Believe me, I sympathize. You are in possession of a truly incredible breakthrough that offers the prospect of changing the very face of science as we know it, if not more. The only problem is, you’re coming at things from an unorthodox perspective. Maybe your findings don’t fit comfortably with people’s preconceived notions, or maybe you don’t have the elaborate academic credentials that established scientists take for granted. Perhaps you have been able to construct a machine that produces more energy than it consumes, using only common household implements; or maybe you’ve discovered a hidden pattern within the Fibonacci sequence that accurately predicts the weight that a top quark would experience on Ganymede, expressed in femtonewtons; or it might be that you’ve elaborated upon an alternative explanation for the evolution of life on Earth that augments natural selection by unspecified interventions from a vaguely-defined higher power. Whatever the specifics, the point is that certain kinds of breakthroughs just aren’t going to come from a hide-bound scholastic establishment; they require the fresh perspective and beginner’s mind that only an outsider genius (such as yourself) can bring to the table.
Yet, even though science is supposed to be about being open-minded, and there’s so much that we don’t understand about how the universe works, it’s still hard for outsiders to be taken seriously. Instead, you run up against stuffy attitudes like this:
If there are any new Einsteins out there with a correct theory of everything all LaTeXed up, they should feel quite willing to ask me for an endorsement for the arxiv; I’d be happy to bask in the reflected glory and earn a footnote in their triumphant autobiography. More likely, however, they will just send their paper to Physical Review, where it will be accepted and published, and they will become famous without my help.
If, on the other hand, there is anyone out there who thinks they are the next Einstein, but really they are just a crackpot, don’t bother; I get things like that all the time. Sadly, the real next-Einsteins only come along once per century, whereas the crackpots are far too common.
And that last part is sadly true. There is a numbers game that is working against you. You are not the only person from an alternative perspective who purports to have a dramatic new finding, and here you are asking established scientists to take time out from conventional research to sit down and examine your claims in detail. Of course, we know that you really do have a breakthrough in your hands, while those people are just crackpots. But how do you convince everyone else? All you want is a fair hearing.
Scientists can’t possibly pay equal attention to every conceivable hypothesis, they would literally never do anything else. Whether explicitly or not, they typically apply a Bayesian prior to the claims that are put before them. Purported breakthroughs are not all treated equally; if something runs up against their pre-existing notions of how the universe works, they are much less likely to pay it any attention. So what does it take for the truly important discoveries to get taken seriously?
Happily, we are here to help. It would be a shame if the correct theory to explain away dark matter or account for the origin of life were developed by someone without a conventional academic position, who didn’t really take a lot of science classes in college and didn’t have a great math background but was always interested in the big questions, only for that theory to be neglected because of some churlish prejudice. So we would like to present a simple checklist of things that alternative scientists should do in order to get taken seriously by the Man. And the good news is, it’s only three items! How hard can that be, really? True, each of the items might require a nontrivial amount of work to overcome. Hey, nobody ever said that being a lonely genius was easy.
So let’s begin at the beginning:
1. Acquire basic competency in whatever field of science your discovery belongs to.
In other words, “get to know what is already known.” If you have a new theory that unites all the forces, make sure you have mastered elementary physics, and grasp the basics of quantum field theory and particle physics. If you’ve built a perpetual-motion machine, make sure you possess a thorough grounding in mechanical and electrical engineering, and are pretty familiar with the First Law of Thermodynamics. If you can explain the cosmological redshift without invoking an expanding universe, make sure you know general relativity and have mastered the basics of modern cosmology and astrophysics.
Just as an example, if fundamental physics is your bailiwick, Gerard ‘t Hooft has put together a list of subjects you should get under your belt, complete with bibliography! Many of them are online lecture notes; some of them are by me. So start reading! It may seem like a daunting collection at first; but keep in mind, this kind of curriculum is completed by hundreds of graduate students every year. Most of whom are not singular geniuses who will transform the very face of science.
Now, you may object that steering clear of such pre-existing knowledge has played a crucial role in your unique brand of breakthrough research, and you would never have been able to make those dazzling conceptual leaps had you been weighed down by all of that established art. Let me break it down for you: no. There may have been a time, in the halcyon days of Archimedes or maybe even Galileo and Newton, when anyone with a can-do attitude and a passing interest in the fundamental mysteries could make an important contribution to our understanding of nature. Those days are long past. (And Galileo and Newton, let us note, understood the science of their time better than anybody.) We’ve learned a tremendous amount about how the universe works, most of which is “right” at least in some well-defined regime of applicability. If you haven’t mastered what we’ve already learned, you’re not going to be able to see beyond it.
