the equations. Engineers only require that a physical principle is "predictable" and "reliable"; the "understandable" part is the problem of the scientists. But at some point, usually too late to matter, an old engineer suddenly gets interested in the "theory" but doesn't bother to go back and brush up on the parts they gleefully skipped over as students. Trouble (and hilarity) can ensue.
As a Systems Engineer, I've always wanted to know the theory of why things are the way they are...... I'm one of two things: a bad engineer, or an ill-educated scientist! But I love what I do, even if everyone around me gets annoyed at my "but why?" questions!!!
As an engineer, practical implementation comes somewhat naturally to me. I have always had the utmost respect for those who can delve into pure theory and I admire those who can bridge theory and practical implementation even more. It's something I really wanted to be able to do, but it's extremely difficult to do.
My first degree was in engineering. Later, I pursued a PhD. in physics. I can tell you that engineers and physicists have completely different mindsets. They are not close at all. It's a bit humorous to hear an engineer talk about physics.
@@jamesmarie1083 that may well be, but it's much better for people to have interests and learn about things they don't yet understand than to be ignorant forever, don't you think?
@@jamesmarie1083 I saw a brochure about airplanes written by an engineer, using "physics" to explain things - and there was a big error in almost every sentence. Like measuring pressure in kilograms (!), which is for mass, not pressure.
A weird little museum in Los Angeles does rotating exhibits in their front room. One of these was letters sent by crackpots to the Mt. Wilson Observatory in the mountains north of LA during the 1920s and 30s. The letters were tragic, most of them clearly from people suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. The name of the exhibit was taken from one of the letters, from a woman who was sure she knew the key to understanding the cosmos, and that the world would be transformed if people would only listen: "No one else will ever have this same knowledge again." Even though her idea was crazy, that letter broke my heart. She was truly trying to help humanity, not understanding how badly her brain was betraying her. That statement from her letter has stuck with me ever since, and made me think about crackpots more sympathetically. You're entirely right about the danger some of them pose, of course. I just wish our society had a better response to dangerous mentally ill people than waiting for them to hurt someone then locking them up.
Explain what "paranoid schizophrenia" is without merely repeating some unproven theory made by some scrawny psychiatrist, from an affluent family, that's regarding the presumed life of a person who has suffered violent trauma.
@@ninepillarsofsalt This lady had not problem with me, she passed away. "Mentally ill" people are scapegoated people ... maybe y'all so wise & compassionate need the truth th-cam.com/video/tgilBaRbulc/w-d-xo.html
@@ninepillarsofsalt I replied with a link to a video from the late Paula Caplan. She's one that speaks out on the behalf of people who've experienced some of the worst kinds of trauma. I've known people who've suffered child abuse and other horrific crime but here you are ridiculing me. Try learning something about the world. You found someone to bully online & all that. You're so cutsie! th-cam.com/video/tgilBaRbulc/w-d-xo.html
@@ninepillarsofsalt To impede communication is to reduce men to the status of "things"-and this is a job for oppressors, not for revolutionaries. ~ Paulo Freire Here's one of the late Dr Paula Caplan's videos for counter-argument (in defense of traumatized people who are scapegoated and labeled "mentally ill". Why hate on them? th-cam.com/video/tgilBaRbulc/w-d-xo.html
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.
@@mrcleanisin I think she meant it in a way that since play doh is so obviously not food, there would be no reason for her to taste it since there is nothing to taste, it isn't food.
Not so sure about that.... a C-130 Hercules picked up a bunch of soldiers in a UN peace keeping force many years ago, the loadmaster passed out EAR plugs in their cellophane wrappers, as lordy, the hero is loud, it funnels the noise inside by some quirk of design... By the time the long suffering loadmaster had completed his recovery round of the troops, he was approached by one of the troops asking if they had seconds. Play Doh may be an improvement in the culinary arts over foam ear plugs.
Technically, you CAN eat Play-Doh. It is literally colored dough with lots of preservatives. You can also eat crayons which are just colored wax. WHY? Because kids will inevitably eat your product and you don't want to get sued.
Well, actually… play dough is made of organic compounds (mainly starches). Despite the fact we don’t see play dough as “food”, it can be eaten and it will be digested by your digestive system. Just like a tortilla. Just sayin’…
I think what you said about the "stories" is very right. Science communicators (even teachers, or practicing scientists in casual conversation) simplify things into stories, but those stories ARE NOT the actual theory, and of course have flaws. From the outside, if all you see is the stories you think that's all there is. You think the story comes first, and the math and details are trying to cover up or deal with the flaws of the story. So they build a story that is "more complete" and "doesn't require the math to fix it". See Also: executives that read an article in Fortune and tell engineers how to design and implement solutions or products.
@@Feralsquirrel for sure stories are useful and important! But it seems like it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the stories aren't the whole truth
@@williamgeorge2045 I think it's more that a lot of people never have it in sight in the first place. They want things to be quick to learn and obviously intuitive. At least for them. Because they are Smart™, so nothing requires real effort.
I think a big problem is how genuinely hard to understand these advanced theories are. Like I watch science education channels on quantum mechanics and relativity and even with the stories I have a hard time understanding what is going on. And then when some of them start to include the math (which I assume is probably the simplest parts of the maths) then I am totally lost. So science communicators have a genuinely hard job. But I am grateful they are still doing it.
Schrödinger's crackpot: If you never open the email it is both the theory of everything and a bunch of word salad... so really you are doing them a favor by not looking at the email
I taught Old South/Civil War at a middling university in southern Georgia for 30 years, and let me tell you about crackpots. Not so much the students, but wanna-be historians in the region. There hadn't been anyone at the university doing Civil War for many years when I started in the '80s fresh off my Ph.D. When word spread that Civil War was being taught there again, they wanted to make damn sure it was being taught right. Every week or two, I'd get a letter, or a phone call, or even a visit from some arm-chair colonel pointing me to their favorite sources, and saying how great they would be for my reading list. Of course, it was all almost all Lost Cause “slavery wasn’t so bad” BS. And, of course, the war had nothing to do with slavery. Never mind that nearly every southern state’s declaration of secession, including Georgia’s, said we’re seceding because we fear threats to slavery. Most of the time I’d hear them out, be as polite as I could, then ignore them. Every once in a while, just for fun, I’d bring up some combination of - the secession declarations, cotton overproduction, southern women rioting for food, blacks escaping whenever they could, wide-spread draft dodging, two-thirds of Confederate soldiers deserting, many of them to the Union army, in which half a million southern men served - and watch their heads explode. It’s a wonder I didn’t get shot. Fortunately, a secondary field in grad school was history of science, and I taught that course as often as I could. It helped keep me semi-sane. After I retired five years ago, I got a telescope, took up stargazing, and now - you guessed it - I’m a crackpot cutting-edge theoretical astrophysicist. Don’t believe me? I’ll prove it. Without the maths, of course. How old is the universe? Well, depends on who you ask. If you ask a physicist, it’s ~13.8 billion years old. If you ask a photon, for which time passes all at once because it travels at the speed of light... Did your head just explode? 😄
I have never heard of crackpot historians but of course they exist! Please make the video on the ins/outs of crackpot historians I would love to learn about them.
Reminds me of the WW2 crackpots who always find a way to argue that Germany was innocent. To be fair, there are complexities that are not accounted for in the dumbed-down history taught through the TV, but it's clear people have ulterior motives due to the particular blind spots they systematically cultivate.
I'm an physics/astro UNDERGRAD and I still get these guys... Once my mum's friend had a birthday, which we went to, and the friend's drunken husband started telling me about how modern physics was completely wrong and how his father (a physicist) didn't understand his life's work because his mind was polluted by academia (...) you know the drill... thankfully i got out safely with no brain damage
@@autohmae Did you ever get asked if the overarching assumptions of all the maths you do are accurate? Because of all things, if I was a physicist, I would worry about indeed wasting my life in useless mental masturbation?
@jahjah it's because of the representations of physicists in popular culture. Sheldon Cooper, fictional Einstein, Hawking. Are all portrayed as quirky geniuses in every subject
I'm an electrical engineer approaching retirement, and I've been thinking about starting a second career as a world-famous pseudoscientist. Thanks for the ideas!
Advice, stay clear of research on the existence of the so-called B_3 component of the EM field. Myron Evans got tarred/feathered in the 90's out of academia. He was a professor at UNC Charlotte. This stuff was grouped into free energy research.
Shouldn't this be the appropriate response to high energy physicists hypothesising particles or interactions that can only be found using an accelerator the size of our galaxy?
A person with BS Physics here, who works as an engineer. Yes, crackpots annoy me, for all the reasons that you stated. Good analysis. Mostly I just take their ideas lightly, laugh them off privatly, and go about my business. I do not really fear them. Of course, you may run into the angry sorts more often. I do not really see the angry ones. The ones I see have energy, curiosity, and creativity. In my mind they are mostly big time-wasters; they will talk your ear off! Mostly, I just compliment them on their creativity and try to change the subject or get away. Can they be insulting and infuriating? Yes. They make statements that undercut the science I hold dear. I try not to take it personally, mostly they are just irrationally overconfident or science illiterates anyway. Interestingly, some of the worst crackpots I have come across is other science professionals. My experience is they typically have crackpot ideas (not in science) in other non-scientific fields like economics, politics, and history. I think crackpotting might be related to a personality type, like "know-it-alls", or like folks easily influenced by conspiracy theories. Those that like the feeling of being "special" or "select" because they hold the "answers" or secret knowledge.
Great comment! I appreciate your positive attitude toward handling crackpots. > My experience is they typically have crackpot ideas (not in science) in other non-scientific fields like economics, politics, and history. This is so true! At the start of 2020 so many physicists on twitter started acting like they were experts in epidemiology because they understood how to read exponential graphs.
@@acollierastro As a data scientist working in politics, my crackpot theory on why some physicists tend to become crackpots in fields like politics and history is that the precision in at least some fields of physics breaks people's ability to handle uncertainty and measurement error. I've seen plenty of physicists claim that they can either perfectly forecast elections or that election results are fraudulent (primarily before 2020 when that role was taken over by actual crackpots) because they'd come up with a neat simple model right out of a stats 101 class and then when reality wouldn't align with that model they'd run a t-test and claim that the actual result had a 1 in a quadrillion chance of occurring. Would be fascinating to see which branches of physics crackpot physicists are actually working on, because I imagine some fields (astrophysics?) are much more used to handling imprecise/incomplete data with measurement error than others.
I think some of this behavior comes from some cognitive error that humans have. My person experience indicates that we as humans oversimplify and smooth the space of anything. It is a minimization technique so we don’t overthink the topic and will survive. I have fallen victim to it in my younger years before I had started working as an engineer and then started to study other disciplines. If one starts to study a discipline in Ernest a though will cross there mind “I could study this topic for a lifetime an not get through 5% of what is here and they is a lot I will not know nor never know.” The world is a complex place and we are trying to understand it.
@@acollierastroanother great example is how so many 'smart' people suddenly became military and geopolitical experts when the Ukraine war started. 99% of those people wouldn't have been able to point out Ukraine on a map before.
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.
As someone who is more familiar with history and pseudo archeology its so weird seeing crackpot physicists. Its the same exact guy just with a different interest. Its so so unreal
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
That retired engineer hit a little close to home. I'm not there yet, but have started studying physics again. It might be awhile before I can come up with a crackpot idea, as I've discovered I need to review factoring polynomials in Algebra 1. But after that, I'm sure I'll be an expert!
I think it is safe to be an engineer first and later study physics. If you do not believe me, ask PAM Dirac. I know crackpots with Phds in Physics. I could link to their papers but do not want to hurt feelings (it is about Bell theorem and Einstein was wrong).
@@justopastorlambare2933 Believe it or not, in grad school I had a fight with a distinguished professor who spent his entire life studying the Bell's inequalities because he said "gravity is a quantum field, the Higgs Boson *is* the graviton" like it was settled science (it's not, and it doesn't even really make sense btw). The guy's an absolute genius and I respect him a lot but man, he does say some whacky shit when he's out of his area of expertise lol I wonder if it's the same guy.
When my son was young, he loved science but detested math. He would ask us, why do I need to know math? I explained to him, while he couldn't see it now, at some point in the future, math and science are fused and you can't understand the science without the math. I just asked him to trust me, and do the work. His grades improved. He took AP calculus in high school, and test out of first semester college calculus. I was very proud of him.
I had a teacher kinda like that, taught our last year biology, for our system it's the year that determines if you can attend university without further hoops. She told us in the first lesson that to understand biology we didn't need to understand physics nor chemistry, that was the year we covered neurons btw. She kinda killed all academic respect I had for her then and there and I would show it. Mind she was fair as a teacher, she gave me good oral grades for the technical level of my contributions, despite it often leaving my classmates in the dust, which she made sure to point out to me. I have always liked biology and my mother is a botanist and her then partner a biochemist, so the field was part of daily conversation. Ended up going into math, then passed over to comp science, due to complicated feelings towards my mother in my 20s. Did still minor in biology though, which was fun because it necessitated running between departments doing everything by slips of paper, because the digital system didn't account for that combination of fields. Unfortunately only got to take two courses, because they were worth so many credits that my allowed allotment for credits from my minor was almost completely exhausted by them. Did get to use a light microscope a lot and sketch the various tissues, also where I learned cutting mycelia with a razor is annoying, it's like cutting woven wool, it frays so much.
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.
#5: They name stuff (particles, equations, principles ... ) after themselves. And since you mentioned the APS meetings, I remember a Particles and Fields one in 2000 where the crackpots were allotted 15 min talks instead of the usual 20 min as a sort of secret code that none of them ever seemed to figure out. I overheard one ask the moderator about it and was skillfully told that they were worried about finishing before the banquet and had to shorten a few of them near the end, which he accepted. A few of us used to hang around these later talks and try to help, pointing out in step 1 where they might have gone astray, but it was often like talking to a brick wall. This one had his ideas bound in hard cover that you'd find everywhere. A stack would somehow appear at the snacks, there'd be at your hotel door at the end of the day, or you'd go to sit down somewhere and they'd be on the chair, must have cost thousands. One of them fooled me for a few seconds at the initial meet and greet, was wearing a $3K suit so I figured this guy must be the director of one of the main labs. First thing out of his mouth was how Einstein was wrong, very first thing. I mean, you really should get to know someone for a few minutes before springing something like that on them. I tried to talk him through it, but again, brick wall.
