Comment by PaulHoule
3 days ago
I used to be in charge of technical measures for controlling crackpot submissions at arXiv because we were trying to get a very ornery physicist from not getting us in trouble sending nastygrams to HBCUs and such. The endorsement system was my work.
Two things we noticed were: (1) there weren’t really that many crackpot submissions but they were concentrated in certain areas that really would have been overrun with them. Crackpots don’t ever seem to find out that there is a big mystery in how cuprate semiconductors superconduct or what determines how proteins fold or even that there is such a thing as condensed-matter physics (e.g. most of it!) (2) Crackpots almost always work alone, contrasted to real physicists who work with other physicists which was the basis for the endorsement system. We’d ask a crackpot “who else is working on this?” And always get the answer “no one.”
From having done that work but also having an interest in the phenomenon, being too well read of a person to make it in academia, and personally meeting more than my share of lunatics, that it is really a psychiatric phenomenon really a subtype of paranoia
https://www.verywellhealth.com/paranoia-5113652
particularly involving grandiosity but sometimes litigiousness. It boggles my mind that Weinstein threatened a lawsuit over criticism of his ideas, something I’ve never heard of a real scientist doing —- I mean, scientific truth is outside the jurisdiction of the courts. I met
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Westley_Newman
and did not get to put his motor on my bench but I did set up some equipment on my bench that showed that the equipment he was demoing his motor on could give inaccurate readings and he had this crazy story of sueing the patent office and using his right-wing connections with churches and the Reagan administration to bully NIST into testing his motor.
> [crackpots] were concentrated in certain areas that really would have been overrun with them
Let me guess: theoretical particle physics, relativity, gravity, and magnetism?
Not so much magnetism, but maybe that's because I'm trained in cond-mat and I think of magnetism as a kind of order in materials and not that dual of the electric field which people explain with that weird right hand rule. (I remember getting chewed out my students because I'd be drawing on the board with my chalk in my right hand and using my left hand and reversing the direction.)
I think calling oneself an "inventor", while not a proof, is at least a smell. Nobody actually working on anything calls themselves that, and there are plenty of people working on things.
It's a label that sounds like something from some amateurish elementary school book of "historical inventors" or some cheesy popularization of science from the 1950s that propagates the view that there are these mythical creatures called "inventors" who appear once in a generation to bring fire to humanity.