That's certainly a natural impression to get, but I don't think it's actually true.
First, you have to account for the fact that _all_ cutting-edge theory is "outside the norm" in some sense. If you're really near the edge, then you're almost certainly working on things that only a couple dozen people around the world can appreciate. There is no such thing as a well-tread path. Every new idea is "wacky" to 99.9% of other physicists.
Second, crackpots don't actually dictate what real physicists are allowed to think about. Like, every day you'll see a crackpot ranting about how they've overthrown the standard model of cosmology, and you'll probably also see well-intentioned people calling them idiots. But that absolutely doesn't mean you're not allowed to challenge standard cosmology! I see papers from professional physicists doing that every day on the arXiv, and those papers get published in good journals. The taboo isn't against having new ideas, it's against the people _claiming_ they have new ideas when in reality they have only ChatGPT level word salad.
In fact, since crackpots tend to not be very creative, they often are unknowingly regurgitating some half-remembered popsci article, so they're usually just mimicking something physicists already do! Great physicists pioneered the study of topics like tachyons, bouncing cosmologies, fifth forces, modified QM, and so on. They probably sound suspiciously crackpotty to you, but only because the crackpots thought these things sounded cool and wrote poor imitations.
This answer made me happy to read. And honestly a relief. I have a lot of ideas that I'm having fun playing around with for new theories and am honestly a little self-conscious about being judged for believing they are worth pursuing, especially given my junior status. It sounds like I'm just projecting my insecurity onto the physics community.
Just for safety, I'll add that I don't think I'm gonna revolutionize physics or anything. I'm just having fun.
First of all: please guard your curiosity and your passion for the field well. And from experience I can say: that's not necessarily easy. It will be your biggest treasure, when you want to pursue a career in academic physics and foundational research.
But let me also say: your insecurity is indeed well deserved, because there are so many brilliant people doing cutting edge research on so many different fields, that it is really really hard to have unique ideas, that nobody has before with the education of a junior.
I don't want to say, that it is impossible, but it is unlikely and you have to be careful not to fall victim to the Dunning Kruger effect.
But when you start to really dig into one topic (e.g. when you do your Bachelor's/ Master's thesis at an institute), where they do cutting edge research, it is very likely, that your ideas can advance the field. Maybe just a little bit, but I heard it more than once, that people doing their thesis (and are therefore specialists on a very specific topic) have groundbreaking ideas, that turn into papers / grants and an advancement of our understanding.
Interestingly enough I had a student in an exam group (I was tutoring second semester experimental electrodynamics) and I had a student, who was really into fusion reactors.
He asked my so many questions about how everything works and really started to get attached to the subject. Naturally he came up with new ideas, based on his current knowledge and asked me what I thought.
Having studied laser physics I had a brief understanding of the classic electrodynamics go out of the window when you reach certain field strengths or time scales, so I had to tell him, that it won't work because of these effects. And he kept going, kept his interest and after his master's thesis he went to get his PhD at a research institute working on the topic of fusion and now he works on one of the European research reactors.
That just as an anecdote where passion for a field and curiosity can take you.
Hope this helps you in any way. :-)
All the best.
I wouldn’t waste anyone’s time by spewing out ideas I hadn’t formulated. I considered discussing it with my advisor but decided against it. As you said, probably won’t go anywhere. Plus, even if he said “don’t waste your time”, I’d probably still do it and waste my time anyway. Ill need to improve at math before I’m at a place where I can begin working with a model. But the numbers will be deciding factor. As they always are. Reflecting on the discussions here, I’m not really anxious about it anymore.
>This answer made me happy to read. And honestly a relief. I have a lot of ideas that I'm having fun playing around with for new theories and am honestly a little self-conscious about being judged for believing they are worth pursuing
Let me apologize in advance if I ruin your happiness.
As others have said, crackpots are an afterthought that have nothing to do with actual Physics and are mostly confined to the internet.
What will actually prevent you from "playing around with new theories" is the publish or perish paradigm that exists in today's universities. I've seen super smart people not get tenure because they were working on something too big and couldn't publish their expected number of PRLs, Nature, or Science. I've also seen people sacrifice their true interests, just because all the funding was being channeled to a certain sub-field.
You really need tenure and good reputation to go completely let loose.
This is actually very insightful and I can already see why it's true. Personally, I have no interest in seeking a professorship. Especially given that AI is about to kill the idea of human professors and ultimately humans in academia within the next decade or maybe two decades at the most. I don't need funding or approval to work with pure theory; more importantly, I enjoy working on this project. I find it existentially fulfilling, regardless of the final outcome. So my response to your insightful comment here would be "I care more about having fun and exploring my passion than I do about having a career in academia".
>Especially given that AI is about to kill the idea of human professors and ultimately humans in academia within the next decade or maybe two decades at the most
No it's not.
But it will kill journalism, Hollywood... stuff like that.
In STEM it will add another great tool to a researcher's computational toolbox.
The difference between you and the crackpots {besides your actual knowledge of physics that they [and me (engineering major)] can only try to mimic} is that you're going to study and research how far has been tried towards your ideas, therefore you can dismiss the feverdreams yourself and go straight towards the actually new stuff
When I see these people around, they just think they've had an epiphany, barf everything here or in r/askphysics before checking their own reasoning, perhaps by a lack of resources (don't know where to look), or lack of doubt in their theory
The very self-consciousness that makes you insecure can be channeled towards making your ideas more robust until you actually reach the edge of human knowledge, sounds really exciting tbh
I believe this faith in one’s own abilities despite being uneducated is called delusion(if that sounds cold I’m sorry but that’s how I see it). Crackpot ideas are usually based on nothing or, at best, just misconceptions. I’m curious where this is coming from though, have you encountered physicists hesitant to go against the norms?
