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By Hamish Johnston
Its secret life will be revealed at the Science Museum in London. (Courtesy: Batholith)
If you happen to be in London next Saturday (20 September), the Science Museum is running a workshop called “The field life of electronic objects”. Participants will measure the electromagnetic fields surrounding everyday objects such as hairdryers and hard drives “to produce astonishing light images of these objects’ secret life”. Space is limited, the cost is £10 and you can register online.
One thing that we really struggle with here at physicsworld.com is comments from crackpots. My colleagues and I put a lot of effort into writing and editing articles that we believe will be of general interest to the physics community. There is nothing more soul-destroying than spending hours trying to understand and then explain a tricky piece of research only to see the comments on your article hijacked by someone promoting their own bizarre theory.
The American Physical Society (APS) takes a brave and novel way of dealing with crackpots – it gives them their own sessions at APS conferences. In “The Crackpot Conundrum”, blogger Henry Brown describes the mood at such sessions as depressing, something that I understand based on a session that I sat through. Brown then reviews some of the various ways that physics bloggers deal with crackpots and in a moment of deep introspection suspects that he might be seen by some as a crackpot!
Finally, if you are winding down on a Friday afternoon, you can put yourself in a trance by watching these mesmerizing animations by the Irish physicist David Whyte.
“…on your article hijacked by someone promoting their own bizarre theory”.
True, most of the time the PW-team presents rasonable writeups of articles of physics, but unfortunately a good part of the comments, for the rather obvious reason (the PW being the only outside window for their “work”), are off the subject treated in these writeups. Of course, any routine-breaking crackpottiness has to be appreciated for its stimulating value.
I’ve had conversations with Henry Brown, see for example where Doug Sweetser was exploring gravity. I’m afraid Brown is the sort of person who resorts to abuse when he meets somebody who points out his shortcomings. He certainly doesn’t understand gravity.
As a rule of thumb, whenever you encounter some person calling somebody else a crackpot, that person is usually a hubristic quack whose arrogance is only exceeded by their ignorance.
Ah yes, the crackpot conundrum! An issue that we are all familiar with now that the internet can allow us all to have our say.
History shows that very often its the agreed experts – or those who don’t question the consensus viewpoint – who happen to have had the crackpot theories, whilst the crackpot(s) of the time have been correct.
But when it comes cosmology and things far beyond testability in the lab, can we ever be certain we know what’s happening?
Presently cosomolgists are perplexed by the accelerating expansion of the cosmos (assuming that is actually happening). There are quite a range of theories being considered to try to explain it…so most if not all the theories that abound must be faulty/crackpot theories.
Some even have crackpot sounding names (that I won’t mention). Personally I don’t think any inventions are necessary ( new more complete understandings maybe but not inventions). Gravity and relativity can explain the accelerating expansion of our cosmos, if our cosmos is surrounded by infinite others in an infinite universe. The cosmology community don’t get it though, so it must be defined as a crackpot theory!
Another troubled soul at Science 2.0 is Sascha Vongehr. See this where he calls Joy Christian a crackpot, see this where he’s pontificating about crackpots and quantized energy without understanding h, and then see this and this where he talks about suicide. The guy is nasty. As is Scott Aaronson, see this. Nasty sneering abuse like this brings science into disrepute. There is no place for it in science, especially these days of funding cuts and a disillusioned public.