Put it this way: it’s a matter of respect. By asking scientists to take your work seriously, you are asking them to respect you enough to spend their time investigating your claims. The absolute least you can do is respect them enough to catch up on the stuff they’ve all made a great effort to master. There are a lot of smart people working as scientists these days; if a basic feature of your purported breakthrough (“the derivation of the Friedmann equation is wrong”; “length contraction is a logical contradiction”) is that it requires that a huge number of such people have been making the same elementary mistake over and over again for years, the fault is more likely to lie within yourself than in the stars. Do your homework, first, then get back to me.
2. Understand, and make a good-faith effort to confront, the fundamental objections to your claims within established science.
Someone comes along and says “I’ve discovered that there’s no need for dark matter.” A brief glance at the abstract reveals that the model violates our understanding of perturbation theory. Well, perhaps there is something subtle going on here, and our conventional understanding of perturbation theory doesn’t apply in this case. So here’s what any working theoretical cosmologist would do (even if they aren’t consciously aware that they’re doing it): they would glance at the introduction to the paper, looking for a paragraph that says “Look, we know this isn’t what you would expect from elementary perturbation theory, but here’s why that doesn’t apply in this case.” Upon not finding that paragraph, they would toss the paper away.
Scientific claims — whether theoretical insights or experimental breakthroughs — don’t exist all by their lonesome. They are situated within a framework of pre-existing knowledge and expectations. If the claim you are making seems manifestly inconsistent with that framework, it’s your job to explain why anyone should nevertheless take you seriously. Whenever someone claims to build a perpetual-motion device, scientist solemnly reiterate that the law of conservation of energy is not to be trifled with lightly. Of course one must admit that it could be wrong — it’s only one law, after all. But when you actually build some machine that purportedly puts out more ergs than it consumes (in perpetuity), it does a lot more than violate the law of conservation of energy. That machine is made of atoms and electromagnetic fields, which obey the laws of atomic physics and Maxwell’s equations. And conservation of energy can be derived from those laws — so you’re violating those as well. If you claim that the position of Venus within the Zodiac affects your love life, you’re not only positing some spooky correlation between celestial bodies and human affairs; your theory also requires some sort of long-range force that acts between you and Venus, and there aren’t any such forces strong enough to be relevant. If you try to brush those issues under the rug, rather than confronting them straightforwardly, your credibility suffers greatly.
For example, imagine you say, “I have a method of brewing a magical healing potion that bypasses the ossified practices of your so-called `medicine,’ and I’ve personally known several people who were miraculously cured by it, and also there was a study once in some journal that didn’t conclusively rule out the possibility of an effect, and besides you don’t know everything.” No non-crackpot person is going to pay a whit of attention to you, except perhaps to poke fun in between doing serious work. But now imagine you say “It’s true that my claimed magical healing potion appears to violate this famous law of chemistry and that well-established principle of medicine, which have been painstakingly developed and stringently tested against experimental data over the course of many decades, and it’s natural that you would be skeptical of such a claim — but here is the empirical evidence that is dramatic enough to overcome that skepticism, and this is the reason why there might be a loophole in those laws in this particular circumstance.” People will be much more likely to take you seriously.
3. Present your discovery in a way that is complete, transparent, and unambiguous.
What we’re getting at here is that scientific discoveries, unlike sonnets or declarations of love, are universal rather than personal. They belong to everyone, and once they are presented to the world, they can be explored equally well by anybody. By almost any standard, I understand general relativity better than Einstein ever did. (Most parts of it, anyway.) Not because I’m anywhere nearly as smart as Einstein, but because we’ve learned a lot about GR since Einstein died. Once the theory was invented, he didn’t have a monopoly on it; it was out there for anyone to understand and move forward with. Even if he had repudiated his own theory, it would have had no effect on whether or not it was correct.
Your discovery should be the same way. If it’s a revolutionary new theory, it should be a theory that anyone can use. That means it needs to be clearly expressed and unambiguous. I’ve had more than one long and fruitless discussion with alternative scientists who would say “You tell me the experimental result, and I will explain it with my theory.” That’s not the way it works. Your theory should have a life of its own; it should be a machine that I (or anyone) could use to make predictions. And if it’s a physics theory, let’s face it, it’s going to involve math. In this day and age, nobody is going to be moved by a model of elementary particles that comes expressed as a set of three-dimensional sculptures constructed from pipe cleaners.
