Actually this messes with the minds of the crackpot community, since half want to include Einstein as a fellow maverick outsider, while the other half wants to attack him as being wrong.

:)

Were Einstein’s ideas taken up by the community almost immediately, without objections?  Nope.  The switchover from Newtonian mechanics and aether-belief and the acceptance of SR took far longer than you think.  Clarke’s First Law is no joke.  True, the cleaned-up mythical history found widely in pop culture and in grade school textbooks makes it appear that the Aether supporters vanished without a fight, and that Einstein was welcomed by all, with no raging controversy, no anti-Einstein petitions being circulated by enemy groups.  Yet in fact his work was revolutionary enough to inspire decades of widespread controversy, not a rapid and silent acceptance.  If you go try digging dirt on how the research community actually responded to Einstein, you’ll find quite a bit more there than is commonly discussed.  I suspect it’s the George Washington cherry tree effect:  the usual historical dirt seems to mysteriously vanish when it involves tarnishing all of our glowing descriptions of Science we learned early on.

So, which one is the myth: that SR, photons, etc. were easily and quickly accepted by the physics community, while aether supporters didn’t fight?    Or was it that SR etc. only won out after decades of major mud-slinging battle and putting rout to a large population of hot-headed enemies?  Perhaps the sources claiming the latter were just wrongly exaggerating the “embattled revolutionary” aspect.  Maybe the ones claiming the former are trying to paint a sanitized (mythical!) picture of a Science which never irrationally resists any revolutionary ideas.

If the person I’m dealing with says “No one else understands my genius/The truth is being suppressed”, that person is almost always a crackpot.

If they say “Think about this for a bit and tell me if it still sounds like a crackpot idea”, they may just be a genius.
It’s not 100% perfect, but you’ll be amazed how far it can get you.

A perfectly absurd looking Swiss patent clerk came up with Special Relativity.

The article mentions the Loch Ness Monster as an example of a crackpot notion because, obviously, it’s absurd to think there might be living dinosaurs. That notion becomes just a little less silly after a coelacanth swims by.

It’s hard to guess who will have the next flash of insight or where it will come from. Today’s orthodoxy will be tomorrow’s dogma. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of the little mind.”

This is exactly the attitude towards criticism that makes me think you are probably a crackpot.  Attacking your critics makes you look petty; worse, it makes you seem like you can’t actually make an argument for your case.  Support your argument, don’t attack your critics.

Wright brothers, Edison, Jobs, and Wozniak — none of these people are scientists and none of them were advancing purely theoretical arguments while claiming to overthrow the scientific orthodoxy (which is the kind of crackpottery under discussion).  I can’t really think of any reason to consider any of these people crackpots whether we overlook this flaw in the comparison or not.  The Wright brothers had a tiny influence on science proper, basically by proving heaver-than-air flight is possible (which we already knew ’cause birds, duh) giving physicists a pretty good puzzle for a few decades figuring out how that flying contraption actually worked.  But I don’t think anyone seriously considered locking them up for putting their money where their mouth is by actually building the thing before screaming about the scientific priesthood suppressing their revolutionary ideas. I’d actually consider the Wright brothers the perfect example of how not to be a crackpot: demonstrate your idea is probably true before making a big freakin’ deal about it.

We should encourage those who think differently…to put their strange new ideas to rigorous tests (like building a plane or a light bulb or a personal computer) rather than just wail about how their strange, brilliant ideas threaten established institutions and that’s why they’re being kept down.  Thinking differently is easy.  Thinking well is hard.

Unfortunately, where the (rare) revolutionary breakthroughs are concerned, the experts actually can’t be trusted.  Also the scientific community really does suppress the eccentric voices, since those voices are usually wrong.  Yet lone revolutionaries have occasionally been correct while the mass opinion was not.  That’s what crackpots are always going on about: insisting that they are wrongly-suppressed revolutionaries like the many historical examples, rather than being correctly-suppressed crackpots like the far more numerous examples.

There’s another facet to this dilemma.  There’s a definite pattern to which “revolutionaries” are able to make a respectful and respectable case against the mainstream and which flame out in utter crackpottery.

The first class are inevitably humble and invite careful scrutiny of their arguments and results by other experts in the field.  The latter class are almost always cranks who insist that their genius is being repressed by a jealous or threatened orthodoxy — words like “priesthood” and “ideology” get tossed around a lot by these types.

I’m sick of Einstein’s name coming up in these conversations.  There was huge uptake of his ideas within a few years of his publishing.  The reason above is part of it — he didn’t set up his new theory adversarially as the Newton-killer.  He presented it as a hypothesis that would resolve several long-standing philosophical objections to Newton’s law of gravity.  And to focus only on relativity is to ignore another reason for the acceptance of his ideas: that his paper on special relativity came out the same year as his analysis of Brownian motion and interpretation of the photoelectric effect.  The Brownian motion paper was pure statistical mechanics, completely in line with what other theorists were working on at the time.  The photoelectric effect explained what appeared to be an anomalous experimental result which Einstein resolved by invoking a theory already advanced by some of the biggest heavyweights in theoretical physics at the time.

Part of Maggie’s warning signs for crackpottery is storytelling.  Well this “Einstein was on the line between crackpot and revolutionary” stuff is the exact same kind of storytelling.  I’d actually call it “myth making”.  This myth does not realistically reflect the attitude of Einstein towards established science or vice versa.

Also remember the venerable Crackpot Index. A good initial guide. Though I think the rules in this article are better but the Crackpot Index is funnier.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

Galileo was accused of blasphemy because he was the first to see Jupiter’s moons – he was a nut. Surely, two bicycle mechanics who thought they could fly needed to be locked up. Steve Jobs and the Woz thought they could sell computers for home use and were no doubt regarded as harmless cranks. When the wheel and moveable type were first invented, was it really obvious to others – or to even the inventors – just how these ideas would change the world?

I think we should encourage those who think differently. I wouldn’t want to have said to Edison: “Tom, give it up. You’ve already tried 999 different filaments and none worked. You’re an idiot if you think you can light up that carbonized thread.”

She praises peer review, but also says real scientists do not like telling “stories”.  What happens when you submit a paper for peer review is that the “story” aspect is emphasized.  You are required to give an unnecessary historical overview and discuss how your work fits in with the story of the field.  Whatjpurnal reference  citations you give is also of utmost importance.  The actual physics is of considerably reduced importance.  One could not know this is the case without actual experience.  So the author has views not basded on experience.  Obviously, and ironically, not scientific.

It wasn’t always this way.  Einstein used few references.  His papers today would be rejected without even being read–he would be viewed as a crackpot.  I’ve looked through old important papers from Einstein, Feynman etc, and they did *not* give historical overviews–they only discussed the important scientific advances they were making.

Anyone can do the experiment–look at old important papers and note how different they are from the modern  stuff–few citations and none of the historical garbage.  “Physics” has become more social, and less scientific.

 The moon must be destroyed to yield a more perfect Earth! Time = Mass!

Ah, the glory days of sci.physics.

My broad specialty within geology is plate tectonics and structure, and I wrote a 30-page “history of science” type paper about the development of plate tectonic theory as an undergrad, and I take any chance I can get to spout off about it ;)

I made $600 for two hours of diplomatic discussion.