I just heard about this the other day, as well – I think I heard it in an interview on NPR.
A little tangential, but in the same ballpark –
I receive a lot of unsolicited physics crackpot materials. Like, a lot. Roughly one a day on average. What’s remarkable in most of these is the sheer amount of effort put in to their construction.
One from earlier this week includes a PDF with sixty high-production-value pages with figures, definitions, elaborate equations and derivations that are all, of course, nonsense. The discourse careens rapidly between the EM spectrum, linguistics, black holes, DNA, algorithm complexity, quantum mechanics, and (mostly) a large number of made up word-salad-y phrases and math-salad-y conclusions. But it sure is pretty.
This isn’t uncommon, although maybe 10 to 15 pages is more typical. The most recent one from today has over thirty figures attached to the email, all in support of its text that claims to provide a Theory of Everything. (It does not.) On much more rare occasions, I’ll receive via snail mail a bound, glossy-printed hardcopy of someone’s Solution to All of Physics or whatever.
Fortunately my spam filter has been tuned well enough that this daily barrage is out of sight, out of mind. But it’s interesting (from a human nature point of view) to poke through these from time to time.
@Pasta brings up a good point. It’s wrong to dismiss some of these crackpots as dumb. Those 60 page rambling papers may be crazy, but they take a lot of creative thought.
I think it’s more a matter of ego than stupidity. A need to show you’re smarter than those sheep mindlessly following the consensus.
Maybe it just comes down to competence. Lots of top scientists turn into crackpots. Nobel Prize Disease is a thing. How did Linus Pauling win a Nobel prize in chemistry and then turn to vitamin C crackpottery? I dunno, but maybe it’s just that he was good at chemistry and bad at medicine. He applied the same unconventional thinking and high degree of effort to both; it’s just that he didn’t have the capability of discerning where he went wrong on the medicine side.
Maybe some of Pasta’s crackpots would be productive, well-regarded experts in some field if they’d just turn their attention toward something they were good at (probably this is already true for some of them).
Maybe there’s a bit of luck, too. Some ideas are so wild that they must take some degree of self-delusion to promote. Maybe the idea works out in the end and maybe it doesn’t. If it works out, you’re Einstein and you’ve reinvented physics. If not, you’re just some forgotten crank.
Wait, are you by chance a patent examiner? Because why do people send their crackpot stuff to you? I once met a patent examiner, a Doper actually, and wow, the stories he could tell…
No, I’m a physics professor. These emails are usually spammed to the entire physics faculty at one or more universities. So, lots of people are receiving these, although my university will be a very common target.
Twice I have had someone physically show up at my office door looking to discuss their ideas. Fortunately in both cases they were cordial and not on the extreme end of crackpot-ism.
Sounds horrible. Do you have any obligation (from the university) to read and react to these mails, or could you just ignore them?
No, I ignore them. They almost all go straight to my spam folder anyway, so I usually only see them when digging through spam looking for something I was expecting.