Likewise, if your breakthrough is an experiment, it had better be a dramatically obvious one — and the more you are violating cherished scientific beliefs, the more dramatic the effect had better be. If what you’re claiming requires a re-arrangement of the energy levels in organic molecules, in flagrant disregard of the Schrödinger equation, you are going to need much more than a two- or three-sigma effect. And, equally importantly, you have to be up front about what the apparatus is, so that anyone can reproduce the experiment. No fair saying “Well, if you come into my lab, I’ll turn it on and show you how it works.” And “This experiment was done in the ’70’s in a secret underground lab in Gdansk, and the KGB has suppressed the lab notebooks” isn’t any better. If you’re actually playing the role of a scientist, share your procedure with everyone, so that they can become true believers themselves. If, on the other hand, you just want to make money, then by all means don’t tell anyone; just start producing the free energy (or amazing stretchy widgets, or whatever) and sell it on the open market. The millions of dollars that will doubtless flow your way will be very comforting as you rail against the establishment for failing to appreciate your genius.
So there you go! Modesty aside, this post might be the single greatest favor that has ever been done for the loose-knit community of non-traditional scientists. We’ve been very explicit about what is expected, if you want to get the recognition you believe is your due. Three simple items, start checking them off!
Also, one last thing. Don’t compare yourself to Galileo. You are not Galileo. Honestly, you’re not. Dude, seriously.
“Also, one last thing. Don’t compare yourself to Galileo. You are not Galileo. Honestly, you’re not. Dude, seriously.”
#55 – “I find this tremendously insulting.”
Why? aren’t you a person we should compare with? 😉
The main problem with crackpots is that Einstein himself was a “crackpot” too, common working as a patent clerk!? 🙂
and so was Newton predicting the end of the world by 2060!
….and the many others the occasional genius of the day happen to have a book of, and believe me, many of our physics gods came up with very crackpot-like behavior at some point of their lives. Why did we care reading those? or paying any attention? Well, cus they were true geniuses! why? well, cus incidentally they changed our views of the universe, and after all that’s what the credential is granted for. It isnt enough if your primary school teacher and the bartender so claim, sory 🙂
Sure you can yell out loud you havent had the chance to change the world cus nobody listens to you!, dont you think then that *this* world therefore doesnt want to be changed *your* way? Why bother? why would you want all of us to switch into your ideas if they dont match ours? Why do you then crave for attention? Isnt a deepest knowledge of the universe enough reward for you, or it is just the greedy thought of a nobel prize??
Of course big revolutionary ideas might be passing by without noticing cus you didnt graduate from Princeton, and we scientist are a bit arrogant after all needless to say. Why bother going into the trouble to talk to them in the first place?
Unless you know what science is about, unless you agree to *stick to the rules* (see items), please, make the millions with the converting machine and go on vacations to the bahamas, do science the favor 😉
It looks like Sean is at least taking seriously the possibility of amateurs making important contributions in science, otherwise he wouldn’t even give such advice. (And many of us have complicated backgrounds, with mixes of training but lack of completed certifications, or of proper career track, that require description as “amateurs.”) But that is only part of the problem: venue for reportage is another part. If you don’t have official cover in the form of proper affiliation (for putting of address, etc.), what forum can someone with decent ideas turn to? In theory, American Journal of Physics etc. will print home address and sometimes does, but it is an uphill struggle for a paper with such an address to be taken seriously. Also, there’s the matter of nature of claims. There used to be Speculations in Science and Technology for offbeat claims that were still well-argued, and to some extent Foundations of Physics and Physics Essays in Canada still take up that role. I don’t know how many people read them now, or whether a good case would be noticed well enough.
Although the temptation is to consider posting on the Internet to be worthless, one can get good discussions going in the right venues. Is it possible a good new idea would be noticed by the right people? FWIW, I started a discussion about a “New quantum measurement paradox” in the moderated group sci.physics.research in 2000. AFAIK it was novel, about repeated passes of a polarized photon through half-wave plates to build up angular momentum and thus measure intermediate levels of circular polarization of a single photon, contra standard measurement theory. (Ties into “weak measurement” concepts.) The arguments basically went round and round, with no clear outcome. Enough big shots like John Baez posted into it, and it linked around enough, that it comes up first in Google search for “Quantum measurement paradox.” Topping out in a subject search is not easy. I don’t find any direct commentary on it out there as a result, but perhaps the right idea could be noticed if you get high on Google with it? Would a good proposal in UseNet be noticed by the right people, aside from search issues?
Ultimately, I think it’s a matter of who you are: if someone well-known makes a point on UseNet, it will be noticed, but if you aren’t well-known, you must be published in a good venue to be noticed, over and above how good an idea was involved. Does anyone have examples of ideas presented in fora like UseNet, that actually caught on? Where can we find more about this sort of science sociology (really, we need a good name for the subject of the activity of scientists and science) be found?