Right like I want to know the story of the first asshole who either didn't listen or didn't get told that the establishment or other people names shit after people who discovered it. You don't name it after yourself. Lmao and it just snowballed
@NiNjA have you considered that they name it after themselves because they discovered it for themselves, usually it even something already discovered but under a different name (also belonging to someone) so what makes it incorrect to say they did make a discovery? Our ability to canonized history? If that is true then documentation is a befouled industry, and we are all doomed. How dare us stand upon the shoulders of others so apathetically. Sometimes one must resist the urge to spurn the authority of another, certainly due to semantics.
Man, this Crackpot drop out perfectly describes me when I was around 20. I did well in mechanics, I did terribly in analysis and linear algebra. I made my own "theory" of unifying all fundamental forces.... Then I said to heck with it all, I'm getting into game design 😂 Now I watch physics videos on TH-cam and that's about it.
@@NelsonGuedes I told my ninth grade teacher that I thought a neutron was a proton and electron combined. He told me I was wrong. I took physics in high school and college until I found out that being a technician at a nuclear power plant paid more than being a student. I dropped out with an associate degree and learned more physics at work than I had in school.
@@davidhomer78 I mean, you have an Associates degree so at least some training, contrary to aspiring crackpots Also is The neutron actually proton+electron? You got me curious 😅
@@eVill420 In some radioactive decays a neutron is changed to a proton and a beta particle (electron) is emitted. There is also a gamma ray emitted to account for the extra energy. That seems to me like the neutron made an electron and a proton but the newer theories are that there aren't actually any particles just waveforms with different energies. As a technician I read a lot and came up with my own ideas but I don't know enough to prove anything.
There are also crackpot engineers who believe that safety margins are conspiracies by the establishment to get them to buy more expensive products. Some of these people do actual construction and electrical work, which is beyond scary.
But for real, if you look into some of the IATF, OSHA, EPA, etc regulations and requirements, after awhile it starts feeling like a huge conspiracy to hold American manufacturing back and allowing the Chinese to pass us up. You can argue the usefulness of these organizations all you want and I'll agree with you, but that doesn't stop the crippling amount of paperwork weighing down an entire department. I don't even design things anymore. Like 5% of my day is double checking numbers and the rest is administrative.
There was an episode of This American Life (episode 293: A Little Bit of Knowledge) on a guy who quit his job and spent a year devoted to proving that E=mc, not E=mc^2. He then shows his work to an actual physicist who immediately pointed out his “theory” is nonsense because mc has the units of momentum, not energy. And instead of feeling like a jackass, the guy just blames the physicist for being narrow minded and claims modern physics is too complicated and reliant on math.
When I was in college, I was a crackpot physicist/philosopher. I wanted to create a "Theory of Everything," something that would change how people viewed the world. I also had the urge to do it on my own, and for my last name to tied to some idea a la "Schrodinger's Equation." I was burning out in college, holding on to my last ropes of being a "scholarly type gifted kid" that I grew up as. What I really needed was to believe that I could get to be a normal person, and that was okay. I didn't have to change the world, I wouldn't be a failure of a person if I didn't. To this day, I'm still learning to accept this. I love learning how the world works, even if the math may be a bit much for me. I love incorporating the feels I get from learning science into my art. I'm much happier this way.
Sounds very familiar! But also, my parents were teachers, and i early learned to utterly avoid the PhD path. Instead I became an electrical engineer ...thus guaranteeing that I could self-fund my own "eccentric" work! Decades later I slowly realized that the engineering community contains WAY more crackpots than does the physics community. Lots of students did the same as I. We don't want a Nobel, instead we want to found Microsoft. We don't want to become the next Einstein, we want to be the next Nikola Tesla!
This thread is awesome. Learning is so fulfilling and learning about yourself and what motivates you can be as fascinating and rewarding as any theoretical physics. There's a concept in Greek philosophical discourse called parrhesia, meaning to speak truth in the face of dire consequence. It was taught that the practice of parrhesia was very honorable. Y'all are practicing parrhesia, and I appreciate you.👍🏾
Hi, As professor of genetics and evolution for over 30 years, now retired, I can vouch for the reality of crackpots out there, and your characterization of them is spot on as near as I can tell. I only received a visit from one of them once, and it was interesting in that it was immediately apparent that this individual did not have any concept of what an experiment was, or how one actually tested a theory. He had enrolled in my class, but after that encounter I never saw him again. With much greater frequency I saw religious fanatics who wanted to dispute evolution with me, but they were more easily handled because they trip over their own »logic ».
You don't know as much as you think you know about how the history of humanity happened. Nobody does because we can not go back in time and verify with our own eyes. I'm not a Christian, either.
@@towardsthelight220you do realize there are a ton of things we can verify without the use of our eyes, right? Like, idk, the circumference of the earth.
@@towardsthelight220 no, you may not be Christian, but you are ignorant of how science works. And calling someone ignorant isn’t an insult, just a description of someone who doesn’t know facts or how something works. Too many people fit into that category.
I’m sure the stories about Ramanujan adds fuel to the crackpots. He’s proof it’s possible for someone without access to any formal education can turn out to be one of the most gifted mathematicians in history. So that must mean I’m also talented like Ramanujan because I’m not tainted by the educational system.
“stories about Ramanujan”, seduction to the magical. - Maybe driven by some corrupting evolutionary advantage, our legends of heroes, Cinderella gifts or whims of anthropomorphic gods stimulate our innate escape mechanism of invoking ‘familiar experience’, imagined ‘to tell how or why things are as they are’. Perhaps as echoes seen in primitive mythologies, they hint at images shared by collective human psyche.
@@beeble2003 for sure. And then there's all that bullshit misinformation out there about how Einstein couldn't do math or whatever. I've heard that one from a BUNCH of comment section keyboard "geniuses"
@@nathanjohnson9715 it comes from misinterpretation about grades 6 is the worst in Germany but the best in Sweiss and he was a in a Sweiss school system. Really astonishing to see people not questioning while seeing 3 for french and history classes and 6 in math and sciences and always thinking a was the worst in math like Einstein was better at speaking french than doing physics. Hilarous !
Yes. I left hardcore physics after scraping through the math in 3rd year. As you say, if you can't math, you can't physics. And believe me, not a lot of us can handle the math past a certain point.
The issue with physics is that it is both too complicated and too alien for any human brain to have a chance at understanding it conceptually without some story abstraction that introduces issues. It's fine to have that in addition to the math, but it's useless without the math. That's why I'm an engineer, I let physicists muck about with the source code bullsh*t and then claim that work and... promptly hand it to programmers that make it into a CAD program and then I get to play videogames, really, *really* , *_REALLY_* , complicated videogames. Then do a lil bit of math sometimes. But conceptually it's pointy end up, flamey end down, basic ways things move that apply to my body tripping down a hill or sticking my arm out a window in a moving car as much as they apply to a rock falling through the air.
I love how some of these phenomena occur in other surprising communities. For example, in the Mario 64 community, there exists a group called the abc community (a button challenge) and they try to beat super Mario 64 with as few a button presses (jumps) as possible. Now, the work they do is incredible, having whittled down the number to 14 using programmed inputs, decompiling the code of the game, making computational tools, brute-forcers,... basically they turned Mario into a science. And even though they've been working on it for years and the solutions increased exponentially in complexity, you still see comments asking about the most brain-dead, nonsensical ideas possible. That community has crackpots, usually kids, who think they can accomplish as much as long-time community members with computer science jobs and tons of experience.
Yeah, but I suspect that's not malice, just the simple and inevitable reality of not knowing what you don't know. The real "good/bad" decider is whether the person decides to change or expand their mind after being delivered a _fair minded_ and _comprehensible_ critique, versus arrogantly resisting it. That's the true mark of an ill-informed creative vs. a "true crackpot" imo.
@@shimrrashai-rc8fq Yeah, well put, but you'd still be surprised at the amount of people that insist on their ideas and pester the hard working people with constant questions and it could be argued that the same lack of self-awareness of one's knowledge can be applied to both cases.
@@sojok693 Not sure how it applies to the other case - if they change their mind then that indicates at least developing awareness which is good, I'd think. Need to explain that more. Also if you don't have the awareness how can you get it? How then can anyone learn anything?
@@shimrrashai-rc8fq I was just hinting at the fact that although the situations are a bit different (primarily because it's easier to show that a strategy in a videogame works or not than to prove a scientific concept to a layman), the reason for why they occur is the same: the tendency for some people to overrate their knowledge, to devalue the knowledge of the expert and to not try their hands at something (math and actual experimental science for testing theories and TASing- simulating a videogame using certain software in this particular case). Even though rare cases do occur that a complete outsider can crack some hard problem, I think that most of the time people should assume ignorance and educate themselves before trying their hands in something.
@@sojok693 I partially agree - particularly with these 3 points: "overrate their knowledge, to devalue the knowledge of the expert and to not try their hands at something". But I do _not_ agree with "people should assume ignorance and educate themselves _before_ trying their hands in something." Perhaps I'm a bit biased because I'm naturally an "act first think later" kind of temperament (born *un*conscientious in Big Five terms; perhaps also some ADHD stuff), but I think "trying one's hands in something" is a key _part_ of learning and there are things that are much easier to get by trying them and seeing _why they aren't working_ and/or what _does_ actually work. The problem is when you too soon assume you have a conclusion and then shift to defending it instead of continuing to ask further or indeed "try more" further. The role of the expert knowledge in particular is that the proper habit to form is that while you're doing something, if you find you are _contradicting_ what is generally considered as well-evidenced facts (e.g. "Einstein was wrong!") it should be a prompt to think deeper about it and look up more about it (even just your own argument; chances are, it's been found before - e.g. the "push the rigid pole" one) and ask (those who aren't arrogant pricks, at least) people about what might be wrong. I've done that a lot and while it's a _little_ disappointing when you invariably find out they are right, it's much more rewarding because now you know *WHY* they are so, instead of having just soaked up something in a dogmatic, submit-to-authority kind of way that really flies in the face of how the philosophical ethos of science is typically presented and also can help you to be a much more effective expositor.
"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...
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 was on cusp of being radicalized by the free energy magnet crowd but this video brought me back. Physics conspiracies seem to confuse everyday experience and empirical study, like a baby instinctually understands physics. We may instinctually understand the wave equations for vortices when we see it but we can't express it in math. I still have faith in wacky inventions. Sometimes accidents happen to crackpots in a garage and the science comes after. But again, people confuse the quality of their perceptual world and self-worth with academic merit or fame like you said. Maybe what they're looking for in grand conspiracies is spiritual in nature, ironically, a path away from violence and anger.
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.
You had me till you said “economics is a hard science”. If any other science consistently made failed predictions, refused to review their model and just carried on making more failed predictions, we’d have questions
Economists don't search for the truth, they just advertise what's convenient for the interests of the people who hire them. I was taught that in an undergrad Economy course.
Well it turns out, unlike fundamental particles that are governed by inherent physical properties, math isn’t so good at predicting irrational human behavior😂😂😂
@@Arcessitor You're wrong. Einstein didn't "prove Newton wrong", he simply realized that the assumptions Newton made could be replaced by different ones which led to a more complete description of reality (and which very closely approximates Newton's description at our familiar energy/velocity scales). Similarly, whoever supersedes Einstein, presumably by developing an experimentally verifiable theory of quantum gravity, will not prove Einstein 'wrong', but will replace Einstein's assumptions with more accurate ones, and general relativity will become a special case of this new theory.
@@Arcessitor Newton wasn't proven wrong, there was just holes in Newtonian Mechanics, some of which had been known about for centuries and some that were recent and that meant that physicists were on the hunt for a better model that could also explain those holes. Relativity was that model however in order for it to be true it had to make the same prediction as Newtonian Mechanics in the areas where Newtonian Mechanics worked, which it did. Thus Einstein didn't prove Newton wrong, the scientific community had known for a long time that Newtonian Mechanics were incomplete thus in a sense they knew it was “wrong”. This is similar to how even since Einstein's own life time we have known that the predictions of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity do not match up on the small scale, but that doesn't mean that General Relativity is wrong, just that it is incomplete. Whatever theory that replaces General Relativity will also need to agree with all the things General Relativity is right about, that means that the majority of the important insights of General Relativity will be carried over. Just like how F=ma was carried over from Newtonian mechanics.
@@johnlukach5694It is ridiculous to suggest a random person on TH-cam should even compare the two theories in the first place let alone form an opinion on them. To do so in any meaningful way would require an impractically large amount of effort to be in a position to make a fair evaluation.
""Schwarzschild singularities" do not exist in physical reality...for the reason that matter cannot be concentrated arbitrarily...due to the fact that...the constituting particles would reach the velocity of light." -Albert Einstein (On a Stationary System with Spherical Symmetry Consisting of Many Gravitating Masses; 1 October 1939 DOI: 10.2307 1968902 Corpus ID: 55495712) [In order for Einstein to have been wrong, either causal velocity mass is not necessary for obtaining the Schwarzschild radius where mass must indeed have causal velocity or mass can in fact obtain causal velocity and the Lorentz factor is simply invalid. Otherwise, relativity prohibits a mass from being contracted to its Schwarzschild radius (γ Mv/c²) just as relativity prohibits a mass from obtaining causal velocity (γ Mv).]
Not all crackpots are that scary... most are. Some are quite nice though. I sat in talks (for the reason she mentioned, that everybody is allowed to give talks if you just sign up) where a guy was building an anti-gravity device with a couple of vacuum-cleaners working together, and he had a scale attached above it to measure the weight of some objects. He told us the idea... something about rotating disks (being driven by the motor of the vacuums), while being extremely enthusiastic. He concluded the talk with not being able to create anti-gravity yet, but would join the conference the following year to present his results then again with more vacuum cleaners, and thanked us for our patience. I kinda admired the enthusiasm... just sitting in his basement, totally believing in his success while modifying vacuum cleaners, and imagining how it would change the world. I was very fascinated by the whole spectacle.
He is one of the rare ones as most don't actually do anything constructive. I have encountered a quite a few and for most it does not seem to be about proving themselves right but rather proving other people wrong. Most never seem to do anything else but to come up with a theory and then start spouting it anyone who will listen (and a lot of people who won't). I admire people like him as he is trying to prove his theory and even though he never will, he is doing something constructive, not hurting anyone and it seems like a fun hobby
Was he trying to get there based on momentum of the disks? Or did he learn about frame dragging somewhere and tried to get frame drag to pull the test mass up?
