26 ms·

Wow, I love this. What a thoughtful, empathetic project. This passage really stuck out to me-- "A typical problem is that, in the absence of equations, they pr

Wow, I love this. What a thoughtful, empathetic project. This passage really stuck out to me-- "A typical problem is that, in the absence of equations, they project literal meanings onto words such as ‘grains’ of space-time or particles ‘popping’ in and out of existence. Science writers should be more careful to point out when we are using metaphors. My clients read way too much into pictures, measuring every angle, scrutinising every colour, counting every dash. Illustrators should be more careful to point out what is relevant information and what is artistic freedom. But the most important lesson I’ve learned is that journalists are so successful at making physics seem not so complicated that many readers come away with the impression that they can easily do it themselves. How can we blame them for not knowing what it takes if we never tell them?" Of course, this writing often isn't for the layperson, it's for an audience who can tell the difference between diagram, artistic license, and metaphor, but even so, it's good to think about, especially when communicating science to the general public.

bee_rider 5y ago
I also liked: "I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin." In some sense, labeling somebody a "crackpot" assigns a sort of malicious wrongness to them. It is interesting to see somebody who's dealt with a significant subset of these people and discovered more actual, honest misunderstanding than we (or at least I) would have expected.
- ganzuul 5y ago
  The unfortunate truth is that humans derive status from belittling others. Being highly educated is apparently no defense against this common weakness.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    I don't get a status boost from letting google label 80% of my incoming email as spam, but I am quite glad that it does.
  - Delk 5y ago
    To be fair, it might not be about the desire to belittle or to derive status. I can understand the frustration of those who are educated in a demanding field that also happens to attract people proposing uneducated and usually unsound theories. The wildest of theories -- especially the wildest of them -- would often take a lot of work to untangle and make sense of to the point where it's even possible to discuss and think about them critically. The vast, vast majority of those kinds of theories are wrong yet they take a lot of work to disprove. That probably has little to offer to the expert other than perhaps exercise in the Socratic method with an uncooperative partner. I'm not in the academia myself but I can totally see how the nth time someone offers their "insights" into something they almost certainly don't understand could make you think of them as crackpots.
    - robocat 5y ago
      I mean, one has to wonder how many real physicists are chasing crackpot theories in exactly the same sense. The drive that results in self-delusion is probably the same mentally/emotionally. Also it isn’t just physicists on the receiving end. As a software engineer I get people wanting me to help them with their “crackpot” business ideas (although they sometimes don’t want to tell me their secret, and I heartily encourage them not to!). I have seen an acquaintance explore a crackpot electrical mechanism for perpetual energy. Mathematicians surely get their fair share of crackpots too!
      - ganzuul 5y ago
        Personally I think most of these problems could be easily resolved if we were taught the basics of how to manage emotions and ego in school. Unfortunately, that essential need is still controlled by certain institutional wills that I in turn label crackpot. - Not that I should be throwing stones, living in a house of glass...
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  I'm not sure that "crackpot" implies malice. To me, it implies a totally wrong starting point. You can't build astronomy on a foundation of astrology. Using Babylonian base-60 mathematics won't help you create a unified field theory. The guy who showed me some random velocity that he had picked, and taken c^2 divided by that velocity, had not shown that faster-than-light travel was possible. It's like cargo-cult physics. They (try to) do all the things, but the starting point is wrong, so it can't work. So showing them "where to even begin" is in fact the solution... if they'll listen.
  - exolymph 5y ago
    This is admittedly a pedantic nitpicky comment, but humans did build astronomy on a foundation of astrology. Much like alchemy and the legit techniques used during that phase of exploration later got subsumed into chemistry.
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      I guess most people haven't read any of Newton's writing on alchemy. What's fascinating is that he's clearly mapping metaphors to experiences, in much the same way he did when writing Principia. The difference is that in P. the metaphors and mappings create consistent experiences for everyone and can be manipulated symbolically using math. That's a huge change, which is why science is everywhere and hardly anyone attempts alchemy today. But under the hood science is still a machine made of metaphors which are partial mappings of experience. I don't think anyone believes all the different metaphors physics uses mesh together neatly, so at least some of them must be misleading. Improving the coverage is almost the definition of physics. But it's also possible the consistent symbolic metaphor approach is limited in ways we don't yet know, and at some point it will reach its limits and have to be replaced with something else.