#77, above “posting on the Internet” one should consider the narrower cathegory “latexpdf posting on the Internet”. This is because modern search engines do a very good work of indexing pdf documents, and modern browsers are able to download them. Looking at the records of our webserver, I find that a lot of hits into my documents come from persons looking specifically for the wording or the exact topic of a particular pdf document. Perhaps a good recomendation could be to use latexpdf plus the html navigation extensions of pdf, leaving to the reader the opportunity of navigating from the PDF towards related papers or towards the homepage.
Neil asked:
If you don’t have official cover in the form of proper affiliation (for putting of address, etc.), what forum can someone with decent ideas turn to?
I honestly can’t imagine to this day why the moderated research group wouldn’t be a good place for this, since it is, or *was* chalk-full of excellent physicists and students with no small mention to Baez, who basically led the group for quite a few years.
It’s really ironic for me, but it was right after he had proclaimed that “we’ve been over all of this”, [the negative mass puzzle], and that ‘there is nothing new to be learned here’… … … that I showed why this is not exactly true, and asked him to shoot me down. I’m still waiting, and here’s an even better presentation that I made later of evidence that the negative energy states have been misinterpreted…
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2006-03/msg0073465.html
Just don’t mention the strong anthropic principle… is the trick, me thinks!… 😉
Hi Neil,
I remember that discussion. You argued your case very well, and it certainly gave me pause in thinking about the photon. It’s still one of those “Web studies” that I keep in mind, as I pursue my own investigations.
When we realize that practical use of the Internet, outside the government and university circles, wasn’t much of an option just a decade ago, we can see how great an impact it’s now having.
Even though it’s hard to get noticed with all the noise, sometimes that’s a good thing. The important point to keep in mind is that it provides a place for us on the “library shelf.” Sure, it might not be a highlighted spot in the lighted glass case in the lobby, but to be able to develop and record our ideas in our very own space on the library shelves is a hitherto undreamt of opportunity.
Once the significance of a work, or an idea, is recognized, everybody will be able to find it. So, if we are on to something good, we just have to bide our time. At least, we don’t have to worry about publishing just to look like we have something to say, as an indication that we are worth the money someone is paying us to think. I would really hate that. I would hate it much, much, more than not being on someone’s “respectability list.”
The irony of all this is that so many, like Sean, have a sense that the knowledge gained in the past is a sure sign that the civilization that possesses it, and that hands out the credentials to work on and extend it, is on the path that leads to ultimate progress in understanding the physical structure of the universe, but it ain’t necessarily so.
The ancient civilizations thought the same thing and they became very good at what they did, but just because the moon and planets, upon which we are now able to tread, are higher than the pyramids and the mountains, upon which the ancients tread, doesn’t mean that Western civlization is on the ultimate track to understanding.
The disconcerting trouble with modern physics is not just a matter of overcoming a super technical challenge. Almost every investigator at the top of the respectability list has acknowleged that we are in a fundamental funk. Something’s wrong with our fundamental understanding of the physical structure of the universe, and, if that’s the case, following Sean’s prescription is not likely to lead anywhere interesting.
Imagine the Egyptians giving that advise to the crackpots and cranks of their day. Someone suggesting to their high priests that they should consider the motion of a pendulum and begin to think in terms of potential and kinetic energy of moving masses, rather than the geometry of pyramids and the travels of the sun, would have never been able to make their respectibility list.
And telling someone like that to acquire basic competency in Egyptian mathematics and astronomy first, would have been senseless. The fact is, a different view of the fundamentals changes everything, undermining the craft of the priests, who maintain the respectability list.
It short, Neil, Sean’s prescription just reveals one edge of two-edged sword. The fact that most crackpot ideas are obviously inept in the science currency of the day, doesn’t mean that a true gem of an idea ought to fit comfortably into it.
Van wrote:
In Figure 7 at my home page is a graph showing a 11% increase in weight of a colander with a hot plate heating element on top. There is some aluminum foil and gasket material on inside used as insulation to insure that most of heat from the heating element would flow radially upward.
You can not get something to weigh 11% more by making the air below it less dense. Maybe a slight amount but not 11%.
With Figures 1 & 2 a ~3.0 % decrease in weight with a convex down hemisphere was observed. You have a better chance claiming that the rising hot air lifts the hemisphere and thereby decrease the weight of the hemisphere. But you can not have it both ways.
When I did the experiment shown in Figures 1 & 2, I was then overly concerned with how the force sensor would be affected by a change of temperature from the hot plate heating elements. The hemisphere was hung to a rod and fulcrum system the other end of which was attached to a wire that went to a force sensor that was attached to the floor. The force sensor in turn was shielded by Styrofoam from the heat from the heating elements.