@@chalkchalkson5639 It was quite some time ago, so I don't remember the details presented. The Abstract of the talk is still available, but in german. The "principle" is based on an "artificial Center of gravity offset" (originally "Künstlicher Schwerpunktversatz"). It's hard to translate, since I believe some vocabulary is just made up (you get words like "Schwerpunktversatzstrecke"). I guess, it's based on the torque due to angular momentum changes (causing, e.g., precession) (but I don't really know). Anyways, there is a book about it, called "Schubdraller - Raumfahrtantrieb durch Rotations-AMG" which would be in english something like "Spin-Booster - Space propulsion by rotary AMG", where I don't know what "AMG" is supposed to be, as I don't own the book (and don't intend to buy it anytime soon). Oh yeah, and I think the guy who gave the talk was also the author of the book. Anyways, have fun with this random information ;).
@@j.f.fisher5318 The genuine "9/11Truthers" are _not_ "crackpots' but highly qualified structural engineers with a thorough understanding of the maths and physics. Those you've debated who "get political" and talk of "conspiracies" belong to the "lunatic fringe" of the movement.
I get the same emails as a physic grad student. Like you, I'm scared of them, but they also make me really sad. It's kind of tragic to see someone so delusional and desperate to make an impact, and to know they never will. I think to some extent I empathize with them, since I, like a lot of grad students, have that same anxiety and urge to make an impact. Sometimes I even worry that I will end up like the crackpots, but that is probably just my doomer depression brain talking. The cases I find even more interesting than the crackpots are people with legitimate scientific training who go overlooked. You mentioned Einstein as a non-example of a crackpot, but he definitely was initially overlooked when he was passed up for academic jobs, and being a patent clerk sending your revolutionary ideas to physics journals feels a bit cranky even though obviously he was not a crank. Another recent example is Yitang Zhang, who got a phd from Purdue in the 90s but was unable to find any academic job due to a falling out with his advisor. He worked odd jobs and even lived out of his car at some point, but eventually he landed a part time teaching job at UNH. While at UNH In 2013 he solved an over 150-year-old math problem on gaps between primes. He was in his 50s! He became a professor at UCSB only in 2015! Talk about dedication and being overlooked.
"they also make me really sad. It's kind of tragic to see someone so delusional and desperate to make an impact, and to know they never will." I feel sad for someone with the ability to help someone pursue their dreams or simply point them in the right direction but that doesn't have the will to do so. I wonder what's behind that mindset, the same one that pervades this video. Clearly its found its audience. An entire community of people who have written off fostering curiosity and the pursuit of proper science. People who in an age of intellectual laziness find a rare spark of curiosity, and instead of building it up, instead try to snuff it out. Sad indeed.
@@Norp-i7m I did watch the video. Safety is certainly a legitimate concern but why then is she going online to publicly antagonize these people through the same channels where I presume they became aware of her? How is that going to help? And I don't even want to harp on that all that much, it certainly was not the substance of this video. It did not appear to me to be the point and while it may add some context I still don't think it excuses it.
Hello, phycisist here, i just want to say that i very much respect the effort and amount of time you've put into research for this video, having to listen to these clips and pick and choose the ones most fitting, and rewatching them again as you are maybe editing...
Random question from a science enthusiast.. If albert einstein's time dilation proves that at different speeds, time passes differently (which was proved with the experiment that put a plane with a synchronized atomic clock that went around the earth and got de-synched with an identical atomic clock on the ground) and every galaxy moves at different speed, wouldn't time be vastly different in each galaxy? counting at 13 billion years.... And even from the center of the galaxy to the outer arms, as closer to the supermassive black hole time also slows down. Aliens might be there one day, but time hasn't caught up with us
@@kodguerrero just like relative speed can change time's "speed", so can energy due to gravity and although einsteins general theory of relativity has lead to great predictions, in these scales things seem to be a little off, so you have for example dark matter acounting for differences in speed across the varying distances from the center of the universe. My response may be a bit inaccurate, so pls do check each part of it. Also, i am not sure about the actual difference it makes from the center outwards, it may be something noticeable may not, may be worth researching so look it up, i will too. I will have completed a course in GTR in 5 months and astrophysics in 7 so if you remember this i will be able to answer most of your questions probably ;p
@@teok7735 Thanks for the reply. I do construction work but in my free time, I'm writing a science fiction novel that focuses a LOT on how every atom has it's own clock.
@@kodguerrero Time dilation is symmetric, and not really an issue until you do a round-trip between observers moving at different speeds. The largest factor related to time is just the absolutely huge "astronomical" distances between things. While relativistic time dilation is greater than zero, it's negligible. Most stuff is just not actually moving fast enough to really make much of a difference. The center of the Milky Way galaxy is 25,800 light years away, the planet Uranus about 0.00031 light years away, the Andromeda galaxy is 2,537,000 light years away. The Virgo cluster of about 100 galaxies is only 50,000,000 light years away... and it's relative velocity to Earth is only about 960 km/s which is only 0.0032% of the speed of light. "Right Now" for us on Earth, is the "Right Now" in the Andromeda galaxy which could be considered to be happening about 2.5 million years ago (if Andromeda was using Earth time). An alien in the Andromeda galaxy, looking at the Earth "Right Now", would see the Earth as it was for us 2.5 million years ago. Every location in space is located in the past of every other location in space. Your feet are 6 nanoseconds in the past from your head, and your head is 6 nanoseconds in the past of your feet. Synchronizing clocks is impossible for reasons I'm not going to go into right now because I'm falling asleep... but the "zero" time for measuring time offsets from is completely and utterly arbitrary, and there are periods of time during which you can not say whether or not events A, B, and C happened in that order, or if C happened first, then B and then A.
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."
Someone joined my Physics 300 course the first day, and the professor looked at the list of students (like 15 people) and asked why he was there (he was some kind of liberal arts major). He said he was interested in quantum physics, but he'd never even taken calculus. The prof said "uhh... Ok, you're welcome to stay but I don't think you'll get anything out of this" He didn't come back the next day That's too bad because that class was actually mind-blowing, we derived the Ideal Gas Law from first principles. Gotta know calculus though
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 🧚🌞🧚🌞🧚
In economics, a disappointing reality is that many universities DON'T use complicated math, paving the way for crackpot economists to smoothly ride their way to PhDs with an elementary (or lower) understanding of empirical analysis. The use of mathematics is shunned and discouraged by certain economic schools of thought. These economists are often well-known because they're loud and don't spend time doing vigorous research.
My friend you are right if you were talking about certain BA economics undergrad programs that don’t require math… but I don’t know of any graduate Econ programs that aren’t making phd candidates glorified math / statistician for research professors.
Also I can’t really think of any high level econ fields that aren’t deeply founded on math (maybe to a fault) whether it’s international macro, game theory, competitive analysis, financial economics, etc.
Just had to go back and re-watch this video. While watching Terence Howard on Joe Rogan, and all the breakdowns on his ideas, my mind kept flitting back to this video and the useful notes on how to spot a crackpot idea. Now listening to it again, if someone told me this was a new video specifically about Howard then I would believe them.
I'll be honest, I have a bachelor's in physics and have a ton of my own crackpot theories. The difference is, I don't invest any belief in any of them, I don't connect my ego with them, I don't post them online, email anyone or tell anyone about them for the most part and if I do I'll preface that I'm most likely completely wrong and this is just what I've been speculating. It's fun to speculate and try to figure out missing or lacking areas of physics and I don't think there's anything innately wrong with that. But the delusion comes in when you aren't educated on the subject and think you know better than the experts, and believe in your unfounded theory that has no mathematical proof or any experimental or observational evidence. If I ever come up with a crackpot theory that I think could possibly be true, I will be sure to go down every possible rabbit hole to disprove myself before I tell a single soul, aside from gf lol.
"It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young." - Konrad Lorenz Also, Linus Pauling apparently said "In order to have a good idea, have a lot of ideas." Exactly. Then we don't go all Smeagol, grasping tight to our single good idea, blocking the arrival of any better ones. "Myyyy Pressssiousss!" But I think Pauling got it wrong. To have a good idea, have a lot of BAD ideas. Bad, crazy, embarrassingly crackpot notions. Unbridled crackpot-think is the source of many breakthroughs. Out of the box. "Brainstorming." Then of course adopt a brutally critical stance, and test the hell out of the best ones.
I have a crackpot theory, so this hits hard. Short version, I had a dream which solved the galactic rotation curve problem by showing spacetime gels up to keep it's own momentum. Similar (but maybe slightly different) to blackhole frame-dragging but on a galactic scale. The idea is: after spinning for a few billion years, a galaxy's own spacetime frame-dragging builds up to a degree it's rotation curve is distorted. Which explains why rotation curves differ across so many galaxies. And explains the bullet cluster. That’s it. Spacetime gel. I solved dark matter. Nobel Prize please. It’s so dumb. Can someone please point me in the right direction why that's already debunked/stupid? I'm just a dude who doesn't have the math, or the physics, and I haven't done the work; yet that's not stopping me from asking real physicists. What are the physics principles/math/observations which indicate this is a terrible idea?
There may be a lot of maths taught in Econ (and that's dropped somewhat compared to what was used in the 80s, since the Austrian School decided to drop modelling, preferring a quasi-philosophical stance closer to something Plato would recognise, and thus far from 'hard science'') but little of it results in concrete, repeatable results. There was a fashion of using formulae based on non-laminar flow calculations in the 90s, but I'm not sure that really ended up in a predictive model beyond "we can't really predict things," employing a lot of physics grads, and ending up with value runs that have crashed the economy a few times since the early 00s.
I remembered my friend describing his non-calculus based physics class. It was so much more confusing than the calculus based physics class. You are on point that math is the language of physics and you definitely need to understand it before delving in.
I got lucky at school. The mathematics teacher and physics teacher coordinated. So we were learning calculus things exactly at the point that we were going to need it for the physics lessons. I understand that this is not how things normally go. US schools seem to delay calculus which impedes other subjects for which calculus is the natural language.
I was a Mathematics/Computer-science major and I cheaped out one semester and took the Physics for business majors level course because I wanted an easy A. The professor was eventually a fellow student in one of my courses and she remembered me for being the only student in her class that laughed at her math jokes all the time.
I feel like the complaint about "not focusing on the concepts" is BECAUSE people are taking the non-calc physics course. The language of basic calculus is necessary to explain how physics mathematically derives from fundamental forces. Otherwise you're just memorizing mysterious equations without a firm understanding of the underlying concepts. Honestly, I get it. It's frustrating being taught how to use a math shortcut for solving particular problems but not _why_ it works that way. If that's as far as they got in physics, no wonder the "dropout" types feel like there's some critical conceptual component missing.
Even starting at mechanics, without knowing what a differential equation is (and at least some broad strokes of existence, uniqueness, analytical/numerical solution methods) you can never understand the point of mechanics.
I had two years of physics in college, and it was so amazing how studying real physics rewires your brain to learn to think about the natural world in a different way so you can actually understand what it means. The very first lecture of the very first class the professor said that learning physics means to retrain your intuition. By the time I got to Electricity and Magnetism It was very rewarding to solve the problems, and I was only in the second year, the rabbit hole got so much deeper haha. thank you for your videos, people are crazy sometimes.
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.
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.
As someone who struggled with math anxiety for a good part of my academic life, thank you for not being dismissive and pointing out it exists. A really wonderful video, ive been watching through your catalog and all very interesting and insightful. Nice work!
Oh, btw, the "Einstein was bad at math" is one of my favorites and I just wanted to add some detail here: This rumor presumably originated from some Germans, who had a look at one of Einstein's school grade reports from the time he lived in Switzerland. The Swiss grading system ranges from 6 for best to 1 for worst, which is opposite to the German grading system. So they saw Einstein had a lot of 6's, especially in math and natural sciences (btw his worst grades were 3 or 4, but in French). Over time, this got diluted to "Even Einstein once had a 4 in math" (i.e. a "D" in the US-system), which I guess they thought is more believable than constantly 6's (being the worst possible grade). This rumor is also very popular among narcissistic parents of kids who are just not good at math. It really floats their boat.
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.
I started getting crackpot emails during my PhD and we had no warning or training in how to handle that. I replied to one that sounded reasonable and just highlighted a couple of the more obvious issues as politely as possible in the hope it might help him. The response I got was like he set out to misunderstand everything and quite aggressive, and certainly didn’t take onboard anything I’d said, I hadn’t just agreed so I had become an enemy. I didn’t reply to any others since.
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.
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.
@@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".
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!
@@CoD420NiNjA 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.
As a highschool drop out who built my own algae research lab, I fight every day to make sure I don't become a crack pot. 🤣 The key is to understand that I will only ever produce 1% of all the knowledge I ever convey. 99% is just the foundation to support my 1%
My crackpot theory about crackpots is that they've never faced a real challenge in their life so they honestly believe that everything should be easy. They're an "engineer" that spent 30 years drawing the same sprocket over and over, they live in a house inherited from their parents.
I've been petitioned several times to "just do the math for me" by people with vague notions that have no basis in phenomenological reality, when I'm revealed as a physicist. To be clear, most people who become physicists have had every notion anyone else has had by the the time they are 18 (eg when I was 12 I had the notion that matter was made from vibrating energy strings). I studied to acquire the maths to formalize those ideas, only to discover 4 years later it was already formalized, and much better than I had orignally concieved. Every professional physicist I know is incredibly smart and imaginative - most way beyond my own humble comprehension and level (I have a Physics PhD and authored 15 peer reviewed papers, but I switched to software and engineering as a profession, becuase it's incredibly competive and not well paid). I would advise people to take that into considerarion when approaching physicists with your "ground breaking revelation".
I'm interested in doing a physics undergrad and I'd heard that a physics degree has like many transferable skills due to it being similar to maths, what is your experience with job offers? And another question, please, what do you think it takes for someone to thrive in physics? I mean, get to a PhD without quitting.
@@wostin - I have found skills to be highly transferable. Colleagues have gone into patent law, actuarial work, data scientists, machine learning, financial modelling, high frequency trading, aerospace engineering, electrical device modelling, software engineering etc. Physics gives you an applied maths and conceptualization toolkit that has broad applications. Your colleagues will be smart and great sounding boards for ideas when you hit the professional ranks. To thrive in Physics you need a deep, penetrating and adaptive curiosity combined with creative problem solving. For example for my PhD I created tools I needed for the experiments I wanted to perform, some were mathematical, some required going into the work shop and milling components I'd designed from steel blocks by hand.
Aren't you saying you made the same mistakes that she goes over in the video? That is thinking that your conceptual model based on stories told by communicators is a substitute for math? I find what you said in your first paragraph very hard to believe.
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.
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.
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
Never say never 😆
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...?