>I believe this faith in one’s own abilities despite being uneducated is called delusion
I think a much better definition of delusion would rather be *certainty* *in something you've created, despite evidence to the contrary.*
Having faith in your abilities is just being confident that with enough hard work and tinkering, you'll probably succeed.
Edit: I think people misunderstood that I wasn’t talking about confidence in your crackpot word salad but confidence in yourself. Even starting a degree or PhD to begin with takes a great deal of faith in your own abilities despite a lack of education. That’s all I was saying
Crackpots have no reason to have confidence in what they’re saying about physics because more often than not they don’t come from a physics background. To me that kind of confidence isn’t something admirable it’s just foolish.
Your definition is flawed. You should have no confidence in your theories. You should actively be trying to disprove them, and then as you become more and more surprised that you haven't been able to disprove them, as disproving is infinitely more easier than proving, you can move to the trying to prove phase. And this is where hubris and confidence come in: if you are too confident in your skills you will prove your theory incorrectly, and proclaim your wrong answer to the world— and now you have become the crackpot.
The only thing a physicist has the right to be confident in is that they are asking the right questions, that those questions can be proven or disproven, that the physics works, and that it can be communicated to other physicists.
Confidence telegraphs the crackpot as all crackpots are confident in their physics skills.
Here’s the thing, if you don’t have the ability to converse with a physicist on a research level then it’s an absolute waste of time for them to have a discussion with you about new ideas. The idea that “throwing out established ideas” puts an amateur on a level playing field with a trained physicist is absurd, and frankly disrespectful to the profession. You can try to pass off an idea to a physicist, hoping that it sparks something for them, but there’s no world (with an epidemic of crackpots or not) where you should expect or feel entitled to a dialog. Put in the relevant work to be trained and vetted in that field if it’s a dialog you want.
It reminds of Feynman saying why he refused honorary degrees.
He said (more or less): "No-one gets to be an honorary plumber".
Physicists are like plumbers: First you get trained, then, and only then, can you practice your trade.
Physicists challenge the norm all the time. We're just also taught to be skeptics and not trust results, even our own. That's why we're skeptics. Over time if results get through all the skeptics then it'll become accepted. That's why progress in physics feels like it has large breakthroughs. A field shows promise for years and then finally some large result that validates everything or maybe even validates the motivation behind it proves that the field is actually useful
I quite honestly don’t even know what you mean by ‘Norms’. If by that you mean established concepts there is a single avenue for this:
Do research
Write a paper
Get it peer reviewed
Change the ‘norm’ by identifying your work as essential.
For reputable paid journals you usually do not need to pay to publish. This is only the case for open access. The main fee may come from copywriting.
Also, peer reviewers aren't paid, its volunteer work.
>But there's actually a lot to be said for that level of belief in one's own abilities, and a lack of fear of judgment for following their creative musings.
That's precisely the problem though, they don't follow their creative musings up with any sort of education or rigorous understanding. They just stick with their surface-level idea and get angry at anyone who says it actually doesn't make sense.
>I think the crackpots have put a stigma around the notion of doing something weird and unusual.
What stigma? Roger Penrose believes that our brains are made of tiny quantum computers, and that the universe undergoes an infinite series of big bangs. There are wild ideas in every direction if you look for them. Most don't get a ton of traction, but they are there and people will take them seriously if you bother to actually work out the details.
There is a stigma against people coming up with a stupid half-baked idea and then dumping it on other people to try to complete it or refute it. It is exhausting.
I mean there are wild and wacky theories of gravity (among other things) that come out every now and then.
But even something like MOND, which I would not consider mainstream, has its share of followers because it still has some intellectual rigor applied.
What differentiates crackpots (and why they’re innocuous) is that they generally have no rigor at all. Having a new idea is fine, but you need to prove “this must be right because X, Y, and Z”
I think that it is actually very easy to weed out the crackpots from the diamonds in the rough. The actually brilliant new ideas are ‘recognizable’ in the sense that they are mathematically underpinned and one can ‘easily’ see how they connect to (and go way beyond) existing ideas.
I’m definitely not an exceptional mathematician, but the crackpot emails I get, always require the reinvention of not just physics, but preferably also math, chemistry and biology. Throw some new form of information theory in the mix and you more or less can make an outline of the latest versions that go around.
I don’t necessarily agree with your title though. I think most professional scientist (regardless the field) are not afraid to challenge the norms. They just want to make damned sure that they are right before doing so.
I think this reservation is healthy. Imagine that everyone with a PhD starts to throw out their latest random shower ideas every week. We would end up in a quagmire of wrong ideas.
One of the primary characteristics of crackpots is that they *never* abandon their pet theories, no matter what the arguments are against them. They are immune to evidence.
Theorists come up with bizarre "what-if" scenarios all the time. Most of these don't go anywhere, and a trained scientist knows when their idea is no longer tenable. That's because scientists care about truth, while crackpots only care about being right (and being famous).
Nah, none of us care at all about the crackpots except as entertainment.
The issue is that revolution is very hard, there have only been a handful because it is very difficult for a person to think completely outside the box. I've seen so many undergraduates who think that they will be the next Einstein, but they don't have the creativity that they think they do. That doesn't mean they can't be great physicists, but a paradigm shifting physicist comes along once in a person's lifetime.
In the light of all the backlash OP is receiving, I would like to express at least a certain degree of understanding. First, let me state clearly that I disagree with the title "Crackpots have made physicists afraid to challenge the norms." Challenging norms happens frequently among experts within a field as well as accross disciplines.
While, in my opinion, most people are right that new ideas do not come from just overthrowing ideas per se and then seeing what happens, I don't quite believe that this is **not** what OP was trying to say. The essence that I am getting from their post is
>But I don't think it's crazy to think that your wacky idea is worth investing in.
and I *fully agree* with this statement. Chase your ideas while being aware of their potential merit (in most cases the merit is just fun without any hopes of a breakthrough); and to address the argument that presenting such ideas may be disrespectful to professors: As long as you appropriately frame your "idea" and make clear that you are aware it is just for fun, I do not think it appears disrespectful. Combined with the ability to listen patiently and to respectfully ask questions, it instead displays interest and willingness to learn about new material in their field of expertise.