I soon learned that this was a unnecessary precaution. Hanging hemisphere’s with steel wire to force sensors 2 to 3 feet above seemed to be all that was necessary. Using thin wooden rods which have lower coefficient of linear expansion that steel or copper also proved unnecessary.
This whole thread is an awesome exercise in point-proving.
Trouble is, an amateur’s theory may be just too radical for physicists to dare take seriously
Wow. It just keeps on going.
Re 67 PokerFace, I was thinking on a grander scale but fame, glory and immortalization comes with their own problems. Such a theory would enable us to move up the Kardashev scale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale very quickly, we would have the knowledge of a type V civilization ( not on the scale it’s self ). Type IV would be able to use the power of space-time (page 317 in parallel worlds by Michio Kaku), Type V would have the knowledge of how to exist beyond the space-time of this universe and be able to use the energy of universes and have power to create them (E.g. Have you seen the film Eragon, a type 5 being would be Eragon and a universe would be his Dragon and both would be entangled as in the film (try not to think about them as a man and a dragon but as a universe and its shadow).
The problem of being the one who comes up with TOE, comes about in Eternal return http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return or if you like Ouroboros http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroborus . How can you have an endless amount of human civilizations that can reach type IV status? I guess what I mean is that; if we come up with a TOE, then there is a higher probability that we recreated this universe, in order to survive the end of time. These beings would have to make sure that this person does not exist in this new universe, or they would have to come up with something to make sure, that we have no chance of getting the TOE, maybe by telling us an infinite lie.
The only way such a thing can be circumnavigated is by this person being hard wired into the universe and multi-verse, he would just have to be here just like the Higgs Boson,(or he would just be the Higgs Boson), so who is this fool?
The clock never stops ticking, ever; no matter what!
PF,
Try the experiment two ways, one with the hemispher concave up with the heating element below and one with the hemisphere concave down and the heating element still below. My guess is you’ll find that the force sensor reads slightly less than the weight for the concave down case and slightly more than the weight for the concave up case. The reason for this should be obvious.
PK, I have the PDG book in my office. Feel free to grab it if the high entropy of my desk doesn’t make that impossible.
Seth Lloyd has recently published his TOE. He proposed that the universe is a quantum computer that executes a superposition of all possible programs (each program appears with a weight of 2^(-program length/2) in this superposition).
Doug:
Thanks lots for your thoughtful reply. It shows how much a big thread gets around, that at least one poster to this thread remembered it. Sure, that very example of presentation in a quality moderated group shows that you can get an idea out and be noticed by knowledgeable folks. The deeper problem is more subtle: Few readers of such posts will take the time to sort through and see if there’s really a substantive point, and respond with perhaps a follow-up paper. They won’t there the way they would if the same idea was presented in Physical Review by an average contributor, or even if someone big posted it to the same newsgroup. (Say, if John Baez posted it.) In practice, independent scholars have a hard time, but maybe that is exaggerated. I do thank Alejandro for some tips on making on-line articles easier to find.
This web site may be helpful: NCIS (The National Coalition of Independent Scholars.)
PS – I have my suspicions of some of the background notions that are used to filter out “crank ideas.” Consider the claim that classical laws of electromagnetism allow for a proof of energy and momentum conservation by internal consistency. I remember some of the points that go into those proofs, and they seem solidly based as far as they go. However, they don’t really go far enough, because there are issues requiring additional theoretical (or even experimental) intervention. For one thing, they take particle sources/targets for granted, and yet consider the difficulty of constructing a rational particle in EM: First, you have the infinite classical field energy if the particle is a point, requiring the contrived and debatable quantum mechanism of renormalization. If you want a reasonable classical particle and a field energy no greater than the observed mass, you need a finite size. That means holding the charge together somehow, with the non-electromagnetic “rubber bands” of Feynman fame.
That has to affect what happens. Just look at the sticky problems of the radiative self-force in the Abraham-Lorentz equation f_rad = 2kq^2 v dot dot / 3c^3. That is a fundamental self force required to conserve energy while radiating, and most of the posters here and elsewhere don’t really appreciate or have even heard of it per my actual experience. It is supposed to come from time delay affecting the transmission of effects from one part to another of the same particle, but how do you make that coherent if the particle is either a point, or held together with unknown other forces? Also, there are runaway solutions which must be stopped by contrived special equations of motion, and we don’t even really know what is true about that — seriously, check it out. Then there is the fact that classically, structures of any kind wouldn’t be formed by classical point charges – collections of charges would collapse into pair singularities or be thrown out. Also, the magnetism of materials cannot be fully explained classically anyway, meaning that for example, any off-beat device using real magnets can’t be blown off with breezy pretensions about the supposedly closed nature of classical E&M.