Crazy you said that. I was just about to say you should become a crackpot physicist when you retire
As an aspiring engineer, the Dunning Kruger effect is absolutely mortifying
But isn't the existence of your future just a theory?
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.
@@helifynoe9930 do you believe in "undetectable all pervasive stuff with magical properties"? -(insert you favorite flavor of dark-?? here)
@@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.
@@helifynoe9930 Cannot agree more, which is why I am appalled whenever anyone says anything about "the science is settled"
Have you felt the urge to start a cult? We tend to do that as well
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. 😂
Wholesome! ❤
I am amazed at the history of all our ancestors involved to present this comment to me so that I may laugh. It seems inevitable now that it is done.
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.
5:41 "economics is a hard science"
First documented case of an academic having *too much* respect for a field that isn't their own
really, talk about crackpot theories
Intrilligator's book on mathematical optimization and economic theory introduces the Euler-Lagrange equations to solve dynamic problems in economics, you are clearly clueless about this discipline.
@@leandrocarg i used to teach economy of law at a university, so despite your aggressive TH-cam comment I remain confident that I have some grasp of the field. Sure, it's harder than law, which is just sociology but with (very consequential) operational framework, but let's not delude ourselves. Political scientists can do complicated regression analysis in their sleep but none of us are putting cloned cats on mars anytime soon
@@j8000 sorry for the ad hominem but my first point remains valid, economics is a hard science, I'm not saying is harder than physics though.
Also this depends on the depth of the knowledge of the field for each individual, I'm pretty sure not all economists know about Euler-Lagrange as well as not all physicists know about homological algebra.
“Hard” as in difficult, yes. “Hard science” as in a field where phenomena is not influenced by options, and results can be reliably replicated? I would think the heavy influence of irrational human behavior on economic theories would rule that out.
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.
I need ideas for my next D&D campaign. Please share with me the crackpot idea on metaphysics.
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
Internal consistency, but not external consistency? That puts philosophy firmly in the field of fiction.
How dare you say elves are not real 🤪
Same is true for sociology. Retired sociology professor--a non-zero number of "crackpot sociologists" among my students.
The comment about wishing a 'crackpot' would email you with a small problem, to me, highlighted a really stark contrast between the crackpot and the amateur. Despite (nominally) coming from a very similar place, a crackpot would never have an interest in a small problem, but an amateur would. Both are non-professionals in a field where they lack formal training, but one is doing it for an interest in the field, while the other is doing it for an interest in themselves. There are a small handful of fields in science where amateurs can make material contributions. Not necessarily groundbreaking, but useful and real (without applying any value judgement on "useful"). Astronomy, ornithology and entomology, and the ecology of hard-to-reach locations are big ones (not surprisingly, they are fields where making a rare observation is a meaningful contribution, which tends to favor those who spend a lot of time looking - especially in hard to reach places like caves). These are almost always 'tiny' problems, some might even call them obscure. And as such, whereas crackpots seem basically allergic to the literature, successful amateurs often require an encyclopedic familiarity: "I saw a bird that isn't supposed to live in this region" requires that you've read several books on what birds are endemic to that region. "I saw a comet that I can't find catalogued anywhere" requires that you are aware of the catalogues and how to use them. That requires a love and respect of the subject that crackpot fundamentally lacks, and what they have in its place is a grandiose view of themselves.
i think respect for the field is important. crackpots don’t respect physics and the people in it. they say things like einstein was a fraud or he tried to mislead people. one day someone might come up with an advance on einstein’s relativity but i am certain that the people who do will have the utmost respect for einstein just as he had for the newtonian physics he superseded
To be honest i feel like part of the problem is that the word "amateur" has taken on a negative connotation. Instead of "this isn't a day job", it means "this person isn't good enough" to many people. They view being an "amateur" as shameful.
Maybe we need to put slightly more focus on the genuine contributions of amateurs to various science to help dispel the negative connotation?
@@Erowens98 It really is a shame that the word basically flip-turned in meaning. It's French for "lover". The word used to mean "this person is working on this because they _love_ it", but now it means "they couldn't muster up enough passion to be good at this if they tried". It's screwed up, man.
Also I think a difference between a crackpot and either amateur or professional is that they'll all have an idea that totally doesn't fit mainstream theories, but the latter two only admit it in secret to their besties while the former makes it their life goal to convince everyone they are right with no evidence. Its fine to have too many mimosas and admit something you know can't be proved but think is real, because you aren't going to go scream it at the physics chair on Monday 😂
@@Erowens98 The word amateur etymologically comes from "amor", love, an amateur is a person who is not an expert but has "love" toward a certain discipline, and that is why the amateur reads, is interested, and is trying to understand as much as a layman that has such interest, such "love" can do... Amateur is not an insult, but real amateur knows that he/she is an amateur, knowing how much one doesn't know is the start... Amateur, a good amateur knows that his/her interest is not professional, has no education and cognitive tools to be expert, or professional, and knows his/her place, such a person never tries to be smarter than the real thing, the professional, the expert.
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?
@B S that's certainly very noble of you, btw, you wouldn't happen to have a rejection machine would you? The afterlife is honestly a drag.
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.
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.
@@sterlingmullett6942 Hi Sterling, these are brilliant questions, thanks for asking them. I’ll try to answer everything in order.
1. 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?
I’d say the root of the cancer problem lies in the difficulty of curing the disease, and not resources. (It seems like you already have a good understanding of why cancer is difficult to cure based on your question, but I’ll explain for others too.) The two big reasons why cancer is hard to cure is the 1. similarity of cancer to normal, healthy cells, and 2. the personalized nature of cancer. The first major hurdle that makes a cure to cancer challenging is that a cure needs to kill some specific human cells without killing too many other human cells. It’s easier when it is a bacteria or some other external source of the disease because the biology of you and the biology of whatever is infecting you is completely different. We can give drugs to you that do nothing (or very little) to your cells, but quickly and violently break the infecting cells. With cancer, any approach we would normally use to kill an infection would just kill the patient as well, given that cancer cells are human and have nearly identical biology. The saving grace is in nearly identical. Cancer cells worked the same as normal cells at some point, but something broke in them, and that means that something is different about their biology that can be targeted to treat it! This leads to the second major challenge in curing cancer. The key point that you mention is cancer is not one disease, it is hundreds, and even for cancers that are the “same disease,” every cancer for every patient is (almost always) inherently different. So, the thing that is broken in one cancer and gives us a route to cure it is unlikely to be the same thing that is broken in another cancer. Even if it is the same thing that is broken, it might be broken in a different way that is clinically significant and prevents the same treatment from working. Given this model of how cancer works at the clinical level, the similarity of cancer to normal cells and the personalized nature of cancer cases makes a universal cure to cancer exceedingly unlikely. We can’t predict if a research group will make a breakthrough in our basic understanding of cancer and uncover a strategy for a universal treatment option, so I will leave some room for that. Broadly speaking, the issue is not resources and attention. More money and research hours go into cancer research than any other type of health-related research. This work does lead to advancements in our understanding of cancer both generally and for specific types of cancer. More on that in the next question.
2. 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 to tackle them?
Health research is broken up into three categories, and most of the time, labs generally stick to one category. The foundation to all health research is basic science research. In the context of cancer, these labs look at broad categories of cancer and try to understand, at the most basic level, how the cancer cells develop, survive, grow, and move. They do not look for a cure at all, but they are the only ones discovering things about the general nature of cancer. I am personally biased towards the value of basic research because I am a basic research scientist, but I think, practically, if any “cure all” ever comes to exist, it will be because a basic scientist discovers something about how cancer inherently works that is targetable by treatment. The second level is translational research. Translational scientists use the models that basic scientists make to find new drugs. To do this, they usually are looking for drugs to treat specific cancers at this point, but drugs are developed for one thing and turn out to cure others things all the time (Viagra was originally for heart disease). By the nature of how these labs work, it is highly unlikely that a miracle cure all drug would come from these labs without a theory first coming out of a basic lab, but it’s not impossible. These labs screen hundreds of thousands of drugs on cancer cells and disease-model animals to try to find one that targets something incredibly specific. They usually find a few drugs out of these screens, and these are sent to clinical researchers. Clinical researchers use candidate drugs and test them on healthy volunteers to ensure safety and specific-cancer-type patients to look at efficacy. It is very rare for a drug to pass all clinical trials and make it to the market, as they usually fail at this stage for one reason or another. So, to more specifically answer your question, I don’t think any lab is specifically trying to find a general “cure all,” for cancer, but the research we do still leaves room for finding that if it exists, mainly at the level of basic research. Cancer labs are usually based on general or specific categories of cancer (I.e. “pancreatic cancers” vs. “K-Ras negative Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma”). Labs that choose general categories are usually looking to understand how cancer works in the first place. Labs that choose specific categories are likely looking to develop and test cancer-specific treatments. With this research structure, we actually have cured specific types of cancers (see HPV-caused head and neck cancers and radiation, for one example). Though, not every cancer is equal, and some are way more simple, biologically, than others. Nowadays, progress in cancer research is generally measured in a 1 or 2% decrease in probability of mortality rather than the larger strides we made when modern cancer research first began, unfortunately. This is mainly because of how far we have already come towards treating cancer (1-2% is harder when you’re at 10% mortality than at 90% mortality), and unless we have more breakthroughs at the basic level, improvements on cancer treatment are likely to remain marginal.
3. Why are some diseases “gone” from our populations with vaccines, but others just seem to linger on?
This is more of an epidemiology question, which I have a little bit of training in, but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert. Given that, take what I say here with a grain of salt. For viral infections, this has to do with a combination of prevalence, modes of transmission, vaccine effectiveness, and mutation rate. Viruses mutate very quickly for many different reasons, and at the amount of virus that is produced in an infected cell, this benefits the virus’ ability to stick around. It helps it evade our immune systems, our vaccines, and spread more efficiently. It’s also important to note that the rate at which viruses will mutate also depends on things like infection rate and prevalence. So, to quantify how likely a virus is to be eradicated, you would probably make an equation that includes prevalence, infection rate, the percentage of population vaccinated, and the rate at which the virus will mutate to evade the vaccine. Timing is another important factor related to mutation rate. We need to make effective vaccines fast enough to reflect the strains of viruses that exist, and we need to distribute it to the public fast enough that they receive it before they are exposed. One factor we can’t really control is whether people are willing and able to get the vaccine. With all of these factors combined, slow moving, slow mutating, low prevalence viruses are much more likely to be eradicated than high infection rate, high mutation rate, and high prevalence viruses. The last factor, related to cancer as well, is exposure prevention. The more we can prevent a disease from happening in the first place, the better. For viruses, this includes things like staying home when you are sick as to not expose others. For cancer, this is more on the lines of avoiding carcinogenic chemicals, avoiding sunburns, etc. These factors have a huge effect on whether diseases become eradicated-if we prevent them in the first place, we don’t have to work so hard to cure all the active cases.
I completely understand the frustration the public experiences on these issues. I have lost family to cancer, and, given the statistics, we all have ~1/3 of a chance of experiencing it ourselves. We have countless examples of Pharma taking advantage of others for money. What you can trust in are the researchers, not the Pharmaceutical business heads. The people that are boots on the ground, actually do the work in the labs to figure this out are there because they are passionate about it. They care about the people they know that could benefit from their work. They care about the impact their work could have on the wellbeing of everyone. They don’t make insane money like the Pharma directors. They do, however, get recognition from society for their scientific contributions. They have every reason to do the best work they can to make those contributions, not for money, but for the sake of making those contributions. Some of the best and brightest scientists I have met work on cancer research, and they are doing everything they can to make the world better, whether they do it in government, academic, or industry research. I’ll reiterate, the problem of cancer really is just that hard to solve.
@@dpboydston Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to my questions and fill in some of the blanks. I like your idea that if a break-through is to be found on a universal level it will be through base research; finding that one moment, that one glitch that sets the whole chain unraveling, or is it rewriting?
I wish that as a society we could prioritize these areas of scientific research. And if most of these people are, as you say, in it for the research and the passion of learning and science, I wonder how much it would cost to simply pay (put them on the government payroll) to do this full time as a national project? Pull the monetization out of the equation, and simply fund it. Would be it a 1/4 of the USA military budget, 1/2, 10%? NASA got 1% of the national budget (in 1990s) and look what they accomplished?
But if these educated, dedicated people could simply be freed to do the work, how much could be accomplished in ten, twenty, thirty years, one person's career multiplied by thousands? How much good and discovery would there be in the world. I'm a dreamer I suppose.
I do appreciate your reply and the insights you've provided on this topic. All the best to you and your colleagues in the field. Be well. -Sterling
My brother unironically believes these things, and his version of the cure is smoking weed. That THC is a wonder drug, and it's kept illegal in the states to make money.
I'm glad we have people who come up with crazy ideas, I just wish these people would admit when they're wrong.
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.
Objectively funny. Belief integrated
How about mass displaces repulsive space-time. Is that crackpot?
That's a good one. They can even babble about conformal symmetry.
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.
famously endorsed by legendary comic book artist Neal Adams!
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
Congrats! Math has so many powerful tools. I really hope they will serve you right
As someone who has little problem with math, I shudder to think how horrible it would be to discover I had to deal with a community to learn physics.
@@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.
@@psychohistmathematics is a social activity.
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.
Who needs black holes in physics when you have them on Quora, bigger and deeper. Even intelligence can't escape.
@@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).
@@KeroGero89have you watched Dan Olson’s “Line Goes Up”?
He explains why that concept of programmers thinking they can fix the issues of society is horrifying
Everybody wants to have written a novel, nobody wants to write a novel.
I'm an electrical engineer raised by physicists, a serious risk of type A crackpot. This is a very useful cautionary tale for me, thank you so much 😂
Make sure you don't ever question mainstream science again... they are the only chefs allowed in the kitchen! 🤣
@@AlienScientist not the point of the video
@@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.
@@AlienScientistcrackpot spotted
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
As an engineer, I've had several marketing managers, after explaining why their idea would not work, would simply reply that they "BELIVED it would work". I started referring to this as "faith-based engineering". I've never seen one of these ideas work, but did watch one pursue it for three years before he finally gave up.
As a machinist, I always enjoyed grease penciling a drawing, sending it back to an engineer, tell him to break out his crayons & slide rule. It aint gonna work.🤣
@@roberttyrrell2250 it is interesting, senior engineers have noticed that younger engineers will design things that cannot be built or are impractical. Shop classes have largely been removed from the school curriculums that most of us had taken. I've also seen this in engineers from foreign countries where working with your hands would be considered below their social status. They just don't have the Hands-On skills to develop the intuitive sense of what will and will not work.