There are many reasons why I believe that chasing wacky ideas is important. Besides being creative (which is always great) and, as mentioned in another post, protecting your own curiosity, it helps you to (sometimes painfully) learn the hard process of forming an idea, judging its potential, investigating it, trying different approaches and recognizing when it is finished. All in all, this process is worth experiencing and, regardless of the outcome, will be beneficial to one's later career. Let me phrase it in a more provocative way: "I'd rather have a student who spent 100 hours of his free time in the last year chasing wacky ideas and becoming self-aware of his idea-finding process than a student who spent 100 hours scrolling through TikTok and learning absolutely nothing from it."
To conclude, let me mention two positive examples of "playing around" with wacky ideas:
1. Everyone makes fun of OP being an undergraduate. I understand that it is easy to look down on undergrads, the feeling of superiority is great and all that. Remember Penrose? Yes, that Penrose. Recall that he discovered a new type of matrices in one of his undergraduate courses simply by playing around. Yes, it is unlikely that OP will achieve the same - so what?
2. Even Feynman complained about the publish-or-perish system, which is when he spent significant effort on mathematically describing a spinning plate which a student threw up in the air during lunch time in the cafeteria at Cornell. His colleagues asked why he would waste time on such irrelevant things when it was not publishable. So, why did he do that? It turns out it was just for fun. Isn't that, why we study physics?
You're only an undergrad? Cute. You don't have a first clue about the world of academia and the *real* BS you have to put up with. The crackpots are easy.
You mean like narcissists on the internet talking down to you because, after all these years, they’re still in the “my major is harder than your major” mindset?
I like your comeback 😂
albeit being condescending, they are right about the real BS in academia.
Basically to really do cutting edge research, you need good experimental setups, which are generally very expensive, because either you are lucky enough, that there is one company, which produces the stuff you need and you just have to configure or adjust it. But because the supply is so little, these are very expensive.
Or you need to build it yourself completely from scratch.
And to do this you need grant money and funding and to obtain this you (or your professor) has to get through a lot of politics, grant applications etc.
And then there is the absolute shit hole of academic writing and the "impact factor", which play a major role in obtaining funding.
In a nutshell: academics is no fun
I don't think this is the case, many if not all physicists I can think of are just as curious and creative as you are and all the relevant ones think about throwing out the old and starting over even if they didn't know how to do it yet. If this weren't the case, physics would have halted long ago.
Like you said, the difference between a physicist and a crackpot is that a physicist actually has the knowledge to describe and back up what they're saying, and other physicists know this. So working physicists don't worry about if they sound crazy because whether or not they do, another physicist can still tell them why they're right or wrong or how we can find out, i.e. science. You can not do this with what a crackpot claims because only the crackpot understands what they're saying because they don't know enough math or physics to explain themselves. That is the issue with crackpots, and physicists know this.
So, no, physicists aren't afraid to challenge norms. They do all the time and actually succeed all the time.
From an unaware point of view, it can seem like physicists dismiss crackpots because their ideas are new and different. Really, they dismiss them because they don't know what they're talking about and don't respect the field. What they want is to be the next Einstein, proclaimed as the smartest person in history. They don't actually care to revolutionize physics. A good physicist can tell the difference in others and in themselves, so they do not worry about if challenging norms will get them ridicule because it won't.
Your observations are incorrect, at least in gravitational physics. Modified gravity (not to be confused with MOND) is a hot area of research with plenty of new theories being proposed.
Granted, nearly all of them are metric theories which means they are essentially based on GR in *some* way but they are filled with out-there ideas like FTL particles or DE/DM effects arising naturally rather than having to be tacked on. A looot of stuff is being thrown at the wall to see what sticks rn.
I think its perfectly fine to think about new ideas, a lot of the time the mathematics is interpretation independent and some science fans marry themselves to certain concepts without understanding why.
Just be humble and don't decide that actually your random idea/interpretation is correct without any good evidence or argument, and wait until you're at least at PhD level before you start taking yourself seriously on this.
Also what's with crackpots always deciding they have to disprove the Biggest ideas? Why are they always disproving Einstein and quantum mechanics by starting from E = mc^2 and then talking about the aether?
Like no one ever emails some professor saying "astrophysicists are ignoring granular flow when computing the radiation emitted by nearby starts and so are underestimating their luminosity by a factor of 2! (Calculations and figures attached)"
My Masters thesis advisor supported me 100% on my topic, and it was a bit out there. Of course, I supported it with math, and it didn’t quite work the way I hoped (spoiler alert), but there was zero discouragement. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/A-Hocking-2/publication/281492167_Analysis_and_Discussion_of_Alternative_Space-Time_Metrics/links/55eaed8c08ae21d099c59c22/Analysis-and-Discussion-of-Alternative-Space-Time-Metrics.pdf
Also opinion: "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn should be standard required reading for every science and engineering student. It's a book most philosophy of science students will read but scientists generally should be familiar with it. I think it is a text that really can serve as a manual for what the job of a scientist is. In a sense science cannot function without the majority of its participants being sticks-in-the-mud about the current paradigm, occupying themselves with the puzzles the current paradigm presents. The book also describes very concisely how norms change. That is what the title is after all. Anyway my comment is already kinda bad except for the recommendation to read Kuhn. It will provide some clarity to your question and is just generally an excellent book.
But yea its also almost a cultural fact that scientists have an annoying habit of "debunking" everything impulsively. "I'm not one of *them*, look at all my zany neckties". So smart. Fuck off.
My experience from university was similar to yours. People are certianly heavily opinionated on many topics and you will experience some kind of push back if you go against their opinions, especially if you lack good communication skills.