Food for thought.
It’s probably worth pointing out, for alternative-science practitioners out there, that physicists, and no doubt all other researchers, tend not to drop everything and study some new idea that person X has come up with, whether they are a crackpot or a Nobel laureate.
Many papers get published in the highest ranked physics journals (Physical Review Letters, etc.) and are never heard of again. It is incredibly self-centered to expect researchers to drop their own research and look at yours instead. Just because people ignore your idea doesn’t mean they’re out to oppress you. They (or rather we) do it to each other too.
Re 85 Qubit: Thankyou for your response. No, I haven’t seen the film Eragon, but your description of the weird and strange philosophical concepts arising from it, while probably not accurate of what really happens with a sufficiently advanced civilisation (it is sheer hubris to really hope to understand any civilisation much more than one rung up the ladder of technological development from one’s own, in my opinion, though nonetheless a quite entertaining exercise in science fiction), intrigues me and piques my interest. I will also have a look at the wikipedia entries you have mentioned.
Joe Fitzsimons said:
Many papers get published in the highest ranked physics journals (Physical Review Letters, etc.) and are never heard of again. It is incredibly self-centered to expect researchers to drop their own research and look at yours instead. Just because people ignore your idea doesn’t mean they’re out to oppress you. They (or rather we) do it to each other too.
Right, it’s easy enough to satisfy all three criterion and still be ignored, and that’s why physicists and others push their ideas into view if they can. But physicists don’t automatically get dismissed out of hand for zero given good reason, like “others” do, and there certainly are enough cranks, both, in and out of the field, I can certainly name a few.
I’m somewhat amused by the label, “alternative” though, considering that this surely must include loop quantum gravity theory, and just as surely, at least one of the two main contenders for a gravity theory is going to be a crackpot theory… AT LEAST one of them, and considering what’s going on with the colliders, I’d say that everybody had better start thinking a little harder next time about just how long they’re chosen belief has been going nowhere, (or into fantasyland), before they spout-off about how ‘Einstein wasted the last 30 years of his life chasing a rainbow’.
And then there’s that whole unjustified anticentrist dogma thing that Brandon Carter very correctly pointed out is NOT simply a subconscious denial… rather, it’s pure willful ignorance. You can fulfill all three criterion until the cows come home and still be talking to a wall for-like-ever, in this case, even if it means that we throw our ToE right out the window just to spite our foot.
These are my honest observations, regardless of whether they are on topic, off topic, or maybe they even prove Sean’s point.
Neil wrote:
You can’t, so it becomes a neglected fact of science, just like the fact that force is defined as a property of motion, but then that definition is ignored, because, if we didn’t ignore it, our theories would fall apart.
I still remember your comment in the discussion about the quantum measurement paradox that went something like “do we really understand the photon?” I think it captures the essence of what all these issues of neglected physical facts raise: We are on shaky theoretical ground, so acting and thinking smugly about the emminance of professional status is just plain foolish.
An amatuer is not necessarily anymore disqualified from finding the “Rosseta Stone” that will unlock the secrets of what underlies the weirdness of the quantum world than a professional is, even though he/she may be less prepared to understand the core issues, since they are expressed in terms of modern, esoteric, concepts and obtuse mathematical equations.
Recall how silly most of the amatuers looked, who were naively trying to unlock the secrets of heavier-than-air flight, while the professionals scoffed and pronounced the impossibility of such a feat and derided their efforts. Yet, a few of the amatuers were properly prepared with an understanding of the pertinent principles, and they were able to eventually pull it off.
I think an important lesson to be learned from the Wright brothers’ experience is that they didn’t do it by trying to convince the sceptical professionals to accept and take on their approach, something they probably never could have succeeded in doing. Instead, they worked it out themselves, making their own tools, and devising their own tests and measurements.
It’s pretty much the same situation today. For every thousand amatuers naively hacking at the branches of the problem, there is only one wisely attacking the roots, while the professional scoff at their efforts as a whole, not realizing that the Wright brothers’ counterparts may be among them.
The professionals are taught to “shut up and calculate,” so they do, and they naturally scold and scorn the amatuers who can’t calculate, but won’t shut up. Meanwhile, the amatuers, unlike the professionals, are uncommited investigators who don’t have to look out for their careers. They are at liberty to take unorthodox views of things, and while they may be villified as “cranks” and “crackpots” for doing so naively, in most cases, theirs is the better lot, in my opinion.
