> Sociologists have long tried and failed to draw a line between science and pseudoscience. In physics, though, that ‘demarcation problem’ is a non-problem, sol

> Sociologists have long tried and failed to draw a line between science and pseudoscience. In physics, though, that ‘demarcation problem’ is a non-problem, solved by the pragmatic observation that we can reliably tell an outsider when we see one. So generally for sciences (and for compsci cranks as well) we have a direct answer because either your theories can be experimentally verified or they cannot. This is normally a solid position but it puts for example the decades of work on string theory in a bind - since they haven't produced a single verifiable result either. So the author offers a tangential and more broadly encompassing but subjectively experiential position: > During a decade of education, we physicists learn more than the tools of the trade; we also learn the walk and talk of the community, shared through countless seminars and conferences, meetings, lectures and papers. After exchanging a few sentences, we can tell if you’re one of us. You can’t fake our community slang any more than you can fake a local accent in a foreign country. Sure, that's great you've verified membership in a social group - but that's really insufficient when you are trying to identify crank science. This sentence can also be applied to all kinds of cults and secular belief systems, hell, I think most of academic humanities fall under this as well. Anecdotal - I know someone who is a well accomplished researcher in their respective experimental physics field (with numerous citations), as a hobby they also happen to have an interest in theoretical physics, where they have published several papers entirely to no response (which to my understanding would be pretty awesome of they were not incorrect) . So it's not just in and out of 'professional physics', the number of people specializing in a particular area can be very small and closed off in an even more domain particular kind of way.