Entertaining Crackpottery

[lpetrich]

What's your favorite crackpottery? Especially entertaining crackpottery.

Recent events here have led me to consider this question. It must be said that lots of physics crackpottery is rather short on entertainment value. But I've found an exception, at least for me: the theories of George Francis Gillette. I first learned of his theories from Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.

Like many other anti-relativity crackpots, GFG claimed to be restoring Newtonian physics; he admired Sir Isaac Newton as the greatest genius who ever lived. He even claimed that his "spiral universe" theory "out-Newton's Newton". What is it?

The ultimate units: "unimotes". Our Universe: a "supraunimote". The cosmos: a "maximote". There's also an "ultimote" which is the "Nth sub-universe plane":

Each ultimote is simultaneously an integral part of zillions of otherplane units and only thus is its infinite allplane velocity and energy subdivided into zillions of finite planar quotas of velocity and energy.

GFG physics features "bumping" very prominently. All motions ever strive to go straight--until they bump." "Nothing else happens at all. That's all there is." "In all the cosmos there is naught but straight-flying bumping, caroming, and again straight flying. Phenomena are but lumps, jumps, and bumps. A mass unit's career is but lumping, jumping, bumping, rejumping, rebumping, and finally unlumping."

His physics also features his "backscrewing theory of gravity." He explains it as "Gravitation is the kicked back nut of the screwing bolt of radiation." "Gravitation and backscrewing are synonymous. All mass units are solar systems...of interscrewed subunits." and "Gravitation is naught but that reaction in the form of subplanar solar systems screwing through higher plane masses."

He expounded his theories in Rational, Non-Mystical Cosmos (1933), and in a shorter work, Orthodox Oxen (1929). He boasted that the latter book is completely free of "Hi-de-hi mathematics" and that it is "bristling with new axioms." It also contains numerous diagrams of the likes of "The all cosmos doughnut," and a "Laminated, solid, solid, solid, solid."

[Svartalf]

My own entertainment crackpottery used to be alternative history and mythology... stuff like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, or the rest of the Templar conspiracy, Masonic history like that expounded in knight and Lomas Hiram Key, the books of Jean Markale or Graham Hancock... but I eventually tired of them because I got fed up with theories that really can't stand if you start scratching at the facts and evidence rather than just buying the author's word wholesale... if I hadn't, I think I'd have ended up delving in theosophy and the stuff about mu and the like.

[Twiglet]

The whole cold fusion beat-up was pretty funny, especially when the truth came out about how it was detected... Pons & Fleischmann... putting their fingers over the end of a neutron detector triggering thermal neutrons which they took of evidence of cold fusion, and for aabout a year, people trying to replicate the experiment with cold cups of Palladium Deuterium tea (put kettle on luv), and just how funny it was that someone did replicate it before the explanation came out.

Other amusing things that arose from it: The US putting a $bn "cold fusion" centre up, which they were too embarrassed to close when the real explanation came out. The bragging rights that numerous UK physics departments had over chemists who didn't understand how their equipemnt worked.

Another very amusing beat-up from a Professor Andrew Lyne at Manchester University, very funny to me as I was there at the time. Lyne reported to have discovered a planet, quite wrongly, in 1991, and would have been the first person to have discovered on outside our solar systems.

Funny because the reason his finding was wrong was due to an effect he himself had identified, and published a paper about only a year or two prior to his "announcement" which was greeted with an ovation at the Royal Society at the time.

By the time people got round to establishing Lyne was wrong, he had secured both tenure and professorship at the university, and there was something of a standing joke that he fudged the whole thing to ensure precisely that outcome. I'm sure it was an honest mistake.... Wiki is very kind to him for publicly admitting the error, and Lynn went on to discover exactly the type of planet and system he was looking for over a decade later.

[Coito ergo sum]

My favorite is "new age energy" ideas of various sorts.