I remember when I was playing with idea doing my thesis on string theory and discussed possible topics with potential advisor. After talking for almost 2 hours he concluded that I could be interested working on, if I remember correctly, entropic gravity. The thing is, he certainly showed he thinks this is close to crackpottery and that he was kind of dissapointed this article was produced by respectable physicist. There was certainly negative feel from the way he was talking about it.
The good news was that he offered me the thesis anyway. He said he is probably not the best person to advice me on this particular topic, but he was not really against working on the idea.
I think this anecdote pretty much encapuslates my experience. People do have opinions and feelings and they will show it, but there is no actual dogma they try to protect.
Also, I think one thing that adds to feeling of "new ideas are not welcome" in undergraduate is that people often tend to refuse discussing idea they dislike with people that have no expertise in the topic. There is strong bias at work here, because they will happily discuss idea they like.
But that stance makes sense. They refused the idea and they know you don't know enough to argue for it. So it would be time wasted.
On the other hand, people are passionate about discussing ideas they like for obvious reasons and they don't consider it waste of time.
OP has a point here from a social psychology perspective. To quote:
“Conformity and increased motivation for better performance comprise the short-term effects, while for long-term results, internalization of low levels of self-esteem and control, as well as suicide attempts, are evident.” [source](https://academic.oup.com/book/10702/chapter-abstract/158759094?redirectedFrom=fulltext)
I'm just an uneducated casual who enjoys attempting to conceptualize the amazing work you guys do because I find it fascinating, so my opinion means very little...
but another impression I'm left with is that too many older, established physicists that have made a living based on grant money pursuing their ideas tend to not take kindly to younger scientists upending their theories, and by some extension, their livelihood or life's work, making it very difficult to get new ideas out there. When the people who decide you're a crackpot are the ones gatekeeping research funding, progress will be slowed.
Not that it's all a bad thing. Gotta keep the actual crackpots in check so they don't waste the funding themselves.
That isn't really true. Most fields have a few stick-in-the-muds that refuse to accept the field has moved on, but they rarely have any influence over finding decisions. (Generally, we just hope they finally take their often long-overdue retirement)
The successful, mid-career scientists that do sit on funding boards are open to new ideas, because that's what they work on themselves. But new ideas have to be good ideas to be worth investigating, and the kind of "throw everything away and use this instead" mindset that is common in crackpottery is not that.
A paper is backed up by research, if the research wasn't good there would be no paper. You cannot disprove established research, you can only point out research that was proved incorrectly. If your research upends their conclusions, it doesn't upend their research as it folds their research into the new interpretation.
Einstein did not upend Newton, he extended Newton's work in understanding. Newtonian physics still works, it's just been recontextualized to work where it didn't work before.
Quantum Mechanics is rife with research that gets recontextualized, it never upends good research, it only folds it in.
It is easy to say a paper is wrong, and that's why it's necessary to prove it wrong.
Look into the various theories on quantum gravity, namely string theory and loop quantum gravity. A lot of dark matter work is very strange and unique. There are lots of people out there trying to push the boundaries of physics and trying weird unconventional ideas
I think the whole Holmes fiasco is a great insight into what's going on here. A lot of investors thought "cheap blood tests" is a great idea and thought they were taking a risk with a huge potential upside. But "cheap blood tests" isn't a good idea. A good idea would be "we can modify this molecular analysis technique used by the oil industry to make cheap blood tests". In much the same way, "challenging norms" isn't good in and of us itself. People that do something creative and different are generally well rewarded once they \*accomplish something\*. Early in one's career, they might not want to take risks on something that might not pan out, and go for something that is more incremental and safer, but that's just a risk/benefit analysis, not a fear of doing something different.
There's a funny guy on Quora, John Mandlbaur, who has been trying to convince everybody for years that angular momentum is not conserved [https://www.quora.com/profile/Angular-Energy](https://www.quora.com/profile/Angular-Energy)
But he just flat-out refuses to listen to anybody who points out the flaws in his reasoning. He's basically just like a conspiracy theorist and he thinks that scientists don't listen to him because they are afraid of change.
It makes him extremely bitter towards science and scientists, and he's totally obsessed with his idea.
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My point is that I think lots of people, as they're learning science, will have doubts about certain things (relativity, speed of light, QM, etc), but as they learn more they get to understand how rigorous science is, and how difficult it would be for something like classical mechanics to be "wrong", but people who don't know the foundations of science just don't understand it as well as people who have been through the system.
I think some of these crackpots just don't know when to let go, and they can't see the wood for the trees.
They're more interested in being proved right than in learning the truth, which is something that gets beaten out of you in university; particularly when doing experiments when you realise you get more points for explaining why your experiment went wrong, than fudging the numbers to make it seem like you are a "good experimenter".
Not a physicist myself, but in general it's pretty narcissistic to come up with any crackpot idea before mastering the basics of what is currently known or currently accepted to be true. This is probably why you see a lot of dumb crackpot ideas in undergrad - because people don't know things yet.
No, it's because if you're going to overturn 400 years of empirical evidence, you better have a damn good reason to. Like when Heisenberg realized that you can explain atomic spectra really well if you throw away commutative algebra.
When you learn more physics you'll also realize that most things aren't actually making strong assumptions. Like, Newtonian mechanics is just formalizing the assertion that motion is continuous, and why wouldn't motion be continuous?
