Isaac Newton contributed more to more fields of knowledge than anyone before or since. But he had no boundaries between what we now know to be reality, and mysticism. He probably spend half or more of his time working on stuff like the true proportions of the Jerusalem of the bible.
Stranger on a Train writes:
> . . . Lynn Margulis . . .
The craziest thing Lynn Margulis ever did was at the age of 19 when she married Carl Sagan.
There was this African-American fellow at Johns Hopkins who did some amazing work with pediatric neurosurgery, something to do with conjoined twins, I think. Then he suddenly started spouting a bunch of YEC nonsense, along with some pretty dubious economic theory. Not sure he “went off the rails” exactly, AFAICT he still has his talents as a medical dude, but that other stuff was plain goofy.
Damned if I can remember his name.
Huh! You’ll probably try telling us next, some crazy thing like he’s running for President or something. No serious scientist ever gets THAT crazy! That’s waaaaaaaay dang off-the-rails!
All that, yet they still called him a mug in his own country.
And it gets worse: She edged closer to AIDS Denialism, positing that AIDS and syphilis were connected and therefore downplaying HIV’s role.
This wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t immediately connect her respected name to the likes of Duesberg and similar shitheads who’ve never done anything to deserve it.
I’ve nothing to add to the lenghtening list of loony luminaries, but I wanted to give a hearty
Bravo, well played Good Sir!
for that fine work. Huzzah!
This says far more about your ideas, limitations, and prejudices than it does about the people you are criticizing.
If you believe that the Bible is literally true, then it is eminently sensible to devote time to studying it.
There have been many highly-successful scientists over the centuries who confidently claimed that “everybody knows that X is impossible” only to be proven wrong. When British science received the first stuffed specimen of a platypus, it was immediately dismissed as a hoax–after all, “everybody knows” that it’s impossible for such a thing to exist.
Lilly also dropped acid and other psychoactive drugs before climbing into isolation tanks, serving as the inspiration for the Paddy Chayefsky novel “Altered States”, and the Ken Russell movie based on it.
What do we make of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin? He was a Jesuit priest who was a legitimate paleontologist with degrees in botany, geology and zoology. He worked on the discovery of Peking Man, even if he was one of the people taken in by the Piltdown Man hoax. But he also had a deep religious faith, in an extremely mystical form, leading him to attempt to couple the theory of evolution to cosmology and the development of cosmic conciousness. The Noosphere, Omega Point and so on, his final work being “The Phenomenon of Man”.
Werner Heisenberg headed the Nazi atomic bomb program during WWII. After the war, he claimed to have intentionally done poor work and chased dead ends to prevent Hitler from getting nukes. And he may be telling the truth, since Hitler never did get a nuclear bomb.
I read his autobiography, and it seems like he was a patriotic, pro-German citizen who was nevertheless concerned about Nazi ideology, but stayed when many of his colleagues left because he thought he could help guide the Nazis in a different direction or at least make lives better for those who stayed in Germany. By the time the war started and he began his research on nukes, he was under no illusions as to the Nazis changing for the better, but by then it was too late for him to leave.
My point is that if you think he was lying in his memoirs about his motivations, he could be seen as a great scientist who invented quantum mechanics and then went to the dark side, building nukes for Hitler. Even if unsuccessful, that’s pretty bad.
First, this doesn’t really fit the thread: Nuclear bombs were and are possible, and they were possible with the technology of that era, so trying to make one then wasn’t crankery. Therefore, the least charitable interpretation of Heisenberg’s state is that he was a somewhat incompetent physicist attempting to do a great evil. However, being somewhat out of your depth in a cutting-edge field you once advanced doesn’t mean you’ve gone off the rails from a purely scientific standpoint.