I find them entertaining because they are usually espoused by folks who scoff at "organized religion," but advance their own crackpot notions of "energy" fields that can be "tapped into" as making perfect sense. Like, the Secret and other crackpot ideas.

[Farsight]

I don't have any favourites, but I have a few bugbears such as time travel, parallel worlds, branes, and the holographic universe. There's simply no evidence for any of these things, and yet I see so-called skeptics swallowing them hook line and sinker. There's other things too like dark-matter WIMPs and quantum mysticism like the Copenhagen Interpretation and intrinsic spin, plus a lot more besides. But then we're into a spectrum that ranges from outright crackpottery through to wild speculation down to decades-old unverified hypotheses, and it's not easy to know where to draw the line. I'd say if the evidence is there, fine, you can examine it with a skeptical eye. Otherwise be very skeptical indeed. In particular you should be extremely skeptical of people who try to persuade you not to examine the evidence, especially those who create silly threads to distract from sincere discussion of physics.

[Twiglet]

In particular you should be extremely skeptical of people who try to persuade you not to examine the evidence, especially those who create silly threads to distract from sincere discussion of physics.

Quite right farsight......

[lpetrich]

Advocates of various crackpot theories sometimes dismiss mainstream theories as crackpottery. It's hard to compete with George Francis Gillette on relativity:

It is the "moronic brainchild of mental colic," "cross-eyed physics," "utterly mad," "the nadir of pure drivel," and "voodoo nonsense." In 1929, he predicted that by 1940, "the relativity theory will be considered a joke." "Einstein is already dead and buried, alongside Andersen, Grimm, and the Mad Hatter." About its inventor, "Einstein a scientist? It were difficult to imagine anyone more contrary to what a scientist should be...As a rational physicist, Einstein is a fair violinist."

I don't have any favourites, but I have a few bugbears such as time travel, parallel worlds, branes, and the holographic universe. There's simply no evidence for any of these things, and yet I see so-called skeptics swallowing them hook line and sinker.

Farsight, what gives you that idea? I think that some people can distinguish between well-established results and theoretical speculations.

There's other things too like dark-matter WIMPs

Dismissing them as evidence-less is absurd. I think that the success of the Cold Dark Matter hypothesis strongly supports the existence of WIMP's. Furthermore, one can get approximately the right mass density of them from the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model and certain parameter values. The next step is to detect them, and that has been VERY difficult. Farsight, if you had been living 100 - 150 years ago, would you have dismissed the existence of atoms in similar fashion?

and quantum mysticism like the Copenhagen Interpretation

I haven't bothered much with interpretations of quantum mechanics. That sort of thing makes my head ache, and I prefer the mathematics.

and intrinsic spin,

The existence of intrinsic spin is well-established. So well-established that to deny its existence is crackpottery. There are oodles of evidence for intrinsic spin.

plus a lot more besides.

Farsight, why don't you give us a list of mainstream physics theories that you dismiss as crackpottery?

But then we're into a spectrum that ranges from outright crackpottery through to wild speculation down to decades-old unverified hypotheses, and it's not easy to know where to draw the line. I'd say if the evidence is there, fine, you can examine it with a skeptical eye. Otherwise be very skeptical indeed. In particular you should be extremely skeptical of people who try to persuade you not to examine the evidence, especially those who create silly threads to distract from sincere discussion of physics.

Farsight, I don't know what you are talking about.

[JimC]

lpetrich wrote:

Advocates of various crackpot theories sometimes dismiss mainstream theories as crackpottery. It's hard to compete with George Francis Gillette on relativity:

It is the "moronic brainchild of mental colic," "cross-eyed physics," "utterly mad," "the nadir of pure drivel," and "voodoo nonsense." In 1929, he predicted that by 1940, "the relativity theory will be considered a joke." "Einstein is already dead and buried, alongside Andersen, Grimm, and the Mad Hatter." About its inventor, "Einstein a scientist? It were difficult to imagine anyone more contrary to what a scientist should be...As a rational physicist, Einstein is a fair violinist."