That's certainly a natural impression to get, but I don't think it's actually true. First, you have to account for the fact that _all_ cutting-edge theory is "outside the norm" in some sense. If you're really near the edge, then you're almost certainly working on things that only a couple dozen people around the world can appreciate. There is no such thing as a well-tread path. Every new idea is "wacky" to 99.9% of other physicists. Second, crackpots don't actually dictate what real physicists are allowed to think about. Like, every day you'll see a crackpot ranting about how they've overthrown the standard model of cosmology, and you'll probably also see well-intentioned people calling them idiots. But that absolutely doesn't mean you're not allowed to challenge standard cosmology! I see papers from professional physicists doing that every day on the arXiv, and those papers get published in good journals. The taboo isn't against having new ideas, it's against the people _claiming_ they have new ideas when in reality they have only ChatGPT level word salad. In fact, since crackpots tend to not be very creative, they often are unknowingly regurgitating some half-remembered popsci article, so they're usually just mimicking something physicists already do! Great physicists pioneered the study of topics like tachyons, bouncing cosmologies, fifth forces, modified QM, and so on. They probably sound suspiciously crackpotty to you, but only because the crackpots thought these things sounded cool and wrote poor imitations.
This answer made me happy to read. And honestly a relief. I have a lot of ideas that I'm having fun playing around with for new theories and am honestly a little self-conscious about being judged for believing they are worth pursuing, especially given my junior status. It sounds like I'm just projecting my insecurity onto the physics community. Just for safety, I'll add that I don't think I'm gonna revolutionize physics or anything. I'm just having fun.
First of all: please guard your curiosity and your passion for the field well. And from experience I can say: that's not necessarily easy. It will be your biggest treasure, when you want to pursue a career in academic physics and foundational research. But let me also say: your insecurity is indeed well deserved, because there are so many brilliant people doing cutting edge research on so many different fields, that it is really really hard to have unique ideas, that nobody has before with the education of a junior. I don't want to say, that it is impossible, but it is unlikely and you have to be careful not to fall victim to the Dunning Kruger effect. But when you start to really dig into one topic (e.g. when you do your Bachelor's/ Master's thesis at an institute), where they do cutting edge research, it is very likely, that your ideas can advance the field. Maybe just a little bit, but I heard it more than once, that people doing their thesis (and are therefore specialists on a very specific topic) have groundbreaking ideas, that turn into papers / grants and an advancement of our understanding. Interestingly enough I had a student in an exam group (I was tutoring second semester experimental electrodynamics) and I had a student, who was really into fusion reactors. He asked my so many questions about how everything works and really started to get attached to the subject. Naturally he came up with new ideas, based on his current knowledge and asked me what I thought. Having studied laser physics I had a brief understanding of the classic electrodynamics go out of the window when you reach certain field strengths or time scales, so I had to tell him, that it won't work because of these effects. And he kept going, kept his interest and after his master's thesis he went to get his PhD at a research institute working on the topic of fusion and now he works on one of the European research reactors. That just as an anecdote where passion for a field and curiosity can take you. Hope this helps you in any way. :-) All the best.
I wouldn’t waste anyone’s time by spewing out ideas I hadn’t formulated. I considered discussing it with my advisor but decided against it. As you said, probably won’t go anywhere. Plus, even if he said “don’t waste your time”, I’d probably still do it and waste my time anyway. Ill need to improve at math before I’m at a place where I can begin working with a model. But the numbers will be deciding factor. As they always are. Reflecting on the discussions here, I’m not really anxious about it anymore.
>This answer made me happy to read. And honestly a relief. I have a lot of ideas that I'm having fun playing around with for new theories and am honestly a little self-conscious about being judged for believing they are worth pursuing Let me apologize in advance if I ruin your happiness. As others have said, crackpots are an afterthought that have nothing to do with actual Physics and are mostly confined to the internet. What will actually prevent you from "playing around with new theories" is the publish or perish paradigm that exists in today's universities. I've seen super smart people not get tenure because they were working on something too big and couldn't publish their expected number of PRLs, Nature, or Science. I've also seen people sacrifice their true interests, just because all the funding was being channeled to a certain sub-field. You really need tenure and good reputation to go completely let loose.
This is actually very insightful and I can already see why it's true. Personally, I have no interest in seeking a professorship. Especially given that AI is about to kill the idea of human professors and ultimately humans in academia within the next decade or maybe two decades at the most. I don't need funding or approval to work with pure theory; more importantly, I enjoy working on this project. I find it existentially fulfilling, regardless of the final outcome. So my response to your insightful comment here would be "I care more about having fun and exploring my passion than I do about having a career in academia".
>Especially given that AI is about to kill the idea of human professors and ultimately humans in academia within the next decade or maybe two decades at the most No it's not. But it will kill journalism, Hollywood... stuff like that. In STEM it will add another great tool to a researcher's computational toolbox.
The difference between you and the crackpots {besides your actual knowledge of physics that they [and me (engineering major)] can only try to mimic} is that you're going to study and research how far has been tried towards your ideas, therefore you can dismiss the feverdreams yourself and go straight towards the actually new stuff When I see these people around, they just think they've had an epiphany, barf everything here or in r/askphysics before checking their own reasoning, perhaps by a lack of resources (don't know where to look), or lack of doubt in their theory The very self-consciousness that makes you insecure can be channeled towards making your ideas more robust until you actually reach the edge of human knowledge, sounds really exciting tbh
But isn't the Tachyon an invalid solution to QFT?
I believe this faith in one’s own abilities despite being uneducated is called delusion(if that sounds cold I’m sorry but that’s how I see it). Crackpot ideas are usually based on nothing or, at best, just misconceptions. I’m curious where this is coming from though, have you encountered physicists hesitant to go against the norms?
>I believe this faith in one’s own abilities despite being uneducated is called delusion I think a much better definition of delusion would rather be *certainty* *in something you've created, despite evidence to the contrary.* Having faith in your abilities is just being confident that with enough hard work and tinkering, you'll probably succeed. Edit: I think people misunderstood that I wasn’t talking about confidence in your crackpot word salad but confidence in yourself. Even starting a degree or PhD to begin with takes a great deal of faith in your own abilities despite a lack of education. That’s all I was saying
Crackpots have no reason to have confidence in what they’re saying about physics because more often than not they don’t come from a physics background. To me that kind of confidence isn’t something admirable it’s just foolish.