      - snowwrestler 5y ago
        I really enjoyed Gleick’s biography of Newton, which spends a lot of time on both his math and physics work that panned out, and his alchemical work that didn’t. Newton is the father of modern physics to us because we have perspective that he lacked. At the time he was working—in the moment—it wasn’t yet clear how the universe worked.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  The difference between a real crackpot and someone trying to understand something difficult is that the former is usually genuinely mentally disturbed while the latter is still in Dunning-Kruger territory. Usenet science boards used to have various "personalities" who were clearly ill. They would post variations on the same word salad over and over, invariably claiming that Einstein was wrong about something or other, while they were right, which made them super-geniuses. I understand high-profile physicists particularly tend to attract these people, so dealing with them must be a challenge, and there must be a temptation to skip over anyone who looks like they fall into that group even if they're just asking questions. There was - possibly still is - a crossover group typically made of electrical/electronic engineers who knew just enough traditional EM theory to be dangerous, but not enough to know what they didn't know about GR and QM. For some reason they were also obsessed with trying to prove that relativity was wrong - perhaps because GR is so weird it's almost offensively strange to people who want to live in an un-weird universe.
  - mr_mitm 5y ago
    These characters still exist on Reddit and elsewhere. They typically also stick to trying to disprove SR, because it barely requires more than high school math. No one ever tries to disprove the foundations of condensed matter physics.
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      Doesn't condensed matter physics heavily feature harmonic analysis? It's a pity -- if math weren't so damn difficult, we could point all the "crystal resonance" crowd in a productive, fascinating direction.
      - boppo1 5y ago
        I'm a mathlet who is working slowly on learning more. Can you elaborate on the connection you're drawing?
        5y ago
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  For a while I held onto this archaic 1950 textbook on geology, solely because the introductory chapter included something like "the now thoroughly discredited crackpot theory of plate tectonics, which we will not consider here."
  - np_tedious 5y ago
    That's fun. I had the converse experience when I discovered and read an old pop science article that discussed the light ether as if it were established fact. I was quite young and it was several years until I learned in high school physics class that this was complete bunk.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Khelavaster 5y ago
      And it's not until further studying that you learn about the Anderson-Higgs effect in superconductors--how a gravity wave burst is generated every time a type 2 superconductor becomes superconducting. Light-ether is real. It's [very oversimplifying] the EM pressure from maintaining every EMF-free zone (the insides of particles superconductors), plus pressure of all the cosmic background radiation.
  - antognini 5y ago
    When I was a kid I read a book published in the 1980s called Yes We Have No Neutrons. It covered various episodes in pseudoscience like N-rays, cold fusion, and Freudian psychology. But there was also a chapter on neural networks that did not age very well at all.
    - mjburgess 5y ago
      The phrase "neural network" is itself a kind of pseudoscience, in being neither neural nor a network -- but an essentially pseudoscientific description of an algorithm better called "ensembled regression" or something of that kind. NNs do not model the brain, and have basically nothing to do with it. I'd imagine rereading that chapter would be a good idea.
- pramsey 5y ago
  There's a wonderful exploration of "crackpots" in the aptly-named "The Crackpots" by Harlan Ellison in his short story collection "Paingod" (which is excellent). https://sckool.org/paingod-and-other-delusions-harlan-ellison.html?page=5 https://sckool.org/paingod-and-other-delusions-harlan-elliso...
  - robocat 5y ago
    Harlan writes about the story: “Think of someone you know, even someone you love, trapped into a corrupt or self-destructive or anti-social behavior pattern by an inability to get around the roadblock of erroneous thinking. [snip] Polly wouldn’t permit such an evil to exist-as an unconscious understanding of the massmind of the general Analog readership, which is at core and primarily engineers, technicians, scientists, men of the drawing board and the spanner. [snip] [I wrote the story] to see if I could gig the Analog readers of thirty-and-more years’ good standing, who would have coronary arrest at seeing Ellison in the hallowed pages of their favorite magazine. You can imagine my joy when I saw the issue on the newsstands, with my name on the front cover with Isaac Asimov’s, knowing that Analog’s faithful would be gagging, and knowing the little jibe I had waiting for them inside”…
    - Intermernet 5y ago
      I always get the feeling when I read either Harlan Ellison or Philip K Dick that they're giggling to themselves at some knowledge that they have, that no-one else has. They both play with form, straddle the line between puerile and innovative, and seemingly come up with original ideas with a wave of their hands. They're both definitely in my favourite author list, of any genre.