I wonder if the Nazis ever knew about or made use of that quote. It would have dovetailed nicely with their dismissal of "Jewish science". I wonder whether Gillette was anti-semitic?

[lpetrich]

George Francis Gillette: "Einstein a scientist? It were difficult to imagine anyone more contrary to what a scientist should be...As a rational physicist, Einstein is a fair violinist."

I wonder if the Nazis ever knew about or made use of that quote. It would have dovetailed nicely with their dismissal of "Jewish science". I wonder whether Gillette was anti-semitic?

I doubt it. I haven't been able to find much on GFG, but he wan't picking on Einstein because he was Jewish.

As to "German physics", its advocates claimed to be restoring the physics of such notable Nordics as Kepler and Newton.

[lpetrich]

Getting back to the main subject, I find that cosmological crackpottery can be very entertaining.

Perhaps my favorite is Hanns Hoerbiger's Welteislehre (WEL), his "Cosmic Ice Theory" / "World Ice Theory".

The Story of Hanns Hoerbiger's Cosmic Ice Theory

Around the turn of the last century, that Austrian engineer would look at the Moon with a small telescope, and one day, he had his first "recognition". Noticing how bright it looked, he concluded that its surface was covered with ice. Some time later, he had his second one, that Newton was wrong and gravity stops at 3 times the distance to Neptune.

According to his theory, a water-soaked star once fell into a supergiant star, spewing out lots of hydrogen and water. It condensed into the Solar System and a few other planetary systems, with the ice condensing into ice blocks. The Solar System's ice went into an ice ring, which is visible as the Milky Way. Ice blocks spiral into the Sun, and on the way, they run into the planets, coating their surfaces with ice.When one falls into the Sun, it makes a sunspot, it evaporates, and the condensed vapor covers the innermost planets with "fine ice". Ice blocks passing by the Earth are visible as meteors, and when one collides with the Earth, it makes blizzards and all-around bad weather.

The Earth has had several previous moons, which had all spiraled into the Earth. Its most recent of these moons is the Tertiary or Cenozoic Moon, and its final moments are remembered as legends about the end of the world. As it spiraled in, it made a "girdle tide" around the Earth's equator, which then poured back, making legendary floods like Noah's Flood. The Earth's present Moon was captured soon after that, and its capture sank Atlantis. It also is spiraling in and it will some day fall into the Earth.

He and schoolteacher Philipp Fauth published his theories in a monumental tome, Glazial-Kosmogonie ("Glacial Cosmogony") around 1917. As Martin Gardner had noted, the German tradition of ponderous scholarship even extended into crackpottery. They got a British follower, Hans Schindler Bellamy, who published books like Moons, Myths, and Man, and In the Beginning God. The latter book described how the Genesis creation stories were about re-creation after the infall of the Cenozoic Moon and how the Adam and Eve story is a memory of a heroine of the Flood getting a Caesarean birth.


When someone pointed out that his numbers did not work out right, Hoerbiger would respond "Calculation can only lead you astray". He claimed that pictures showing lots and lots and lots of stars in the Milky Way had been faked by "reactionary" astronomers. His followers organized a movement to pressure people into accepting his theory, and they would heckle astronomers' meetings with "Out with astronomical orthodoxy! Give us Hoerbiger!"

Along the way, they changed the theory's name from the Graeco-Latin "Glazial-Kosmogonie" to the Germanic "Welteislehre".

In the 1930's, they associated themselves with Nazism, and they stated
"Our Nordic ancestors grew strong in ice and snow; belief in the Cosmic Ice is consequently the natural heritage of Nordic Man."
"Just as it needed a child of Austrian culture--Hitler!--to put the Jewish politicians in their place, so it needed an Austrian to cleanse the world of Jewish science."
"The Fuehrer, by his very life, has proved how much a so-called 'amateur' can be superior to self-styled professionals; it needed another 'amateur' to give us a complete understanding of the Universe."