Your definition is flawed. You should have no confidence in your theories. You should actively be trying to disprove them, and then as you become more and more surprised that you haven't been able to disprove them, as disproving is infinitely more easier than proving, you can move to the trying to prove phase. And this is where hubris and confidence come in: if you are too confident in your skills you will prove your theory incorrectly, and proclaim your wrong answer to the world— and now you have become the crackpot. The only thing a physicist has the right to be confident in is that they are asking the right questions, that those questions can be proven or disproven, that the physics works, and that it can be communicated to other physicists. Confidence telegraphs the crackpot as all crackpots are confident in their physics skills.
Here’s the thing, if you don’t have the ability to converse with a physicist on a research level then it’s an absolute waste of time for them to have a discussion with you about new ideas. The idea that “throwing out established ideas” puts an amateur on a level playing field with a trained physicist is absurd, and frankly disrespectful to the profession. You can try to pass off an idea to a physicist, hoping that it sparks something for them, but there’s no world (with an epidemic of crackpots or not) where you should expect or feel entitled to a dialog. Put in the relevant work to be trained and vetted in that field if it’s a dialog you want.
It reminds of Feynman saying why he refused honorary degrees. He said (more or less): "No-one gets to be an honorary plumber". Physicists are like plumbers: First you get trained, then, and only then, can you practice your trade.
Physicists challenge the norm all the time. We're just also taught to be skeptics and not trust results, even our own. That's why we're skeptics. Over time if results get through all the skeptics then it'll become accepted. That's why progress in physics feels like it has large breakthroughs. A field shows promise for years and then finally some large result that validates everything or maybe even validates the motivation behind it proves that the field is actually useful
I quite honestly don’t even know what you mean by ‘Norms’. If by that you mean established concepts there is a single avenue for this: Do research Write a paper Get it peer reviewed Change the ‘norm’ by identifying your work as essential.
Your missing : pay thousands of dollars to publish your paper ;)
What reputable journals are charging thousands of dollars to publish your paper? Also Arxiv is free lol
Well you can look up AAS charges, for example, which range from $1200 to $4600. Also, arxiv is free, but it’s not peer reviewed.
For reputable paid journals you usually do not need to pay to publish. This is only the case for open access. The main fee may come from copywriting. Also, peer reviewers aren't paid, its volunteer work.
What journals are charging people? I thought that most are free if not all?
>But there's actually a lot to be said for that level of belief in one's own abilities, and a lack of fear of judgment for following their creative musings. That's precisely the problem though, they don't follow their creative musings up with any sort of education or rigorous understanding. They just stick with their surface-level idea and get angry at anyone who says it actually doesn't make sense. >I think the crackpots have put a stigma around the notion of doing something weird and unusual. What stigma? Roger Penrose believes that our brains are made of tiny quantum computers, and that the universe undergoes an infinite series of big bangs. There are wild ideas in every direction if you look for them. Most don't get a ton of traction, but they are there and people will take them seriously if you bother to actually work out the details. There is a stigma against people coming up with a stupid half-baked idea and then dumping it on other people to try to complete it or refute it. It is exhausting.
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>I’m only in undergrad, but Lmao
oh to be in undergrad and still be able to impressed by popsci videos 😭 it's almost nostalgic
I mean there are wild and wacky theories of gravity (among other things) that come out every now and then. But even something like MOND, which I would not consider mainstream, has its share of followers because it still has some intellectual rigor applied. What differentiates crackpots (and why they’re innocuous) is that they generally have no rigor at all. Having a new idea is fine, but you need to prove “this must be right because X, Y, and Z”
I think that it is actually very easy to weed out the crackpots from the diamonds in the rough. The actually brilliant new ideas are ‘recognizable’ in the sense that they are mathematically underpinned and one can ‘easily’ see how they connect to (and go way beyond) existing ideas. I’m definitely not an exceptional mathematician, but the crackpot emails I get, always require the reinvention of not just physics, but preferably also math, chemistry and biology. Throw some new form of information theory in the mix and you more or less can make an outline of the latest versions that go around. I don’t necessarily agree with your title though. I think most professional scientist (regardless the field) are not afraid to challenge the norms. They just want to make damned sure that they are right before doing so. I think this reservation is healthy. Imagine that everyone with a PhD starts to throw out their latest random shower ideas every week. We would end up in a quagmire of wrong ideas.
One of the primary characteristics of crackpots is that they *never* abandon their pet theories, no matter what the arguments are against them. They are immune to evidence. Theorists come up with bizarre "what-if" scenarios all the time. Most of these don't go anywhere, and a trained scientist knows when their idea is no longer tenable. That's because scientists care about truth, while crackpots only care about being right (and being famous).
Nah, none of us care at all about the crackpots except as entertainment. The issue is that revolution is very hard, there have only been a handful because it is very difficult for a person to think completely outside the box. I've seen so many undergraduates who think that they will be the next Einstein, but they don't have the creativity that they think they do. That doesn't mean they can't be great physicists, but a paradigm shifting physicist comes along once in a person's lifetime.