Professor Carroll,
Did you read Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method? Your first two rules for new genuises are fine, particularly in the cases where they have the money or nearby suitable universities to get that fine degree of education right up to the elitist PhD level. The third rule is kind of demeaning to the likes of Professor Witten. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think he is helping science that much by claiming string theory predicts gravity and such like, but it is demeaning to advise him:
3. Present your discovery in a way that is complete, transparent and unambiguous.
Don’t you think that’s a bit too insulting to the intelligence of the crackpot stringer? There she is, with here PhD, working on string theory, failing to make any predictions, then having to read this nonsense that what she needs to do is to prevent it being a incomplete mess, and turn it into a proper theory. You can imagine her suffering on reading this post. They can’t help having such an incomplete, ambiguous (10^500 solution landscape) mess of a half-baked theory.
In future when attacking string theory, maybe you should use Professor Baez’ index, awarding points to theories based on speculations which make no falsifiable predictions? BTW, I think the other kind of “crackpot” (leaving Witten aside for a moment) has an idea but lacks the skills to develop it. He or she decides to write it up and publish it, in the hope that someone with the skills will be able to develop it, and take a major share of the credit. Ultimately, if these people are on to something and do live long enough, they may be able to do the work needed themselves. Darwin and Newton were examples who spent decades taking your advice, developing a lot of arguments to support their theories, before publishing all the results in lucid books. Aristarchus or Samos and Boltzmann are examples where this didn’t occur.
Tony Smith (a string theorist censored off arXiv possibly because he has embarrassingly stuck to 26 dimensional bosonic string theory, instead of changing to 10 dimensional superstrings with 1:1 boson:fermion supersymmetry), has quoted Feynman describing his problems with getting people to listen to him in 1948 at the Pocono conference:
“Teller said: “… It is fundamentally wrong that you don’t have to take the exclusion principle into account.” … Dirac could not think of going forwards and backwards … in time … Bohr … said: “… one could not talk about the trajectory of an electron in the atom, because it was something not observable.” … Bohr thought that I didn’t know the uncertainty principle …
“… it didn’t make me angry, it just made me realize that … [ they ] … didn’t know what I was talking about, and it was hopeless to try to explain it further.
“I gave up, I simply gave up …”. – The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Sciece of Richard Feynman, by Jagdish Mehra (Oxford 1994) (pp. 245-248).
Dyson has a google video (search for Freeman Dyson Feynman, on google video) describing how hard it was to get Feynman’s idea taken seriously:
“… the first seminar was a complete disaster because I tried to talk about what Feynman had been doing, and Oppenheimer interrupted every sentence and told me how it ought to have been said, and how if I understood the thing right it wouldn’t have sounded like that. He always knew everything better, and was a terribly bad organiser of seminars.
“I mean he would – he had to have the centre stage for himself and couldn’t shut up [like string theorists today!], and we couldn’t tell him to shut up. So in fact, there was very little communication at all. …
“I always felt Oppenheimer was a bigoted old fool. …”
Eventually, Dyson got Bethe to explain it to Oppeheimer, who listened to Bethe. Tony Smith quotes Dyson’s conclusion:
“… At any particular moment in the history of science, the most important and fruitful ideas are often lying dormant merely because they are unfashionable. Especially in mathematical physics, there is commonly a lag of fifty or a hundred years between the conception of a new idea and its emergence into the mainstream of scientific thought. If this is the time scale of fundamental advance, it follows that anybody doing fundamental work in mathematical physics is almost certain to be unfashionable. …”
– Freeman Dyson, 1981 essay Unfashionable Pursuits (reprinted in From Eros to Gaia (Penguin 1992, at page 171).
Tony Smith, in a comment on the Not Even Wrong weblog, points out that Oppenheimer continued to be bigoted by nature:
“Einstein was … interested in having Bohm work as his assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study … Oppenheimer, however, overruled Einstein on the grounds that Bohm’s appointment would embarrass him [Oppenheimer] as director of the institute. … Max Dresden … read Bohm’s papers. He had assumed that there was an error in its arguments, but errors proved difficult to detect. … Dresden visited Oppenheimer … Oppenheimer replied … “We consider it juvenile deviationism …” … no one had actually read the paper … “We don’t waste our time.” … Oppenheimer proposed that Dresden present Bohm’s work in a seminar to the Princeton Institute, which Dresden did. … Reactions … were based less on scientific grounds than on accusations that Bohm was a fellow traveler, a Trotskyite, and a traitor. … the overall reaction was that the scientific community should “pay no attention to Bohm’s work.” … Oppenheimer went so far as to suggest that “if we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him.” …”.