Second, Hitler not getting the bomb was over-determined: He was a micro-managing idiot, a hopped-up (often literally) corporal who leveraged the incompetence of others to hijack a mostly-functional government which he then proceeded to run into the ground. Therefore, he failed to use the limited time Germany had in which it was both mobilized and not being bombed to begin serious research, which would have been hampered in any case by the fact he’d driven off a number of the best scientists with his racial policies. He was stupid enough to allow physicists to be drafted into the Wehrmacht in combat roles! Therefore, the project pottered around, hampered by politics and a severe brain drain, never amounting to much.
My point is, Heisenberg would’ve had to have had not only the physics acumen to replace a whole team of collaborators driven away or killed by Nazi stupidity, but also unrivaled political skills to secure sufficient funds and time even as the war was beginning to turn against the Nazis, plus a good helping of luck on top of that to ensure that his labs were neither far enough away from the center of Germany to be captured early, nor close enough to major cities or other obvious industrial works to be bombed once the Luftwaffe invariably began to fail, nor discovered and destroyed through Allied spying. It simply strains credibility.
So we can observe the results of Heisenberg’s actions but the mental states which produced them must always remain uncertain; there was too much interference to imagine we could disentangle the past to see things without a fog of uncertainty; I’m not anti commuting the verdict of history, but we must be certain that no information gets lost or hidden. I fear I am unequal to the task of making this clear as a bell.
These were the two that came to mind after Newton. I once heard Mullis talk about the invention of PCR.
The pair of primers was key to one of his anecdotes. Apparently, Cetus made oligo DNA using one primer and a template strand. Mullis said when he got to a lab meeting the Monday after thinking about PCR, the only person who was excited about his future Nobel Prize-winning insight was the sales rep–because the rep figured Mullis had just doubled his sales of oligo primers.
Well, I don’t think this thread is exclusive to once-respected cranks. IF Heisenberg (one of the greatest minds in physics, ever) became a Nazi and tried to help them take over the world, that’s massively evil. And I think massively evil genius scientists bent on world domination fall pretty squarely into “mad scientists” territory.
I happen to lean towards the charitable interpretation of “Heisenberg was a German patriot who attempted to help his fellow countrymen during the Nazi era even while his colleagues escaped, and then got stuck on the Nazi Manhattan Project because he was the only great physicist left”. But partly that’s because I read his autobiography and partly because I don’t want to think one of the great minds of the century, if not history, was an evil Nazi.
But I mentioned Heisenberg because there is a case to be made that my first paragraph is the real story. Like you said, the Nazi nuke program was doomed from the start, and was doomed more as the war went on. So Heisenberg may just be taking credit for that for PR’s sake, and to avoid being hanged at Nuremberg. The possibility exists that Heisenberg really was an evil Nazi genius helping Hitler take over the world, in which case I think he would clearly be a “mad scientist”, even if his mental health never faltered and he never became a crank.
I forget to mention that Lenard and Stark were Nobel Prize winners.
Another physicist-turned-Nazi was theorist Pascal Jordan, who teamed with eventual Nobel winners Max Born and Werner Heisenberg in the immediate follow-up to Heisenberg’s discovery of Quantum Mechanics (Matrix form) in 1925. According to his Wiki bio Nazi party membership may have cost Jordan a shot at the Nobel.
Einstein went on to work for nearly forty years after 1917 (nearly to his death in 1955) and, aside from an innovative design for a non-mechanism absorption refrigerator in 1926 (along with Leo Szilard, who would go on to do substantial work validating the nuclear chain reaction, the linear accelerator, cyclotron, chemostat, and a number of discoveries about the internal cellular physiology and molecular biology when he shifted fields), did little genuniely memorable or innovative work on his own. Most of his notable works after 1920 were collaborations in which the bulk of the work was done by collaborators. Einstein-Bose statistics (and the Einstein-Bose condensate that they predicted) were fundamentally developed by Satyendra Nath Bose, which were just extended in collaboration with Einstein. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox (intended to undermine the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics) was demonstrated to not prove discrete values for position and momentum under the assumption of local realism by John Stewart Bell (later confirmed by experiment in the early 'Eighteis).