@@roberttyrrell2250
Oh man, being a guy that designs his own stuff for fun, yeah. The older my schematics, the more impossible they are to machine, lol. I love simple, elegant solutions. If I can walk over to the hardware store to buy 5 bucks of things and that solves a problem, then that to me is genius. If I have to break out the damn lathe, then it's a necessary evil and not "ingenius".
I guess this was how Theranos happened
@@Incandescentiron yes, it's the lack of real-world experience, intuition and proper education that is the root problem. Students are led to believe that if they want something than that will somehow become a reality, despite the ideas breaking some fundamental laws of physics. It's the quality of the education that is the real problem.
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. 🤦♂
@@alexashworth3119 electricity is manifested in existence. nothing is being "generated"
im 100% believer in a medium. the speed of light is nothing more than just the rate of induction of the medium. (btw this video is self -serving)
when at 16:59 Angela describes how a crackpot shot a physicist in 1952, because his paper was ridiculed, that changed my view of crackpots entirely. I had noticed that a lot of them have a massive chip on their shoulder, but this shows where it can lead. Crackpots can be scary.
Yes. Conspiracy theorists are often narcissists and narcissists are sometimes dangerous.
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.
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!
This is awesome.
As a mathematician, I love hearing this stuff! I applaud you for your study!
@@acollierastro Thank you. Really enjoy your presentations.
A bit unfortunate you also showed Unzicker,who is a real physicist
@@tryphonsoleflorus8308 Even physicists can be crackpots. Look at Freeman Dyson.
I once worked in a Physics Department at a university. I was only there for a brief time, but I did encounter a handful of crackpots who needed to talk to someone IMMEDIATELY about something that they had discovered.
My favourite may have been a man who told us that he had discovered the theory of everything. After not getting what he wanted from our front office (I assume adoration and a Nobel Prize), he began wandering the halls, looking for someone else to impart his wisdom upon. He found a professor with their door open and barged inside, declaring once more that he "had discovered the theory of everything!"
The professor's response? "Well, right now I'm just working on the theory of one thing."
Suffice it to say, we eventually needed to call security.
The audacity of this man 😭 I’d enter *my* professor’s office hours like “hey, saw the door was open is it ok if I ask a few quick questions on-“
This sounds like textbook bipolar mania.
@@KasamiraYou don't just walk in.....
It takes one to know one.
Sounds like a manic episode or maybe he was high lol
Who's here in 2024 after the whole Terrence Howard situation
me lol 😂
This aged well
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 😂
Yep! She absolutely hit the nail on the head with this breakdown, sums him up perfectly
I am here after his second showing on JRE a few days ago with Eric Weinstein. It was almost painful to watch.
The topic of this video and the expression "non-mathematically rigorous" reminded of one of my favorite scenes in a video game, where you find a ... strange person running a nuclear power plant:
"They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard."
Fallout NV, a classic.
This reference is fantastic
It's a solar power facility actually!
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.
Thanks I’ll check it out
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 TH-cam 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.
@@yaroslavsobolev9514 he is such a king for this
I've had many arguments with crackpots on the internet. Most usually just dissolve the second you pushback, but I once had a very long argument with a man about the twin towers conspiracies; he was saying it's impossible for all the floors to collapse at the same time, and also impossible for all the beams in a floor to collapse at the same time, or that engineers couldn't write an accurate simulation that proves that the towers fell that way. I said "hey I can prove it to you with some very intuitive math" 3 or 4 times in the Convo, but he ignored it every time, relying on what I can only explain as stories of how the physics should work.
I think he meant well, but damn bro you have to actually understand the math. You can write a story about anything, but if it doesn't yield some math that makes sense then the stories are just creative fiction
As a (semi) retired engineer, I can relate to that aspect of crackpottedness. It results from the basic difference between scientists/physicists and engineers - scientists discover and describe the physical principles of the universe; engineers put them to practical use. Consequently, engineers tend to be much less interested in the "theory" and more interested in the recipe to follow to enable their practical designs. In fact I can't tell you how many times that professors at my school went on random rants about how students aren't interested in the theory, they just care about how to use the equations. Engineers only require that a physical principle is "predictable" and "reliable"; the "understandable" part is the problem of the scientists. But at some point, usually too late to matter, an old engineer suddenly gets interested in the "theory" but doesn't bother to go back and brush up on the parts they gleefully skipped over as students. Trouble (and hilarity) can ensue.
As a Systems Engineer, I've always wanted to know the theory of why things are the way they are...... I'm one of two things: a bad engineer, or an ill-educated scientist! But I love what I do, even if everyone around me gets annoyed at my "but why?" questions!!!
As an engineer, practical implementation comes somewhat naturally to me. I have always had the utmost respect for those who can delve into pure theory and I admire those who can bridge theory and practical implementation even more. It's something I really wanted to be able to do, but it's extremely difficult to do.
My first degree was in engineering. Later, I pursued a PhD. in physics. I can tell you that engineers and physicists have completely different mindsets. They are not close at all. It's a bit humorous to hear an engineer talk about physics.
@@jamesmarie1083 that may well be, but it's much better for people to have interests and learn about things they don't yet understand than to be ignorant forever, don't you think?
@@jamesmarie1083 I saw a brochure about airplanes written by an engineer, using "physics" to explain things - and there was a big error in almost every sentence. Like measuring pressure in kilograms (!), which is for mass, not pressure.
A weird little museum in Los Angeles does rotating exhibits in their front room. One of these was letters sent by crackpots to the Mt. Wilson Observatory in the mountains north of LA during the 1920s and 30s. The letters were tragic, most of them clearly from people suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. The name of the exhibit was taken from one of the letters, from a woman who was sure she knew the key to understanding the cosmos, and that the world would be transformed if people would only listen: "No one else will ever have this same knowledge again." Even though her idea was crazy, that letter broke my heart. She was truly trying to help humanity, not understanding how badly her brain was betraying her.
That statement from her letter has stuck with me ever since, and made me think about crackpots more sympathetically. You're entirely right about the danger some of them pose, of course. I just wish our society had a better response to dangerous mentally ill people than waiting for them to hurt someone then locking them up.
Explain what "paranoid schizophrenia" is without merely repeating some unproven theory made by some scrawny psychiatrist, from an affluent family, that's regarding the presumed life of a person who has suffered violent trauma.
@@erfahren
Try looking in a mirror
@@ninepillarsofsalt This lady had not problem with me, she passed away. "Mentally ill" people are scapegoated people ... maybe y'all so wise & compassionate need the truth th-cam.com/video/tgilBaRbulc/w-d-xo.html
@@ninepillarsofsalt I replied with a link to a video from the late Paula Caplan. She's one that speaks out on the behalf of people who've experienced some of the worst kinds of trauma. I've known people who've suffered child abuse and other horrific crime but here you are ridiculing me. Try learning something about the world. You found someone to bully online & all that. You're so cutsie! th-cam.com/video/tgilBaRbulc/w-d-xo.html
@@ninepillarsofsalt To impede communication is to reduce men to the status of "things"-and this is a job for oppressors, not for revolutionaries. ~ Paulo Freire
Here's one of the late Dr Paula Caplan's videos for counter-argument (in defense of traumatized people who are scapegoated and labeled "mentally ill". Why hate on them? th-cam.com/video/tgilBaRbulc/w-d-xo.html
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.
Just telling you that your car's extended warranty expired on 1/3 and the grace period ends on 2/6... you ungrateful #*%^$
ok but what happened to Earth is it still here???
Favorite Moment:
Play-Doh is not food.
Really captures the central concept of this physicist's crackpot construct. Simply brilliant.
Yes, but she should have said the chief tasted it and it was not food.
@@mrcleanisin I think she meant it in a way that since play doh is so obviously not food, there would be no reason for her to taste it since there is nothing to taste, it isn't food.
Not so sure about that.... a C-130 Hercules picked up a bunch of soldiers in a UN peace keeping force many years ago, the loadmaster passed out EAR plugs in their cellophane wrappers, as lordy, the hero is loud, it funnels the noise inside by some quirk of design... By the time the long suffering loadmaster had completed his recovery round of the troops, he was approached by one of the troops asking if they had seconds. Play Doh may be an improvement in the culinary arts over foam ear plugs.
Technically, you CAN eat Play-Doh. It is literally colored dough with lots of preservatives. You can also eat crayons which are just colored wax.
WHY? Because kids will inevitably eat your product and you don't want to get sued.
Well, actually… play dough is made of organic compounds (mainly starches). Despite the fact we don’t see play dough as “food”, it can be eaten and it will be digested by your digestive system. Just like a tortilla. Just sayin’…
I think what you said about the "stories" is very right. Science communicators (even teachers, or practicing scientists in casual conversation) simplify things into stories, but those stories ARE NOT the actual theory, and of course have flaws. From the outside, if all you see is the stories you think that's all there is. You think the story comes first, and the math and details are trying to cover up or deal with the flaws of the story. So they build a story that is "more complete" and "doesn't require the math to fix it". See Also: executives that read an article in Fortune and tell engineers how to design and implement solutions or products.
I used stories and metaphors to teach about addiction to addicts. It's just easier no matter how simple the subject is.
@@Feralsquirrel for sure stories are useful and important! But it seems like it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the stories aren't the whole truth
@@williamgeorge2045 I think it's more that a lot of people never have it in sight in the first place. They want things to be quick to learn and obviously intuitive. At least for them. Because they are Smart™, so nothing requires real effort.
@@Feralsquirrel agree
I think a big problem is how genuinely hard to understand these advanced theories are. Like I watch science education channels on quantum mechanics and relativity and even with the stories I have a hard time understanding what is going on. And then when some of them start to include the math (which I assume is probably the simplest parts of the maths) then I am totally lost.
So science communicators have a genuinely hard job. But I am grateful they are still doing it.
Schrödinger's crackpot: If you never open the email it is both the theory of everything and a bunch of word salad... so really you are doing them a favor by not looking at the email
I taught Old South/Civil War at a middling university in southern Georgia for 30 years, and let me tell you about crackpots. Not so much the students, but wanna-be historians in the region. There hadn't been anyone at the university doing Civil War for many years when I started in the '80s fresh off my Ph.D. When word spread that Civil War was being taught there again, they wanted to make damn sure it was being taught right. Every week or two, I'd get a letter, or a phone call, or even a visit from some arm-chair colonel pointing me to their favorite sources, and saying how great they would be for my reading list. Of course, it was all almost all Lost Cause “slavery wasn’t so bad” BS. And, of course, the war had nothing to do with slavery. Never mind that nearly every southern state’s declaration of secession, including Georgia’s, said we’re seceding because we fear threats to slavery. Most of the time I’d hear them out, be as polite as I could, then ignore them. Every once in a while, just for fun, I’d bring up some combination of - the secession declarations, cotton overproduction, southern women rioting for food, blacks escaping whenever they could, wide-spread draft dodging, two-thirds of Confederate soldiers deserting, many of them to the Union army, in which half a million southern men served - and watch their heads explode. It’s a wonder I didn’t get shot.
Fortunately, a secondary field in grad school was history of science, and I taught that course as often as I could. It helped keep me semi-sane. After I retired five years ago, I got a telescope, took up stargazing, and now - you guessed it - I’m a crackpot cutting-edge theoretical astrophysicist. Don’t believe me? I’ll prove it. Without the maths, of course. How old is the universe? Well, depends on who you ask. If you ask a physicist, it’s ~13.8 billion years old. If you ask a photon, for which time passes all at once because it travels at the speed of light... Did your head just explode? 😄
I have never heard of crackpot historians but of course they exist! Please make the video on the ins/outs of crackpot historians I would love to learn about them.
@@acollierastroAtun-Shei is waging a campaign against Civil War crackpots! OP, he might be quite interested in talking to or interviewing you!
youtube.com/@AtunSheiFilms
Reminds me of the WW2 crackpots who always find a way to argue that Germany was innocent. To be fair, there are complexities that are not accounted for in the dumbed-down history taught through the TV, but it's clear people have ulterior motives due to the particular blind spots they systematically cultivate.
No not yet....why did you stop? No pay off, & you call yourself a crack pot. Your just pointing out facts man chill 😉 🤣🤣🤣
I'm an physics/astro UNDERGRAD and I still get these guys... Once my mum's friend had a birthday, which we went to, and the friend's drunken husband started telling me about how modern physics was completely wrong and how his father (a physicist) didn't understand his life's work because his mind was polluted by academia (...) you know the drill... thankfully i got out safely with no brain damage
I get questions about IT problems, very basic support at parties. But I think soon I'll be getting lots more AI questions I'm sure...
@@autohmae Did you ever get asked if the overarching assumptions of all the maths you do are accurate? Because of all things, if I was a physicist, I would worry about indeed wasting my life in useless mental masturbation?
@@autohmae i think people just assume physicists are all geniuses, when in fact we are just tired masochists
@jahjah it's because of the representations of physicists in popular culture. Sheldon Cooper, fictional Einstein, Hawking. Are all portrayed as quirky geniuses in every subject
@@autohmae Look them straight in the eye, adopt your most serious expression.. and say.. Ask the AI.
I'm an electrical engineer approaching retirement, and I've been thinking about starting a second career as a world-famous pseudoscientist. Thanks for the ideas!
😂
😅
Advice, stay clear of research on the existence of the so-called B_3 component of the EM field. Myron Evans got tarred/feathered in the 90's out of academia. He was a professor at UNC Charlotte. This stuff was grouped into free energy research.
Now is the best time. God luck. :)
The world can always use one more perpetual motion machine
Nothing so common as the desire to be unique
Do they ask questions!?
“This isn't right. This isn't even wrong.”
― Wolfgang Pauli
Shouldn't this be the appropriate response to high energy physicists hypothesising particles or interactions that can only be found using an accelerator the size of our galaxy?
@@pianoraves Well, we are experiencing tragic moments in the world of the so-called "science"...
@@PlanetIscandar Dude this video is for you, you should watch it.
@@pianoraves The whole so-called science is filled with unproven hypotheses, represented as evidence-based facts...
@@PlanetIscandar Evidence for this hypothesis?
A person with BS Physics here, who works as an engineer. Yes, crackpots annoy me, for all the reasons that you stated. Good analysis. Mostly I just take their ideas lightly, laugh them off privatly, and go about my business. I do not really fear them. Of course, you may run into the angry sorts more often. I do not really see the angry ones. The ones I see have energy, curiosity, and creativity. In my mind they are mostly big time-wasters; they will talk your ear off! Mostly, I just compliment them on their creativity and try to change the subject or get away. Can they be insulting and infuriating? Yes. They make statements that undercut the science I hold dear. I try not to take it personally, mostly they are just irrationally overconfident or science illiterates anyway.