– Infinite Potential, by F. David Peat (Addison-Wesley 1997) at pages 101, 104, and 133.
Even Carl Sagan falsely argued: “exceptional claims require exceptional evidence”.
Problem is, what is exceptional evidence to one person, looks like a mere coincidence to a critic:
“The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, Crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.”
– George Orwell, 1984.
You can see why Feynman gave up explaining path integrals in 1948. If he had presented it differently, would that have helped?
island: I used the word ‘alternative’ because Sean used it in the title of the post. I would not include either LQC or string theory in this, and niether one is a ‘crackpot theory’.
A theory can be wrong without being in anyway a crackpot theory. For example, in Mathematics, a perfectly valid approach to Fermats last theorem would have been to look for a counter example. We now know that such a counterexample does not exist, but that does not automatically make anyone who had searched for one a crackpot. Obviously the situation is somewhat different now, given that a proof of the theorem exists.
It is the same with physics. If there is a problem with current theories, attempts to address that problem which contain known physics as an approximation in all the domains in which it has been verified are perfectly valid. So no, genuine string theorists, LQC researchers, Twistor theorists, etc. are not ‘alternative-scientists’ in my opinion.
“So no, genuine string theorists, LQC researchers, Twistor theorists, etc. are not ‘alternative-scientists’ in my opinion.” – Joe Fitzsimons
What about’s Witten’s claim:
‘String theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity.’
– E. Witten (M-theory originator), Physics Today, April 1996.
’50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.’
– J. Baez (crackpot Index originator).
String theory predicts a spin-2 massless particle, which is exactly what we expect from a theory of quantum gravity.
So, no, Ed Witten is not a crackpot.
Hi Joe, thanks for your reply.
Personally, I would require that any theory that turns out not to be an actual reflection of nature, an “alternative, crackpot theory’, or you open the door to any mathematically consistent invention that manages to give the correct solutions. So when Dr. Witten says that “String theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity”… he’s jumping the gun in a crackpot-ish manner in the enthusiastic name of his belief-system, which is not necessarily even loosely tied to reality.
‘Has the remarkable property of predicting what we string theorists currently believe will eventually turn out to be a valid theory of quantum gravity’… seems more the kind of thing that you should hear a physicist saying about it.
Not that I think that Ed Witten is by any means a crackpot, just to be clear. I just wish that physicists would be more careful about what they claim is real science, vs., that which is still to be established, because it is farily common to see previously questioned assumptions get accepted by default into the mainstream as reality, after people do nothing more than to make the claim long enough, rather than because anything about it has changed.
And I apologize for not being more clear that I was also talking Sean’s usage of the term, “alternative”, not yours.
Hi Island,
We cannot possibly know in advance which theories will be proved correct by as yet unperformed experiments. As such, it is perfectly valid science to investigate unporven theories (usually with the goal of verifying them). Many many physicists do this everyday, and certainly should not be called crackpots if the theory eventually fails. What makes a crackpot is the willingness to completely ignore contradictory evidence, either by not examining the current state of the field, or by willfully ignoring criticisms or by trying to obfuscate problems with their personal theory.
Good scientists do not do this. It’s as simple as that. If someone came along with an experimental test of string theory which conclusively ruled out string theory as a correct theory of nature, then the field would crumble (although some of it may well remain as an interesting mathematical structure).
It seems there are two really distinguishing features of crackpots: 1) How thouroughly they study the current state of the field to which their theory applies (usually they have very poor, if any, understanding of the current theories), and 2) How they respond to criticism (badly). In point (2) I’m refering to scientific criticism of their work, and not personal attacks. I know I’d react poorly to someone who’s only criticism of my work is “You’re a stupid liar.”
String theorists in general cannot be accused of meeting either of these two criteria.
‘What makes a crackpot is the willingness to completely ignore contradictory evidence, either by not examining the current state of the field, or by willfully ignoring criticisms or by trying to obfuscate problems with their personal theory.’ – Joe Fitzsimons
Try this for size:
‘The critics feel passionately that they are right, and that their viewpoints have been unfairly neglected by the establishment. … They bring into the public arena technical claims that few can properly evaluate. … Responding to this kind of criticism can be very difficult. It is hard to answer unfair charges of élitism without sounding élitist to non-experts. A direct response may just add fuel to controversies.’ – Dr Edward Witten, M-theory originator, Nature, Vol 444, 16 November 2006.
Witten is “willfully ignoring criticisms” because it seems he advises string theorists to try not to reply directly to criticisms for fear of causing negative controversy.