Back in the early days of the WWW I ran across a personal website by some guy who was quite proud of his credentials as an EE. Those made him a Certified Genius®™. At least in his mind.
His pet theory was that tornadoes were
Driven by magnetic forces, not air pressure and rotational inertia, AND
Emerged from the ground and grew up into the clouds, widening as they went.
His website disappeared as the WWW stopped being a village and turned into a business.
He was sane, unlike poor Dr. Timecube. But boy howdy did he have a novel take on a lot of physics. He’d make solid sense for 3 or 4 paragraphs and then Squirrel!. The Wayback Machine wasn’t invented for a few years later, so I beleive his contributions to “science” are lost in the mists of antiquity forever.
I’d almost like to read more of that kind of stuff from a more innocent non-profit era.
The way I see it, many of professional specialties “work” regardless of how the greater cosmos outside that specialty does. And it can even be to your advantage if you have a certain touch of hyper-focus.
And fair’s fair: You do not need to understand big bang cosmology to put up a bridge. You do not need to understand evolution to program an accounting app. Brain surgery skill is independent from the Egyptian pyramids. But you WERE told of these things at some point in your education.
But as I said on another social medium back when the last big eclipse was happening: we can see that a LOT of people just held on to their general education class lessons just long enough to pass the grade, then reformatted that disk sector to record things that REALLY interested them.
We had a guy on the SDMB who didn’t believe in electrons. His theory was apparently that there was another particle (and a replacement force for the electrostatic force) that had properties that exactly matched electrons. (The Iliad wasn’t written by Homer, but by another Greek of the same name)
Sometimes I wonder if the human brain is only capable of being brilliant in so many realms at a given time and that if you are exceptionally smart and knowledgeable in some ways, you would be deficient in others. Maybe Einstein had some really daft ideas?
My father has a PhD and is/was an engineer. He also believes some highly illogical things, or sometimes cannot grasp even some simple things even when explained.
You’re describing a well-known affliction, whose grossest manifestation is Nobel disease, where geniuses in a certain field have or later develop bizarrely irrational and and sometimes hateful views. Kary Mullis and his glowing green raccoon/singing dolphin is a notorious case.
A corollary which I was first to describe but haven’t yet received the accolades I deserve, is Emeritus disease, characterized by once-competent or even brilliant academic scientists and physicians descending into rabbit holes of quackery and/or lunacy once they’ve been put out to pasture.
There was a guy who lived in Lancaster, California in the 1960’s. That area was pretty much empty desert at the time. He published a newsletter for the Flat Earth Society. He pointed out that his wife was from Australia and people did not walk around with their heads hanging down.