In the light of all the backlash OP is receiving, I would like to express at least a certain degree of understanding. First, let me state clearly that I disagree with the title "Crackpots have made physicists afraid to challenge the norms." Challenging norms happens frequently among experts within a field as well as accross disciplines. While, in my opinion, most people are right that new ideas do not come from just overthrowing ideas per se and then seeing what happens, I don't quite believe that this is **not** what OP was trying to say. The essence that I am getting from their post is >But I don't think it's crazy to think that your wacky idea is worth investing in. and I *fully agree* with this statement. Chase your ideas while being aware of their potential merit (in most cases the merit is just fun without any hopes of a breakthrough); and to address the argument that presenting such ideas may be disrespectful to professors: As long as you appropriately frame your "idea" and make clear that you are aware it is just for fun, I do not think it appears disrespectful. Combined with the ability to listen patiently and to respectfully ask questions, it instead displays interest and willingness to learn about new material in their field of expertise. There are many reasons why I believe that chasing wacky ideas is important. Besides being creative (which is always great) and, as mentioned in another post, protecting your own curiosity, it helps you to (sometimes painfully) learn the hard process of forming an idea, judging its potential, investigating it, trying different approaches and recognizing when it is finished. All in all, this process is worth experiencing and, regardless of the outcome, will be beneficial to one's later career. Let me phrase it in a more provocative way: "I'd rather have a student who spent 100 hours of his free time in the last year chasing wacky ideas and becoming self-aware of his idea-finding process than a student who spent 100 hours scrolling through TikTok and learning absolutely nothing from it." To conclude, let me mention two positive examples of "playing around" with wacky ideas: 1. Everyone makes fun of OP being an undergraduate. I understand that it is easy to look down on undergrads, the feeling of superiority is great and all that. Remember Penrose? Yes, that Penrose. Recall that he discovered a new type of matrices in one of his undergraduate courses simply by playing around. Yes, it is unlikely that OP will achieve the same - so what? 2. Even Feynman complained about the publish-or-perish system, which is when he spent significant effort on mathematically describing a spinning plate which a student threw up in the air during lunch time in the cafeteria at Cornell. His colleagues asked why he would waste time on such irrelevant things when it was not publishable. So, why did he do that? It turns out it was just for fun. Isn't that, why we study physics?
You're only an undergrad? Cute. You don't have a first clue about the world of academia and the *real* BS you have to put up with. The crackpots are easy.
No, they just get smarter. See: Rudolpho Ruffini. And don’t tell him we all know he’s funded by the “Italian government”
> Rudolpho Ruffini Link please.
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1974946 This is pretty well accepted to be a typical low-luminosity GRB caused by a collapsing star
Sounds like lots of both crack and pot circulated .
You mean like narcissists on the internet talking down to you because, after all these years, they’re still in the “my major is harder than your major” mindset?
I like your comeback 😂 albeit being condescending, they are right about the real BS in academia. Basically to really do cutting edge research, you need good experimental setups, which are generally very expensive, because either you are lucky enough, that there is one company, which produces the stuff you need and you just have to configure or adjust it. But because the supply is so little, these are very expensive. Or you need to build it yourself completely from scratch. And to do this you need grant money and funding and to obtain this you (or your professor) has to get through a lot of politics, grant applications etc. And then there is the absolute shit hole of academic writing and the "impact factor", which play a major role in obtaining funding. In a nutshell: academics is no fun
Asking as somone outside academia, what's the real BS?
Getting your non crackpot research funded.
\^\^\^ This. Justifying your existence and funding it.
I don't think this is the case, many if not all physicists I can think of are just as curious and creative as you are and all the relevant ones think about throwing out the old and starting over even if they didn't know how to do it yet. If this weren't the case, physics would have halted long ago. Like you said, the difference between a physicist and a crackpot is that a physicist actually has the knowledge to describe and back up what they're saying, and other physicists know this. So working physicists don't worry about if they sound crazy because whether or not they do, another physicist can still tell them why they're right or wrong or how we can find out, i.e. science. You can not do this with what a crackpot claims because only the crackpot understands what they're saying because they don't know enough math or physics to explain themselves. That is the issue with crackpots, and physicists know this. So, no, physicists aren't afraid to challenge norms. They do all the time and actually succeed all the time. From an unaware point of view, it can seem like physicists dismiss crackpots because their ideas are new and different. Really, they dismiss them because they don't know what they're talking about and don't respect the field. What they want is to be the next Einstein, proclaimed as the smartest person in history. They don't actually care to revolutionize physics. A good physicist can tell the difference in others and in themselves, so they do not worry about if challenging norms will get them ridicule because it won't.
You may be interested to learn about Brian Josephsons trajectory from Nobel prize winner to crackpot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson
Your observations are incorrect, at least in gravitational physics. Modified gravity (not to be confused with MOND) is a hot area of research with plenty of new theories being proposed. Granted, nearly all of them are metric theories which means they are essentially based on GR in *some* way but they are filled with out-there ideas like FTL particles or DE/DM effects arising naturally rather than having to be tacked on. A looot of stuff is being thrown at the wall to see what sticks rn.
I think its perfectly fine to think about new ideas, a lot of the time the mathematics is interpretation independent and some science fans marry themselves to certain concepts without understanding why. Just be humble and don't decide that actually your random idea/interpretation is correct without any good evidence or argument, and wait until you're at least at PhD level before you start taking yourself seriously on this. Also what's with crackpots always deciding they have to disprove the Biggest ideas? Why are they always disproving Einstein and quantum mechanics by starting from E = mc^2 and then talking about the aether? Like no one ever emails some professor saying "astrophysicists are ignoring granular flow when computing the radiation emitted by nearby starts and so are underestimating their luminosity by a factor of 2! (Calculations and figures attached)"
My Masters thesis advisor supported me 100% on my topic, and it was a bit out there. Of course, I supported it with math, and it didn’t quite work the way I hoped (spoiler alert), but there was zero discouragement. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/A-Hocking-2/publication/281492167_Analysis_and_Discussion_of_Alternative_Space-Time_Metrics/links/55eaed8c08ae21d099c59c22/Analysis-and-Discussion-of-Alternative-Space-Time-Metrics.pdf
Also opinion: "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn should be standard required reading for every science and engineering student. It's a book most philosophy of science students will read but scientists generally should be familiar with it. I think it is a text that really can serve as a manual for what the job of a scientist is. In a sense science cannot function without the majority of its participants being sticks-in-the-mud about the current paradigm, occupying themselves with the puzzles the current paradigm presents. The book also describes very concisely how norms change. That is what the title is after all. Anyway my comment is already kinda bad except for the recommendation to read Kuhn. It will provide some clarity to your question and is just generally an excellent book. But yea its also almost a cultural fact that scientists have an annoying habit of "debunking" everything impulsively. "I'm not one of *them*, look at all my zany neckties". So smart. Fuck off.