Adolf Hitler himself was not very enthusiastic about this theory, and the Nazi leadership went on record as stating that "one can be a good National Socialist without believing in the WEL."

After WWII, the WEL's supporters dropped out of sight, though they reappeared in the 1950's and 1960's. But if any WEL supporters are still around, then they have no Internet presence that I have been able to discover.

[Rum]

Homoeopathy.

[JimC]

The hollow Earth...

[lpetrich]

The hollow Earth...

An especially weird variant on that is Cyrus Reed Teed's Koreshan Universology, which states that we are living on the inside of a hollow Earth.

The sun is an invisible electromagnetic battery revolving in the universe's center on a 24-year cycle. Our visible sun is only a reflection, as is the moon, with the stars reflecting off seven mercurial discs that float in the sphere's center. Inside the earth there are three separate atmospheres: the first composed of oxygen and nitrogen and closest to the earth; the second, a hydrogen atmosphere above it; the third, an aboron (sic) atmosphere at the center. The earth's shell is one hundred miles thick and has seventeen layers. The outer seven are metallic with a gold rind on the outermost layer, the middle five are mineral and the five inward are geologic strata. Inside the shell there is life, outside a void.

From Koreshanity - Wikipedia

[Svartalf]

The hollow Earth...

Well, at least that gave rise to some nice literature and comics like Warlord.

[Farsight]

I don't have any favourites, but I have a few bugbears such as time travel, parallel worlds, branes, and the holographic universe. There's simply no evidence for any of these things, and yet I see so-called skeptics swallowing them hook line and sinker.

Farsight, what gives you that idea? I think that some people can distinguish between well-established results and theoretical speculations.

I'm sure some can, Loren. But there's a certain irony in hearing somebody scoff about some unsupported belief and then start wittering on about Novikov self-consistency principle and parallel worlds.

There's other things too like dark-matter WIMPs

Dismissing them as evidence-less is absurd.

No it isn't. There is no evidence for WIMPs, and we've been looking for them since 1987. People have claimed that they have evidence, but others in the field say they're fooling themselves, and everybody else. See http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/691 for an article on this.

I think that the success of the Cold Dark Matter hypothesis strongly supports the existence of WIMP's. Furthermore, one can get approximately the right mass density of them from the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model and certain parameter values. The next step is to detect them...

You just conceded that there is no actual evidence to support this hypothesis.

Farsight, if you had been living 100 - 150 years ago, would you have dismissed the existence of atoms in similar fashion?

No. Not at all. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism#Atomic_renaissance and note the dates.

and quantum mysticism like the Copenhagen Interpretation

I haven't bothered much with interpretations of quantum mechanics. That sort of thing makes my head ache, and I prefer the mathematics.

You should bother. And yes, you've made it perfectly clear that you prefer the mathematics to the scientific evidence.

The existence of intrinsic spin is well-established. So well-established that to deny its existence is crackpottery. There are oodles of evidence for intrinsic spin.

LOL. People who suffer from a conviction never think they do. Now go and read up on Einstein-de Haas, and when you've finished, you can dismiss that as crackpottery too.

Farsight, why don't you give us a list of mainstream physics theories that you dismiss as crackpottery?

Because it isn't a black-and-white situation. For example, quantum mechanics is solid as a rock, but the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is garbage. The Standard Model is pretty good, but the Higgs sector is "frightfully ad hoc".

But then we're into a spectrum that ranges from outright crackpottery through to wild speculation down to decades-old unverified hypotheses, and it's not easy to know where to draw the line. I'd say if the evidence is there, fine, you can examine it with a skeptical eye. Otherwise be very skeptical indeed. In particular you should be extremely skeptical of people who try to persuade you not to examine the evidence, especially those who create silly threads to distract from sincere discussion of physics.

Farsight, I don't know what you are talking about.

Yes you do. I put up threads like Time Explained, complete with references and scientific evidence. You can't deal with it, and you post up silly quack trash that distracts attention away from it.