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I used to work in a well-regarded Astronomy and Astrophysics department at a research university. Every few months, I would go through the department "crackpot

I used to work in a well-regarded Astronomy and Astrophysics department at a research university. Every few months, I would go through the department "crackpot folder" when I was especially bored. Every couple days the department chair or some well-known professor would get a letter (this was before most of the crackpots had email accounts, I guess) claiming that some theory--particularly general relativity--was wrong and all it took was a simple application of high school arithmetic to see it. One of our faculty happened to coin the phrase "dark energy" while I was there, and man did the letters start coming in after that. Of course, the only absolutely universal commonality among all of the letters was that they were all nonsense, like the above. In general, I felt sort of bad because you could tell that a lot of these people were really not well, but it's still hard for me to see things from someone's perspective who genuinely believes that the entire astrophysics community (save a tiny handful of contrarian actual physicists) has somehow engaged in a massive conspiracy to ignore introductory physics in favor of some other vastly more complicated theory for absolutely no possible benefit. (Especially when these professors are literally teaching introductory physics to students while they're pursuing their research.)

trhway 9y ago
I feel your pain :) Back then the most such fun we had were Fermat theorem proofs coming to the algebra department.
pilsetnieks 9y ago
There was a time when the entire scientific community believed the entire universe was filled with a light-bearing medium (luminiferous aether) because they couldn't explain propagation of light in empty space; or that there was another planet between Mercury and the Sun (Vulcan) because they couldn't explain Mercury's orbit. I'm not claiming it is the case now (though it does smack of luminiferous aether a bit) but the scientific community can and has been wrong sometimes in the face of as yet undiscovered principles.
- davidmr 9y ago
  I think you might have missed my point. I'm not saying that dark matter skeptics are crackpots because they don't believe in dark matter. I'm saying that if people think they can disprove the existence of dark matter because you can apply some high school arithmetic and claim that Keplerian law is violated, then you are a crackpot. Someone else unwittingly suggested a parallel to Fermat, which I think hits the nail on the head exactly. If someone thinks they can prove Fermat's last theorem with some high school geometry, odds are pretty good they're a crackpot. If they're a well-regarded mathematician and they can build off new mathematics and make a few very complicated leaps by discovering new mathematics of their own, then people take them more seriously. Scott Aaronson has a really great take on this here: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 As an aside that's probably only interesting to me, I went to a Great Books college. It's one of those hippy dippy liberal arts schools where there are no electives, no textbooks, no lectures, just primary sources. You learn mathematics by reading Euclid, Ptolemy, Newton, etc. At any rate, for first-year "Labratory" class, you trace the atomic theory from the Greeks to roughly Avogadro. Along the way you read papers by and replicate the experiments of many influencial scientists along the way. When I mention that the above crackpots are "wrong", I don't mean it in the sense of the aether or analogous theories along the way to the atomic theory, namely phlogiston or caloric, two previous theories of heat. Those theories did not explain new observations and were rightly discarded along the way. Priestly and Lavoisier were brilliant and tried to make theory match observation, so now even though their theories are discarded, their work still stands on its own for the time. I wouldn't call them wrong. There's a definite difference between them and theories that are just wrong. Nobody's going to get a Nobel Prize when they just make the world believe that they have obviated the need for dark matter by pulling out some high school math and some Kepler proofs. Someone will win it if they ever make an observation that proves a MOND theory in a way that shows conclusively that dark matter is not needed to explain all current observations and in fact cannot remain compatible with this new observation. There's a big difference between the two, I think.
  - nonbel 9y ago
    >"Someone will win it if they ever make an observation that... shows conclusively that dark matter ... cannot remain compatible with this new observation." This requirement is impossible to meet for sufficiently flexible theories. Eg no one will ever "win" over "God did it" according to your metric. Also, if you see how many people in high academic positions are obviously wrong about simple stuff they use every day like p-values, nothing will surprise you any more.

trhway 9y ago

I feel your pain :) Back then the most such fun we had were Fermat theorem proofs coming to the algebra department.

pilsetnieks 9y ago

There was a time when the entire scientific community believed the entire universe was filled with a light-bearing medium (luminiferous aether) because they couldn't explain propagation of light in empty space; or that there was another planet between Mercury and the Sun (Vulcan) because they couldn't explain Mercury's orbit. I'm not claiming it is the case now (though it does smack of luminiferous aether a bit) but the scientific community can and has been wrong sometimes in the face of as yet undiscovered principles.

davidmr 9y ago
I think you might have missed my point. I'm not saying that dark matter skeptics are crackpots because they don't believe in dark matter. I'm saying that if people think they can disprove the existence of dark matter because you can apply some high school arithmetic and claim that Keplerian law is violated, then you are a crackpot. Someone else unwittingly suggested a parallel to Fermat, which I think hits the nail on the head exactly. If someone thinks they can prove Fermat's last theorem with some high school geometry, odds are pretty good they're a crackpot. If they're a well-regarded mathematician and they can build off new mathematics and make a few very complicated leaps by discovering new mathematics of their own, then people take them more seriously. Scott Aaronson has a really great take on this here: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 As an aside that's probably only interesting to me, I went to a Great Books college. It's one of those hippy dippy liberal arts schools where there are no electives, no textbooks, no lectures, just primary sources. You learn mathematics by reading Euclid, Ptolemy, Newton, etc. At any rate, for first-year "Labratory" class, you trace the atomic theory from the Greeks to roughly Avogadro. Along the way you read papers by and replicate the experiments of many influencial scientists along the way. When I mention that the above crackpots are "wrong", I don't mean it in the sense of the aether or analogous theories along the way to the atomic theory, namely phlogiston or caloric, two previous theories of heat. Those theories did not explain new observations and were rightly discarded along the way. Priestly and Lavoisier were brilliant and tried to make theory match observation, so now even though their theories are discarded, their work still stands on its own for the time. I wouldn't call them wrong. There's a definite difference between them and theories that are just wrong. Nobody's going to get a Nobel Prize when they just make the world believe that they have obviated the need for dark matter by pulling out some high school math and some Kepler proofs. Someone will win it if they ever make an observation that proves a MOND theory in a way that shows conclusively that dark matter is not needed to explain all current observations and in fact cannot remain compatible with this new observation. There's a big difference between the two, I think.
- nonbel 9y ago
  >"Someone will win it if they ever make an observation that... shows conclusively that dark matter ... cannot remain compatible with this new observation." This requirement is impossible to meet for sufficiently flexible theories. Eg no one will ever "win" over "God did it" according to your metric. Also, if you see how many people in high academic positions are obviously wrong about simple stuff they use every day like p-values, nothing will surprise you any more.