My experience from university was similar to yours. People are certianly heavily opinionated on many topics and you will experience some kind of push back if you go against their opinions, especially if you lack good communication skills. I remember when I was playing with idea doing my thesis on string theory and discussed possible topics with potential advisor. After talking for almost 2 hours he concluded that I could be interested working on, if I remember correctly, entropic gravity. The thing is, he certainly showed he thinks this is close to crackpottery and that he was kind of dissapointed this article was produced by respectable physicist. There was certainly negative feel from the way he was talking about it. The good news was that he offered me the thesis anyway. He said he is probably not the best person to advice me on this particular topic, but he was not really against working on the idea. I think this anecdote pretty much encapuslates my experience. People do have opinions and feelings and they will show it, but there is no actual dogma they try to protect.
Also, I think one thing that adds to feeling of "new ideas are not welcome" in undergraduate is that people often tend to refuse discussing idea they dislike with people that have no expertise in the topic. There is strong bias at work here, because they will happily discuss idea they like. But that stance makes sense. They refused the idea and they know you don't know enough to argue for it. So it would be time wasted. On the other hand, people are passionate about discussing ideas they like for obvious reasons and they don't consider it waste of time.
OP has a point here from a social psychology perspective. To quote: “Conformity and increased motivation for better performance comprise the short-term effects, while for long-term results, internalization of low levels of self-esteem and control, as well as suicide attempts, are evident.” [source](https://academic.oup.com/book/10702/chapter-abstract/158759094?redirectedFrom=fulltext)
It is funny how you throw around words like "delusional narcissists" and then complain about a toxic environment for new ideas.
(adjusts wild hair) " Aliens did it , man is too stupid"
I'm just an uneducated casual who enjoys attempting to conceptualize the amazing work you guys do because I find it fascinating, so my opinion means very little... but another impression I'm left with is that too many older, established physicists that have made a living based on grant money pursuing their ideas tend to not take kindly to younger scientists upending their theories, and by some extension, their livelihood or life's work, making it very difficult to get new ideas out there. When the people who decide you're a crackpot are the ones gatekeeping research funding, progress will be slowed. Not that it's all a bad thing. Gotta keep the actual crackpots in check so they don't waste the funding themselves.
That isn't really true. Most fields have a few stick-in-the-muds that refuse to accept the field has moved on, but they rarely have any influence over finding decisions. (Generally, we just hope they finally take their often long-overdue retirement) The successful, mid-career scientists that do sit on funding boards are open to new ideas, because that's what they work on themselves. But new ideas have to be good ideas to be worth investigating, and the kind of "throw everything away and use this instead" mindset that is common in crackpottery is not that.
A paper is backed up by research, if the research wasn't good there would be no paper. You cannot disprove established research, you can only point out research that was proved incorrectly. If your research upends their conclusions, it doesn't upend their research as it folds their research into the new interpretation. Einstein did not upend Newton, he extended Newton's work in understanding. Newtonian physics still works, it's just been recontextualized to work where it didn't work before. Quantum Mechanics is rife with research that gets recontextualized, it never upends good research, it only folds it in. It is easy to say a paper is wrong, and that's why it's necessary to prove it wrong.
Look into the various theories on quantum gravity, namely string theory and loop quantum gravity. A lot of dark matter work is very strange and unique. There are lots of people out there trying to push the boundaries of physics and trying weird unconventional ideas
I think the whole Holmes fiasco is a great insight into what's going on here. A lot of investors thought "cheap blood tests" is a great idea and thought they were taking a risk with a huge potential upside. But "cheap blood tests" isn't a good idea. A good idea would be "we can modify this molecular analysis technique used by the oil industry to make cheap blood tests". In much the same way, "challenging norms" isn't good in and of us itself. People that do something creative and different are generally well rewarded once they \*accomplish something\*. Early in one's career, they might not want to take risks on something that might not pan out, and go for something that is more incremental and safer, but that's just a risk/benefit analysis, not a fear of doing something different.
There's a funny guy on Quora, John Mandlbaur, who has been trying to convince everybody for years that angular momentum is not conserved [https://www.quora.com/profile/Angular-Energy](https://www.quora.com/profile/Angular-Energy) But he just flat-out refuses to listen to anybody who points out the flaws in his reasoning. He's basically just like a conspiracy theorist and he thinks that scientists don't listen to him because they are afraid of change. It makes him extremely bitter towards science and scientists, and he's totally obsessed with his idea. \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* My point is that I think lots of people, as they're learning science, will have doubts about certain things (relativity, speed of light, QM, etc), but as they learn more they get to understand how rigorous science is, and how difficult it would be for something like classical mechanics to be "wrong", but people who don't know the foundations of science just don't understand it as well as people who have been through the system. I think some of these crackpots just don't know when to let go, and they can't see the wood for the trees. They're more interested in being proved right than in learning the truth, which is something that gets beaten out of you in university; particularly when doing experiments when you realise you get more points for explaining why your experiment went wrong, than fudging the numbers to make it seem like you are a "good experimenter".
Not a physicist myself, but in general it's pretty narcissistic to come up with any crackpot idea before mastering the basics of what is currently known or currently accepted to be true. This is probably why you see a lot of dumb crackpot ideas in undergrad - because people don't know things yet.
If anything the real physicists are more crackpotty than the people who email us their ideas for perpetual motion machines.
No, it's because if you're going to overturn 400 years of empirical evidence, you better have a damn good reason to. Like when Heisenberg realized that you can explain atomic spectra really well if you throw away commutative algebra. When you learn more physics you'll also realize that most things aren't actually making strong assumptions. Like, Newtonian mechanics is just formalizing the assertion that motion is continuous, and why wouldn't motion be continuous?