Interestingly, some of the worst crackpots I have come across is other science professionals. My experience is they typically have crackpot ideas (not in science) in other non-scientific fields like economics, politics, and history.
I think crackpotting might be related to a personality type, like "know-it-alls", or like folks easily influenced by conspiracy theories. Those that like the feeling of being "special" or "select" because they hold the "answers" or secret knowledge.
Great comment! I appreciate your positive attitude toward handling crackpots.
> My experience is they typically have crackpot ideas (not in science) in other non-scientific fields like economics, politics, and history.
This is so true! At the start of 2020 so many physicists on twitter started acting like they were experts in epidemiology because they understood how to read exponential graphs.
@@acollierastro Yeah! Thanks for the compliment.
@@acollierastro As a data scientist working in politics, my crackpot theory on why some physicists tend to become crackpots in fields like politics and history is that the precision in at least some fields of physics breaks people's ability to handle uncertainty and measurement error.
I've seen plenty of physicists claim that they can either perfectly forecast elections or that election results are fraudulent (primarily before 2020 when that role was taken over by actual crackpots) because they'd come up with a neat simple model right out of a stats 101 class and then when reality wouldn't align with that model they'd run a t-test and claim that the actual result had a 1 in a quadrillion chance of occurring.
Would be fascinating to see which branches of physics crackpot physicists are actually working on, because I imagine some fields (astrophysics?) are much more used to handling imprecise/incomplete data with measurement error than others.
I think some of this behavior comes from some cognitive error that humans have. My person experience indicates that we as humans oversimplify and smooth the space of anything. It is a minimization technique so we don’t overthink the topic and will survive. I have fallen victim to it in my younger years before I had started working as an engineer and then started to study other disciplines. If one starts to study a discipline in Ernest a though will cross there mind “I could study this topic for a lifetime an not get through 5% of what is here and they is a lot I will not know nor never know.” The world is a complex place and we are trying to understand it.
@@acollierastroanother great example is how so many 'smart' people suddenly became military and geopolitical experts when the Ukraine war started. 99% of those people wouldn't have been able to point out Ukraine on a map before.
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.
They're also almost all old men, and they dismiss the "music establishment" and things like "notation" and "practice" as gatekeeping.
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.
Literally the same people now flocking to AI
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.
As someone who is more familiar with history and pseudo archeology its so weird seeing crackpot physicists. Its the same exact guy just with a different interest. Its so so unreal
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...
intransigent: unwilling or refusing to change one's views or to agree about something.
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
That doesnt even sound like a crackpot theory, i thought that's what was generally accepted to be true in popular science terms
That retired engineer hit a little close to home.
I'm not there yet, but have started studying physics again.
It might be awhile before I can come up with a crackpot idea, as I've discovered I need to review factoring polynomials in Algebra 1.
But after that, I'm sure I'll be an expert!
You don’t have to be a crackpot, I think it’s great that you want to learn
I think it is safe to be an engineer first and later study physics. If you do not believe me, ask PAM Dirac. I know crackpots with Phds in Physics. I could link to their papers but do not want to hurt feelings (it is about Bell theorem and Einstein was wrong).
@@acollierastro Don't discourage them from being a crackpot. Eric, you can be whatever you want to be! :P
@@justopastorlambare2933 Believe it or not, in grad school I had a fight with a distinguished professor who spent his entire life studying the Bell's inequalities because he said "gravity is a quantum field, the Higgs Boson *is* the graviton" like it was settled science (it's not, and it doesn't even really make sense btw).
The guy's an absolute genius and I respect him a lot but man, he does say some whacky shit when he's out of his area of expertise lol
I wonder if it's the same guy.
@@justopastorlambare2933 She touches on this in a video about Avi Loeb actually
When my son was young, he loved science but detested math. He would ask us, why do I need to know math? I explained to him, while he couldn't see it now, at some point in the future, math and science are fused and you can't understand the science without the math. I just asked him to trust me, and do the work. His grades improved. He took AP calculus in high school, and test out of first semester college calculus. I was very proud of him.
I had a teacher kinda like that, taught our last year biology, for our system it's the year that determines if you can attend university without further hoops. She told us in the first lesson that to understand biology we didn't need to understand physics nor chemistry, that was the year we covered neurons btw. She kinda killed all academic respect I had for her then and there and I would show it. Mind she was fair as a teacher, she gave me good oral grades for the technical level of my contributions, despite it often leaving my classmates in the dust, which she made sure to point out to me.
I have always liked biology and my mother is a botanist and her then partner a biochemist, so the field was part of daily conversation. Ended up going into math, then passed over to comp science, due to complicated feelings towards my mother in my 20s.
Did still minor in biology though, which was fun because it necessitated running between departments doing everything by slips of paper, because the digital system didn't account for that combination of fields. Unfortunately only got to take two courses, because they were worth so many credits that my allowed allotment for credits from my minor was almost completely exhausted by them. Did get to use a light microscope a lot and sketch the various tissues, also where I learned cutting mycelia with a razor is annoying, it's like cutting woven wool, it frays so much.
My cousin Roy Kerr is known for his cosmology but is a mathematician.
What happened to him
@@aBitTedious he earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and music in four years.
@@Incandescentiron Poor kid. He gets to be a wage slave.
I now know what level is my understanding of Physics. I’m the baby.
Bro, same. I was a physics major for one month. Ended up graduating with very respectable grades in Psychology. Lol
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.
#5: They name stuff (particles, equations, principles ... ) after themselves.
And since you mentioned the APS meetings, I remember a Particles and Fields one in 2000 where the crackpots were allotted 15 min talks instead of the usual 20 min as a sort of secret code that none of them ever seemed to figure out. I overheard one ask the moderator about it and was skillfully told that they were worried about finishing before the banquet and had to shorten a few of them near the end, which he accepted.
A few of us used to hang around these later talks and try to help, pointing out in step 1 where they might have gone astray, but it was often like talking to a brick wall. This one had his ideas bound in hard cover that you'd find everywhere. A stack would somehow appear at the snacks, there'd be at your hotel door at the end of the day, or you'd go to sit down somewhere and they'd be on the chair, must have cost thousands.
One of them fooled me for a few seconds at the initial meet and greet, was wearing a $3K suit so I figured this guy must be the director of one of the main labs. First thing out of his mouth was how Einstein was wrong, very first thing. I mean, you really should get to know someone for a few minutes before springing something like that on them. I tried to talk him through it, but again, brick wall.
So true about the brick wall. I feel like everyone meets their first crackpot and tries to help...
Right like I want to know the story of the first asshole who either didn't listen or didn't get told that the establishment or other people names shit after people who discovered it. You don't name it after yourself. Lmao and it just snowballed
@NiNjA have you considered that they name it after themselves because they discovered it for themselves, usually it even something already discovered but under a different name (also belonging to someone) so what makes it incorrect to say they did make a discovery? Our ability to canonized history? If that is true then documentation is a befouled industry, and we are all doomed. How dare us stand upon the shoulders of others so apathetically. Sometimes one must resist the urge to spurn the authority of another, certainly due to semantics.
@@johnsmoak8237 Sarcasm?
@@arctic_haze that would have been the easy answer, but incorrect
Man, this Crackpot drop out perfectly describes me when I was around 20.
I did well in mechanics, I did terribly in analysis and linear algebra. I made my own "theory" of unifying all fundamental forces....
Then I said to heck with it all, I'm getting into game design 😂
Now I watch physics videos on TH-cam and that's about it.
Yeah, I felt a little called out too. At least we grew out of it though.
I've thought of "theories" too, but by the time I was 20 I knew I was just having fun with something I was fascinated by but didn't fully understand.
@@NelsonGuedes I told my ninth grade teacher that I thought a neutron was a proton and electron combined. He told me I was wrong. I took physics in high school and college until I found out that being a technician at a nuclear power plant paid more than being a student. I dropped out with an associate degree and learned more physics at work than I had in school.
@@davidhomer78 I mean, you have an Associates degree so at least some training, contrary to aspiring crackpots
Also is The neutron actually proton+electron? You got me curious 😅
@@eVill420 In some radioactive decays a neutron is changed to a proton and a beta particle (electron) is emitted. There is also a gamma ray emitted to account for the extra energy. That seems to me like the neutron made an electron and a proton but the newer theories are that there aren't actually any particles just waveforms with different energies. As a technician I read a lot and came up with my own ideas but I don't know enough to prove anything.
There are also crackpot engineers who believe that safety margins are conspiracies by the establishment to get them to buy more expensive products. Some of these people do actual construction and electrical work, which is beyond scary.
I would say “incompetent engineers” in that case.
If you knew how often we said "yeah it should hold" you'd never drive a car again lol
But for real, if you look into some of the IATF, OSHA, EPA, etc regulations and requirements, after awhile it starts feeling like a huge conspiracy to hold American manufacturing back and allowing the Chinese to pass us up. You can argue the usefulness of these organizations all you want and I'll agree with you, but that doesn't stop the crippling amount of paperwork weighing down an entire department. I don't even design things anymore. Like 5% of my day is double checking numbers and the rest is administrative.
Some of them sold tickets for trips to the Titanic.....
I guess we've found one.
A quick way to identify a crackpot is to ask him about the units in his (it is always a him?) in his theory. Deer in the headlight response...
There was an episode of This American Life (episode 293: A Little Bit of Knowledge) on a guy who quit his job and spent a year devoted to proving that E=mc, not E=mc^2. He then shows his work to an actual physicist who immediately pointed out his “theory” is nonsense because mc has the units of momentum, not energy. And instead of feeling like a jackass, the guy just blames the physicist for being narrow minded and claims modern physics is too complicated and reliant on math.
When I was in college, I was a crackpot physicist/philosopher. I wanted to create a "Theory of Everything," something that would change how people viewed the world. I also had the urge to do it on my own, and for my last name to tied to some idea a la "Schrodinger's Equation."
I was burning out in college, holding on to my last ropes of being a "scholarly type gifted kid" that I grew up as. What I really needed was to believe that I could get to be a normal person, and that was okay.
I didn't have to change the world, I wouldn't be a failure of a person if I didn't. To this day, I'm still learning to accept this. I love learning how the world works, even if the math may be a bit much for me. I love incorporating the feels I get from learning science into my art. I'm much happier this way.
There's some f'in honesty for you. That's rare: Thank you.
this is literally me! it makes me happy to think that I am not alone lol!
Sounds very familiar!
But also, my parents were teachers, and i early learned to utterly avoid the PhD path. Instead I became an electrical engineer ...thus guaranteeing that I could self-fund my own "eccentric" work! Decades later I slowly realized that the engineering community contains WAY more crackpots than does the physics community. Lots of students did the same as I. We don't want a Nobel, instead we want to found Microsoft. We don't want to become the next Einstein, we want to be the next Nikola Tesla!
This thread is awesome. Learning is so fulfilling and learning about yourself and what motivates you can be as fascinating and rewarding as any theoretical physics.
There's a concept in Greek philosophical discourse called parrhesia, meaning to speak truth in the face of dire consequence. It was taught that the practice of parrhesia was very honorable.
Y'all are practicing parrhesia, and I appreciate you.👍🏾
The math is always a bit much until you get used to it. And then there's always new math 😵💫
Hi, As professor of genetics and evolution for over 30 years, now retired, I can vouch for the reality of crackpots out there, and your characterization of them is spot on as near as I can tell. I only received a visit from one of them once, and it was interesting in that it was immediately apparent that this individual did not have any concept of what an experiment was, or how one actually tested a theory. He had enrolled in my class, but after that encounter I never saw him again. With much greater frequency I saw religious fanatics who wanted to dispute evolution with me, but they were more easily handled because they trip over their own »logic ».
You don't know as much as you think you know about how the history of humanity happened. Nobody does because we can not go back in time and verify with our own eyes. I'm not a Christian, either.
@@towardsthelight220you do realize there are a ton of things we can verify without the use of our eyes, right? Like, idk, the circumference of the earth.
@@towardsthelight220 no, you may not be Christian, but you are ignorant of how science works. And calling someone ignorant isn’t an insult, just a description of someone who doesn’t know facts or how something works. Too many people fit into that category.
@@towardsthelight220 You know you are in crackpot territory, right? :)
@@towardsthelight220 No one has ever seen a hydrogen atom, and yet somehow, we know they exist.
I’m sure the stories about Ramanujan adds fuel to the crackpots. He’s proof it’s possible for someone without access to any formal education can turn out to be one of the most gifted mathematicians in history. So that must mean I’m also talented like Ramanujan because I’m not tainted by the educational system.
“stories about Ramanujan”, seduction to the magical. - Maybe driven by some corrupting evolutionary advantage, our legends of heroes, Cinderella gifts or whims of anthropomorphic gods stimulate our innate escape mechanism of invoking ‘familiar experience’, imagined ‘to tell how or why things are as they are’. Perhaps as echoes seen in primitive mythologies, they hint at images shared by collective human psyche.
Yep. That and the crackpot syllogism: "Einstein had papers rejected. I had papers rejected. Therefore, I am the next Einstein!"
@@beeble2003 for sure. And then there's all that bullshit misinformation out there about how Einstein couldn't do math or whatever. I've heard that one from a BUNCH of comment section keyboard "geniuses"
People laughed at Galileo… but they forget that people also laughed at Bozo the clown.
@@nathanjohnson9715 it comes from misinterpretation about grades 6 is the worst in Germany but the best in Sweiss and he was a in a Sweiss school system. Really astonishing to see people not questioning while seeing 3 for french and history classes and 6 in math and sciences and always thinking a was the worst in math like Einstein was better at speaking french than doing physics. Hilarous !
It's like you went forward into the future and listened to the interaction between Terrance Howard and Niele De Grasse Tyson... Spot on.
This video was the first thing I thought of when I saw Eric Weinstein with Terrence on the latest JRE.
@@monkeysuncle2816 It seems a lot of people went back and watched this video. Because I got this video recommend soon after I watched that JRE today.
no shit good point lol you sir called it
So this video was made before Terrence came out as a crackpot?
@@mozkitolife5437 Yup...
Yes. I left hardcore physics after scraping through the math in 3rd year.
As you say, if you can't math, you can't physics. And believe me, not a lot of us can handle the math past a certain point.
The issue with physics is that it is both too complicated and too alien for any human brain to have a chance at understanding it conceptually without some story abstraction that introduces issues. It's fine to have that in addition to the math, but it's useless without the math.