Chronos is correct that Einstein doesn’t strictly belong in a list of crackpot scientists; his peculiarity is after having the revolutionary insights that gave birth to the previously conceived notions of relativity and quantum mechanics which had been matriculating for the three decdes prior to his Annus Mirabilis in 1905, he essentially become a stanch and concervative physicist hell-bent on defending the thesis of a static, continuous, universe with strictly local causality and non-stochastic realism at the fundamental level despite the growing body of evidence that the fundamental physics of the universe was quantized and required non-local connectivity. He essentially squandered his remaining carrier in physics aggressively denying the implications of quantum mechanics and insisting on a smoothly continuous model of a unified field theory in which a geometric model of gravitation served as the approach to explain electrodynamic and nuclear forces. It’s more of J.D. Salinger retreat into isolation than crackpotism, but still represents a loss of potential, where many other less celebrated scientists such as Maxwell, Bohr, Curie, Bose, Bethe, Gell-Man, the maligned Pauling, Weinberg, et cetera, continued to do progressive and sometimes groundbreaking work throughout their careers.
Sounds like a fairly typical Caltech grad to me.
To be fair, for Newton and others of his time, science as we know it today didn’t exist. For Newton, the researches into “physicks” and his development of calculus were just means to developing a “natural philosophy” of a world in which the supernatural in the form of gods, invisible fields, action-at-a-distance, chemical transmutation of elements, et cetera were all part and parcel of the same as-yet-unexplained set of phenomenon. A truly unified theory of physics that could explain more than just the gross motion of the planets or simple chemical reactions had to await the rigor of Dalton’s and Avagadro’s chemical theory of reactions, the development of thermodynamics as a mathematically grounded discipline (Carnot, Kelvin), and the conception and model of electrodynamics as a classical field theory by Maxwell, et al, and arguably the unification of all of these with statistical mechanics to explain the non-deterministic behavior of real world reactions.
Newton (and Pierre-Simon Laplace) were at the beginning of a very long line of natural philosophers who sought to put examinations of real world phenomena on a firm grounding of mathematically driven predictive models, and that application of mathematics to describe and predict behavior in a systematic way is the cornerstone of all modern ‘hard’ science, including biology, ecology, and integrative systems theory. That Newton conflated what was essentially magic with physics was a product of his unavoidable ignorance at being one of the very first to understand physical behavior in a systematic and objective way at all.
Stranger
Luckily, the Nobel is for a single finding, and not a lifetime achievement award. But, it’s hard to argue that his PCR finding wasn’t huge. It’s a technology I’ve personally used thousands of times, and am grateful for.
CRISPR technology over the last 3-4 years is the only thing that I’ve seen that comes close to PCR on shear impact and speed of adoption, and might just surpass it in importance.
Years ago Stephen Gould proposed that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin *authored *the Pitldown hoax! I’m not sure where that (Gould’s) theory stands today.
There’s no shortage of suspects:
I think the most accepted opinion is that it was Charles Dawson, as alluded to there, particularly as he perpetrated other frauds previously. It would seem out of character for the devout and philosophical Teilhard to have deliberately perpetrated a hoax. It would also not be unlikely for him to have swallowed Dawson’s story hook, line and sinker. Particularly since Dawson was a friend of his.
Even Peter Medawar, who wrote an incredibly vitriolic review of “The Phenomenon of Man”, didn’t believe him to be a charlatan:
The Wikipedia article is quite inadequate. I tried reading the book. No, he was proposing his own “radical” view of consciousness. A whole lot of technical term abuse. He thought really, really highly of his “new” idea.
Which leads us into a troublesome space under 39A. Without the help of one of the more evil NAZI scientists, Kennedy’s vision of putting a man on the moon and bringing him safely back again by the end of the decade might well have not played out. Perhaps taken much longer.
Was that V2 guy actually evil or just a facilitator of evil? Can we ever be certain one way or the other?