That's why I'm an engineer, I let physicists muck about with the source code bullsh*t and then claim that work and... promptly hand it to programmers that make it into a CAD program and then I get to play videogames, really, *really* , *_REALLY_* , complicated videogames. Then do a lil bit of math sometimes.
But conceptually it's pointy end up, flamey end down, basic ways things move that apply to my body tripping down a hill or sticking my arm out a window in a moving car as much as they apply to a rock falling through the air.
I left 3rd year as well, but because I simply couldn’t find it interesting enough to remain disciplined.
Weird how it's cool for physicists to indulge their passion of psychology without getting called crackpot shrinks.
That's why you leave the math to computers and mathematicians (also known as number masochists).
Doesn’t math stop working at a certain point? Say, like black holes?
I love how some of these phenomena occur in other surprising communities. For example, in the Mario 64 community, there exists a group called the abc community (a button challenge) and they try to beat super Mario 64 with as few a button presses (jumps) as possible. Now, the work they do is incredible, having whittled down the number to 14 using programmed inputs, decompiling the code of the game, making computational tools, brute-forcers,... basically they turned Mario into a science. And even though they've been working on it for years and the solutions increased exponentially in complexity, you still see comments asking about the most brain-dead, nonsensical ideas possible. That community has crackpots, usually kids, who think they can accomplish as much as long-time community members with computer science jobs and tons of experience.
Yeah, but I suspect that's not malice, just the simple and inevitable reality of not knowing what you don't know. The real "good/bad" decider is whether the person decides to change or expand their mind after being delivered a _fair minded_ and _comprehensible_ critique, versus arrogantly resisting it. That's the true mark of an ill-informed creative vs. a "true crackpot" imo.
@@shimrrashai-rc8fq Yeah, well put, but you'd still be surprised at the amount of people that insist on their ideas and pester the hard working people with constant questions and it could be argued that the same lack of self-awareness of one's knowledge can be applied to both cases.
@@sojok693 Not sure how it applies to the other case - if they change their mind then that indicates at least developing awareness which is good, I'd think. Need to explain that more.
Also if you don't have the awareness how can you get it? How then can anyone learn anything?
@@shimrrashai-rc8fq I was just hinting at the fact that although the situations are a bit different (primarily because it's easier to show that a strategy in a videogame works or not than to prove a scientific concept to a layman), the reason for why they occur is the same: the tendency for some people to overrate their knowledge, to devalue the knowledge of the expert and to not try their hands at something (math and actual experimental science for testing theories and TASing- simulating a videogame using certain software in this particular case). Even though rare cases do occur that a complete outsider can crack some hard problem, I think that most of the time people should assume ignorance and educate themselves before trying their hands in something.
@@sojok693 I partially agree - particularly with these 3 points: "overrate their knowledge, to devalue the knowledge of the expert and to not try their hands at something". But I do _not_ agree with "people should assume ignorance and educate themselves _before_ trying their hands in something." Perhaps I'm a bit biased because I'm naturally an "act first think later" kind of temperament (born *un*conscientious in Big Five terms; perhaps also some ADHD stuff), but I think "trying one's hands in something" is a key _part_ of learning and there are things that are much easier to get by trying them and seeing _why they aren't working_ and/or what _does_ actually work. The problem is when you too soon assume you have a conclusion and then shift to defending it instead of continuing to ask further or indeed "try more" further.
The role of the expert knowledge in particular is that the proper habit to form is that while you're doing something, if you find you are _contradicting_ what is generally considered as well-evidenced facts (e.g. "Einstein was wrong!") it should be a prompt to think deeper about it and look up more about it (even just your own argument; chances are, it's been found before - e.g. the "push the rigid pole" one) and ask (those who aren't arrogant pricks, at least) people about what might be wrong. I've done that a lot and while it's a _little_ disappointing when you invariably find out they are right, it's much more rewarding because now you know *WHY* they are so, instead of having just soaked up something in a dogmatic, submit-to-authority kind of way that really flies in the face of how the philosophical ethos of science is typically presented and also can help you to be a much more effective expositor.
"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
i believe in proton bialy supremacy
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
This just makes me really sad... so many people who are passionate to learn and want to understand being made fun of and ridiculed by others
@@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...
"to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough to be rejected by an unkind establishment, you also have to be right"
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.
Dan's work is a treasure. It may be coincidence, but the burst of the crypto bubble followed conspicuously closely to his video on NFTs and crypto.
@@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.
@@Littleprinceleon do you think someone watching this video doesn’t know correlation isn’t causation? Thanks for pointing that out, eagle eye.
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!
From a certain point of view, all motion is "almost" perpetual.
@@Fopenplop If you're in bad enough shape then all motion will feel like it takes forever.
I am not a crackpot, I just love to yodel on top of Dunning-Kruger Mountain. I guess that is like crackpot karaoke.
😂😂😂
😂😂😂
Haha, excellent
Wow, that's pretty impressive that she became a physicist at 10 years old.
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 love hearing about crackpots on other fields!
@@acollierastro Crackpotism is the dark side of the force. :P
Oh my god is it Richard Dumbrill? Blink twice if it's Dumbrill.
@@qartarsauce lmao 😜😜
I was on cusp of being radicalized by the free energy magnet crowd but this video brought me back. Physics conspiracies seem to confuse everyday experience and empirical study, like a baby instinctually understands physics. We may instinctually understand the wave equations for vortices when we see it but we can't express it in math. I still have faith in wacky inventions. Sometimes accidents happen to crackpots in a garage and the science comes after. But again, people confuse the quality of their perceptual world and self-worth with academic merit or fame like you said. Maybe what they're looking for in grand conspiracies is spiritual in nature, ironically, a path away from violence and anger.
As long as you’re not harming or intimidating anyone, good on ya. Whatever happens behind closed garage doors is between you and god.
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.
You had me till you said “economics is a hard science”. If any other science consistently made failed predictions, refused to review their model and just carried on making more failed predictions, we’d have questions
"Our model is fine. It's reality that's wrong"
She probably thinks it's a hard science because "wow, look at all the math!"
Even physicists have a hard time seeing thru the free market worship shit. We're all workers
Economists don't search for the truth, they just advertise what's convenient for the interests of the people who hire them. I was taught that in an undergrad Economy course.
Well it turns out, unlike fundamental particles that are governed by inherent physical properties, math isn’t so good at predicting irrational human behavior😂😂😂
"Non-mathematically rigorous" is a really generous description in every case I've seen.
That is for sure not a crackpot criterium. Loads of published material is non rigorous.
@@johannoldus2874 Where did I say it was?
I was not specifically reacting towards you, 😀 just towards the general idea that you should try to define what a crackpot is.@@marksea64
I responded to this but it got lost. I just wanted to illustrate that it is impossible to come up with crackpot criteria.
@@johannoldus2874 There are many crackpot criteria, just probably not ones that can be applied without knowing anything about anything.
Some crackpot: I will be the new Einstein of this century!!
Same crackpot: Einstein was wrong!!
But those two statements make perfect sense. You will be the new highly renowned physicist by proving the old one wrong. Try again.
@@Arcessitor You're wrong. Einstein didn't "prove Newton wrong", he simply realized that the assumptions Newton made could be replaced by different ones which led to a more complete description of reality (and which very closely approximates Newton's description at our familiar energy/velocity scales).
Similarly, whoever supersedes Einstein, presumably by developing an experimentally verifiable theory of quantum gravity, will not prove Einstein 'wrong', but will replace Einstein's assumptions with more accurate ones, and general relativity will become a special case of this new theory.
@@Arcessitor Newton wasn't proven wrong, there was just holes in Newtonian Mechanics, some of which had been known about for centuries and some that were recent and that meant that physicists were on the hunt for a better model that could also explain those holes. Relativity was that model however in order for it to be true it had to make the same prediction as Newtonian Mechanics in the areas where Newtonian Mechanics worked, which it did. Thus Einstein didn't prove Newton wrong, the scientific community had known for a long time that Newtonian Mechanics were incomplete thus in a sense they knew it was “wrong”. This is similar to how even since Einstein's own life time we have known that the predictions of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity do not match up on the small scale, but that doesn't mean that General Relativity is wrong, just that it is incomplete. Whatever theory that replaces General Relativity will also need to agree with all the things General Relativity is right about, that means that the majority of the important insights of General Relativity will be carried over. Just like how F=ma was carried over from Newtonian mechanics.
@@johnlukach5694It is ridiculous to suggest a random person on TH-cam should even compare the two theories in the first place let alone form an opinion on them. To do so in any meaningful way would require an impractically large amount of effort to be in a position to make a fair evaluation.
""Schwarzschild singularities" do not exist in physical reality...for the reason that matter cannot be concentrated arbitrarily...due to the fact that...the constituting particles would reach the velocity of light."
-Albert Einstein
(On a Stationary System with Spherical Symmetry Consisting of Many Gravitating Masses;
1 October 1939 DOI: 10.2307 1968902 Corpus ID: 55495712)
[In order for Einstein to have been wrong, either causal velocity mass is not necessary for obtaining the Schwarzschild radius where mass must indeed have causal velocity or mass can in fact obtain causal velocity and the Lorentz factor is simply invalid. Otherwise, relativity prohibits a mass from being contracted to its Schwarzschild radius (γ Mv/c²) just as relativity prohibits a mass from obtaining causal velocity (γ Mv).]
Not all crackpots are that scary... most are. Some are quite nice though.
I sat in talks (for the reason she mentioned, that everybody is allowed to give talks if you just sign up) where a guy was building an anti-gravity device with a couple of vacuum-cleaners working together, and he had a scale attached above it to measure the weight of some objects. He told us the idea... something about rotating disks (being driven by the motor of the vacuums), while being extremely enthusiastic.
He concluded the talk with not being able to create anti-gravity yet, but would join the conference the following year to present his results then again with more vacuum cleaners, and thanked us for our patience.
I kinda admired the enthusiasm... just sitting in his basement, totally believing in his success while modifying vacuum cleaners, and imagining how it would change the world. I was very fascinated by the whole spectacle.
He is one of the rare ones as most don't actually do anything constructive. I have encountered a quite a few and for most it does not seem to be about proving themselves right but rather proving other people wrong. Most never seem to do anything else but to come up with a theory and then start spouting it anyone who will listen (and a lot of people who won't). I admire people like him as he is trying to prove his theory and even though he never will, he is doing something constructive, not hurting anyone and it seems like a fun hobby
Was he trying to get there based on momentum of the disks? Or did he learn about frame dragging somewhere and tried to get frame drag to pull the test mass up?
@@chalkchalkson5639 It was quite some time ago, so I don't remember the details presented. The Abstract of the talk is still available, but in german. The "principle" is based on an "artificial Center of gravity offset" (originally "Künstlicher Schwerpunktversatz"). It's hard to translate, since I believe some vocabulary is just made up (you get words like "Schwerpunktversatzstrecke"). I guess, it's based on the torque due to angular momentum changes (causing, e.g., precession) (but I don't really know). Anyways, there is a book about it, called "Schubdraller - Raumfahrtantrieb durch Rotations-AMG" which would be in english something like "Spin-Booster - Space propulsion by rotary AMG", where I don't know what "AMG" is supposed to be, as I don't own the book (and don't intend to buy it anytime soon). Oh yeah, and I think the guy who gave the talk was also the author of the book.
Anyways, have fun with this random information ;).
It gets scary when they get political. I used to debate 9/11 truthers.
@@j.f.fisher5318
The genuine "9/11Truthers" are _not_ "crackpots' but highly qualified structural engineers with a thorough understanding of the maths and physics. Those you've debated who "get political" and talk of "conspiracies" belong to the "lunatic fringe" of the movement.
It's hard to put into words how much I appreciate your channel. Thank you for all the work that you put into your videos, it's greatly appreciated.
I get the same emails as a physic grad student. Like you, I'm scared of them, but they also make me really sad. It's kind of tragic to see someone so delusional and desperate to make an impact, and to know they never will. I think to some extent I empathize with them, since I, like a lot of grad students, have that same anxiety and urge to make an impact. Sometimes I even worry that I will end up like the crackpots, but that is probably just my doomer depression brain talking.
The cases I find even more interesting than the crackpots are people with legitimate scientific training who go overlooked. You mentioned Einstein as a non-example of a crackpot, but he definitely was initially overlooked when he was passed up for academic jobs, and being a patent clerk sending your revolutionary ideas to physics journals feels a bit cranky even though obviously he was not a crank. Another recent example is Yitang Zhang, who got a phd from Purdue in the 90s but was unable to find any academic job due to a falling out with his advisor. He worked odd jobs and even lived out of his car at some point, but eventually he landed a part time teaching job at UNH. While at UNH In 2013 he solved an over 150-year-old math problem on gaps between primes. He was in his 50s! He became a professor at UCSB only in 2015! Talk about dedication and being overlooked.
"they also make me really sad. It's kind of tragic to see someone so delusional and desperate to make an impact, and to know they never will."
I feel sad for someone with the ability to help someone pursue their dreams or simply point them in the right direction but that doesn't have the will to do so. I wonder what's behind that mindset, the same one that pervades this video. Clearly its found its audience. An entire community of people who have written off fostering curiosity and the pursuit of proper science. People who in an age of intellectual laziness find a rare spark of curiosity, and instead of building it up, instead try to snuff it out. Sad indeed.
@@Nefville Did you watch the video. FEAR is behind that mindset.
@@Norp-i7m I did watch the video. Safety is certainly a legitimate concern but why then is she going online to publicly antagonize these people through the same channels where I presume they became aware of her? How is that going to help? And I don't even want to harp on that all that much, it certainly was not the substance of this video. It did not appear to me to be the point and while it may add some context I still don't think it excuses it.
Hello, phycisist here, i just want to say that i very much respect the effort and amount of time you've put into research for this video, having to listen to these clips and pick and choose the ones most fitting, and rewatching them again as you are maybe editing...
Random question from a science enthusiast.. If albert einstein's time dilation proves that at different speeds, time passes differently (which was proved with the experiment that put a plane with a synchronized atomic clock that went around the earth and got de-synched with an identical atomic clock on the ground) and every galaxy moves at different speed, wouldn't time be vastly different in each galaxy? counting at 13 billion years.... And even from the center of the galaxy to the outer arms, as closer to the supermassive black hole time also slows down.
Aliens might be there one day, but time hasn't caught up with us
@@kodguerrero just like relative speed can change time's "speed", so can energy due to gravity and although einsteins general theory of relativity has lead to great predictions, in these scales things seem to be a little off, so you have for example dark matter acounting for differences in speed across the varying distances from the center of the universe. My response may be a bit inaccurate, so pls do check each part of it. Also, i am not sure about the actual difference it makes from the center outwards, it may be something noticeable may not, may be worth researching so look it up, i will too. I will have completed a course in GTR in 5 months and astrophysics in 7 so if you remember this i will be able to answer most of your questions probably ;p
@@teok7735 Thanks for the reply. I do construction work but in my free time, I'm writing a science fiction novel that focuses a LOT on how every atom has it's own clock.
@@kodguerrero Time dilation is symmetric, and not really an issue until you do a round-trip between observers moving at different speeds. The largest factor related to time is just the absolutely huge "astronomical" distances between things. While relativistic time dilation is greater than zero, it's negligible. Most stuff is just not actually moving fast enough to really make much of a difference. The center of the Milky Way galaxy is 25,800 light years away, the planet Uranus about 0.00031 light years away, the Andromeda galaxy is 2,537,000 light years away. The Virgo cluster of about 100 galaxies is only 50,000,000 light years away... and it's relative velocity to Earth is only about 960 km/s which is only 0.0032% of the speed of light.
"Right Now" for us on Earth, is the "Right Now" in the Andromeda galaxy which could be considered to be happening about 2.5 million years ago (if Andromeda was using Earth time). An alien in the Andromeda galaxy, looking at the Earth "Right Now", would see the Earth as it was for us 2.5 million years ago.
Every location in space is located in the past of every other location in space. Your feet are 6 nanoseconds in the past from your head, and your head is 6 nanoseconds in the past of your feet. Synchronizing clocks is impossible for reasons I'm not going to go into right now because I'm falling asleep... but the "zero" time for measuring time offsets from is completely and utterly arbitrary, and there are periods of time during which you can not say whether or not events A, B, and C happened in that order, or if C happened first, then B and then A.
@@juliavixen176 This is a great answer.
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.
@@KevinSterns do you not think that maybe your distrust of experts might be because of that hubris?
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."
Someone joined my Physics 300 course the first day, and the professor looked at the list of students (like 15 people) and asked why he was there (he was some kind of liberal arts major). He said he was interested in quantum physics, but he'd never even taken calculus. The prof said "uhh... Ok, you're welcome to stay but I don't think you'll get anything out of this"
He didn't come back the next day
That's too bad because that class was actually mind-blowing, we derived the Ideal Gas Law from first principles. Gotta know calculus though
It sucks that people act like calculus is some unknowable entity that you cant get unless you’re a certain type of person.
@plaidchuck ...yeah, the type of person who's learned calculus, which is anyone who tries
What if gravity is just the friends we made along the way?
Yeah. Some friends srsly weigh you down. Like faaaq man, lighten up.
This made me chuckle cause I use this joke all the time. "Maybe the real Gravity was the friends we made along the way". LOL!
Like all the little particles made friends with Higgs along their journey ❤
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.
keep going man, i believe in you
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 🧚🌞🧚🌞🧚
Why an undergrad degree in physics, of all things? Invest the finite years of your life into something meaningful.
@@DM_Curtis Yes, a degree in Electrical Engineering, so you can self-fund your physics research, once you retire.
In economics, a disappointing reality is that many universities DON'T use complicated math, paving the way for crackpot economists to smoothly ride their way to PhDs with an elementary (or lower) understanding of empirical analysis. The use of mathematics is shunned and discouraged by certain economic schools of thought. These economists are often well-known because they're loud and don't spend time doing vigorous research.
My friend you are right if you were talking about certain BA economics undergrad programs that don’t require math… but I don’t know of any graduate Econ programs that aren’t making phd candidates glorified math / statistician for research professors.
Also I can’t really think of any high level econ fields that aren’t deeply founded on math (maybe to a fault) whether it’s international macro, game theory, competitive analysis, financial economics, etc.
Just had to go back and re-watch this video. While watching Terence Howard on Joe Rogan, and all the breakdowns on his ideas, my mind kept flitting back to this video and the useful notes on how to spot a crackpot idea. Now listening to it again, if someone told me this was a new video specifically about Howard then I would believe them.
Terrence Howard shouldn't even be considered a crackpot 😂. He's just an idiot
I'll be honest, I have a bachelor's in physics and have a ton of my own crackpot theories. The difference is, I don't invest any belief in any of them, I don't connect my ego with them, I don't post them online, email anyone or tell anyone about them for the most part and if I do I'll preface that I'm most likely completely wrong and this is just what I've been speculating. It's fun to speculate and try to figure out missing or lacking areas of physics and I don't think there's anything innately wrong with that. But the delusion comes in when you aren't educated on the subject and think you know better than the experts, and believe in your unfounded theory that has no mathematical proof or any experimental or observational evidence. If I ever come up with a crackpot theory that I think could possibly be true, I will be sure to go down every possible rabbit hole to disprove myself before I tell a single soul, aside from gf lol.
Agreed
My GF thinks my crackpot theories are super smart guy stuff, and that's good enough for me.
@@yuothineyesasian good GFs are also attracted to guys much further along in Christian theology than they
"It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young." - Konrad Lorenz
Also, Linus Pauling apparently said "In order to have a good idea, have a lot of ideas." Exactly. Then we don't go all Smeagol, grasping tight to our single good idea, blocking the arrival of any better ones. "Myyyy Pressssiousss!"
But I think Pauling got it wrong. To have a good idea, have a lot of BAD ideas. Bad, crazy, embarrassingly crackpot notions. Unbridled crackpot-think is the source of many breakthroughs. Out of the box. "Brainstorming." Then of course adopt a brutally critical stance, and test the hell out of the best ones.
If you are saying that you dont connect your ego to them - Arent you connecting your ego to the idea of not relying on others?
See, that's why I don't ever use the words 'theory of everything' whenever I'm trying to sell my theory of everything
I find "Let me tell you about my iron-clad law of all the stuff" gets past those silly filters and always gets a great reaction!
The playdough analogy story is incredible; hilarious, and definitely terrifying
At first I thought Angela said "Plato". Why would you take Plato to a kitchen, he never wrote a cookbook.
I have a crackpot theory, so this hits hard.
Short version, I had a dream which solved the galactic rotation curve problem by showing spacetime gels up to keep it's own momentum. Similar (but maybe slightly different) to blackhole frame-dragging but on a galactic scale. The idea is: after spinning for a few billion years, a galaxy's own spacetime frame-dragging builds up to a degree it's rotation curve is distorted. Which explains why rotation curves differ across so many galaxies. And explains the bullet cluster.
That’s it. Spacetime gel. I solved dark matter. Nobel Prize please.
It’s so dumb. Can someone please point me in the right direction why that's already debunked/stupid? I'm just a dude who doesn't have the math, or the physics, and I haven't done the work; yet that's not stopping me from asking real physicists. What are the physics principles/math/observations which indicate this is a terrible idea?
There may be a lot of maths taught in Econ (and that's dropped somewhat compared to what was used in the 80s, since the Austrian School decided to drop modelling, preferring a quasi-philosophical stance closer to something Plato would recognise, and thus far from 'hard science'') but little of it results in concrete, repeatable results. There was a fashion of using formulae based on non-laminar flow calculations in the 90s, but I'm not sure that really ended up in a predictive model beyond "we can't really predict things," employing a lot of physics grads, and ending up with value runs that have crashed the economy a few times since the early 00s.
what does Economics say / "think" about control engineering? feedback loops? .. that kind of stuff
When I am super high my mind sometimes wanders into crackpot territory.
Crackpottery !
Cannacrackery 🎉
You got your high from crack-pot that's why.
First time I took my ADHD meds I had some crackpot ideas
I assume most crackpots are mentally impaired by one chemical or another, or the degeneration of the brain tissue
The Play-Doh food analogy is genius.
It reminds me of cargo cult science as described in Richard Feynman's commencement speech of that name.
Chef story had me cracking up
I remembered my friend describing his non-calculus based physics class. It was so much more confusing than the calculus based physics class. You are on point that math is the language of physics and you definitely need to understand it before delving in.
I got lucky at school. The mathematics teacher and physics teacher coordinated. So we were learning calculus things exactly at the point that we were going to need it for the physics lessons. I understand that this is not how things normally go. US schools seem to delay calculus which impedes other subjects for which calculus is the natural language.
I was a Mathematics/Computer-science major and I cheaped out one semester and took the Physics for business majors level course because I wanted an easy A. The professor was eventually a fellow student in one of my courses and she remembered me for being the only student in her class that laughed at her math jokes all the time.
Physics without math is like carpentry without a tape measure.
I feel like the complaint about "not focusing on the concepts" is BECAUSE people are taking the non-calc physics course. The language of basic calculus is necessary to explain how physics mathematically derives from fundamental forces. Otherwise you're just memorizing mysterious equations without a firm understanding of the underlying concepts.
Honestly, I get it. It's frustrating being taught how to use a math shortcut for solving particular problems but not _why_ it works that way. If that's as far as they got in physics, no wonder the "dropout" types feel like there's some critical conceptual component missing.
Even starting at mechanics, without knowing what a differential equation is (and at least some broad strokes of existence, uniqueness, analytical/numerical solution methods) you can never understand the point of mechanics.
I had two years of physics in college, and it was so amazing how studying real physics rewires your brain to learn to think about the natural world in a different way so you can actually understand what it means. The very first lecture of the very first class the professor said that learning physics means to retrain your intuition. By the time I got to Electricity and Magnetism It was very rewarding to solve the problems, and I was only in the second year, the rabbit hole got so much deeper haha. thank you for your videos, people are crazy sometimes.
You studied E&M in your sophomore year?! @_@ Why would they do that to you?! LOL!
Crazy? or three standard devs above the rest? th-cam.com/video/CM0Hi0YwAJA/w-d-xo.html How can you tell?
As a recovering crackpot I can say that you're analysis is spot on.
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.
@@johnreford Thank you for your insight.
@@johnrefordI have a crackpot theory about why people on the internet always confuse _you're_ with *your.* It involves aliens.
What if dark matter is play dough? Big physics is trying to hide from this question.
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.
So, how do you tell that an arbitrary axiom of a language game is right instead or wrong?
@@santerisatama5409 That's a question for mathematical logicians.
@@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.
As someone who struggled with math anxiety for a good part of my academic life, thank you for not being dismissive and pointing out it exists. A really wonderful video, ive been watching through your catalog and all very interesting and insightful. Nice work!
Oh, btw, the "Einstein was bad at math" is one of my favorites and I just wanted to add some detail here: This rumor presumably originated from some Germans, who had a look at one of Einstein's school grade reports from the time he lived in Switzerland. The Swiss grading system ranges from 6 for best to 1 for worst, which is opposite to the German grading system. So they saw Einstein had a lot of 6's, especially in math and natural sciences (btw his worst grades were 3 or 4, but in French).
Over time, this got diluted to "Even Einstein once had a 4 in math" (i.e. a "D" in the US-system), which I guess they thought is more believable than constantly 6's (being the worst possible grade). This rumor is also very popular among narcissistic parents of kids who are just not good at math. It really floats their boat.
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.
I started getting crackpot emails during my PhD and we had no warning or training in how to handle that. I replied to one that sounded reasonable and just highlighted a couple of the more obvious issues as politely as possible in the hope it might help him. The response I got was like he set out to misunderstand everything and quite aggressive, and certainly didn’t take onboard anything I’d said, I hadn’t just agreed so I had become an enemy. I didn’t reply to any others since.
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
I like to say that everyone is happy when I do NOT sing in the choir.
"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.
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.
The cooking analogy at the end is absolutely perfect
I loved the Play-doh metaphor. Unfortunately, we live in a world where a person with enough conviction can convince others to eat Play-doh...
(cough) tide pod challenge (cough)
@@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".
I'm a thought leader.
I've done my Play-Doh eating in kindergarten!
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.
Babe the funding for string theory has been minuscule for two decades. We hate particle physics and CERN now.
LOL
@@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!
It's impossible NOT to find our universe in an infinite number of universes.....why would you only have a potential amount in a multiverse?
@@CoD420NiNjA 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.
As a highschool drop out who built my own algae research lab, I fight every day to make sure I don't become a crack pot. 🤣 The key is to understand that I will only ever produce 1% of all the knowledge I ever convey. 99% is just the foundation to support my 1%
That sounds like so much fun!
My crackpot theory about crackpots is that they've never faced a real challenge in their life so they honestly believe that everything should be easy. They're an "engineer" that spent 30 years drawing the same sprocket over and over, they live in a house inherited from their parents.
I've been petitioned several times to "just do the math for me" by people with vague notions that have no basis in phenomenological reality, when I'm revealed as a physicist. To be clear, most people who become physicists have had every notion anyone else has had by the the time they are 18 (eg when I was 12 I had the notion that matter was made from vibrating energy strings). I studied to acquire the maths to formalize those ideas, only to discover 4 years later it was already formalized, and much better than I had orignally concieved.
Every professional physicist I know is incredibly smart and imaginative - most way beyond my own humble comprehension and level (I have a Physics PhD and authored 15 peer reviewed papers, but I switched to software and engineering as a profession, becuase it's incredibly competive and not well paid).
I would advise people to take that into considerarion when approaching physicists with your "ground breaking revelation".
I'm interested in doing a physics undergrad and I'd heard that a physics degree has like many transferable skills due to it being similar to maths, what is your experience with job offers? And another question, please, what do you think it takes for someone to thrive in physics? I mean, get to a PhD without quitting.
How I decided to do engineering. Thank you for putting this out there!
@@wostin - I have found skills to be highly transferable. Colleagues have gone into patent law, actuarial work, data scientists, machine learning, financial modelling, high frequency trading, aerospace engineering, electrical device modelling, software engineering etc.
Physics gives you an applied maths and conceptualization toolkit that has broad applications. Your colleagues will be smart and great sounding boards for ideas when you hit the professional ranks.
To thrive in Physics you need a deep, penetrating and adaptive curiosity combined with creative problem solving. For example for my PhD I created tools I needed for the experiments I wanted to perform, some were mathematical, some required going into the work shop and milling components I'd designed from steel blocks by hand.
Aren't you saying you made the same mistakes that she goes over in the video? That is thinking that your conceptual model based on stories told by communicators is a substitute for math? I find what you said in your first paragraph very hard to believe.
@@mikemian Thank you!
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.
Yeah I watched that too, love his videos.
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.
Is that supposed to make sense?@@Boardwoards
@@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.
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.
Now I know Tarrence Howard is a crackpot.