      - blaser-waffle 5y ago
        I always got the vibe that Harlan was giggling, but in a malicious, "screw you" sort of way.
        Intermernet 5y ago
- dahdum 5y ago
  > In some sense, labeling somebody a "crackpot" assigns a sort of malicious wrongness to them. The naive enthusiasm, self directed exploration, and passion many of these crackpots have are winning traits in many pursuits. Just a bit of poor luck they picked an especially high wall to scale with theoretical physics.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - XorNot 5y ago
    It's closer to "none of them are good at math, and aren't trying to learn". It's why they rage at people not taking them seriously - if anyone tries to show something mathematically they can't understand it, don't want to admit it, and either wander off or ignore it and go back to the extensive prose.
- cmollis 5y ago
  I've run a 'crackpot consultant business' for like the past 30 years. except in the US it's called the 'Fortune 500'.
- jstgord 5y ago
  Although mostly horrified / entertained watching a flat-earther documentary a while back with my teenage son .. I was also kind of impressed at one point when the flat earthers did a measurement with a laser over some kilometers to 'prove' the flatness of their landscape. Needless to say the experimental results differed slightly from their theory. But what struck me is, they were actually doing science .. which is wonderful. I remembered thinking if only our local schools would do a little bit of science, or math for that matter..
  - jhanschoo 5y ago
    I believe high school curricula (at least at the good ones) meet aspects of that in two ways: 1. There are labs / practicals as part of a scientific curriculum, though ultimately in a controlled fashion. 2. There are projects that allow a student to pursue an open-ended like of inquiry.
buescher 5y ago
Most impressive: "One of them might even publish a paper soon. Not a proposal for a theory of everything, mind you, but a new way to look at a known effect. A first step on a long journey." Hossenfelder must have the patience of Job and a deep teaching vocation. If you are ever even around physics or math at all, you will see the crackpot letters. I was a little surprised engineers are largely unaware of the phenomenon and are shocked, for example, that anyone seriously tries to make perpetual motion machines at all. Here's a couple links about the mathematical equivalent: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/beware-cranks https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/beware-cranks https://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/whattodowhentrisectorcomes.pdf https://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/whattodowhentrisectorcomes.pdf
- nerpderp82 5y ago
  When I was in Physics this dude from off campus stapled up all these posters that said the inverse square law was rubbish and to come to a conference room in the library on a certain day. There were like 10+ physicists and 10+ grad students in this meeting, they respectful when they smoked this time crystal guy, but of course he just used it as an example of the cabal keeping the truth down.
- more_corn 5y ago
  Remember when google offered that “ideas to save the planet” contest? I used to wade through those. They fell into a couple easy categories. Perpetual motion machines, casual ideas that are obviously impractical, fundamentally failing to understand the subject area. Not a single one of them seemed new or useful. Then again Nicola Tesla had some strange ideas. Turns out half of them were brilliant and the other half still seem weird. Efforts to demarcate crackpot and real might be approaching the problem from the wrong direction. I like the author’s strategy of helping people gain the knowledge to understand what they’re trying to talk about. Teslas ideas about motion and flow as it pertains to physical health were weird but that doesn’t mean he was unable to learn about biology, had he spent time learning about it, maybe he’d have brought his ideas back to reality and contributed something interesting. We should celebrate people for their curiosity, encourage them to gain the knowledge that has already been discovered and help them express their ideas in ways that others can relate to.
lumost 5y ago
This was such a common problem in my undergrad. I'd say over half of all incoming majors had at least some form of miss-understanding of what physics was and how it really worked coming off of pop sci. Even those who stick it out through Grad School and post docs often lament that they toiled away always believing that the grandiose visions of research presented in pop sci would eventually come true for them. While pop-sci has been radically successful at making physics concepts appear accessible, it has woefully failed at making actual physics accessible. It's no wonder that Americans increasingly view science as either the tony stark like practice of wizards - or as a ceremonious endeavor practiced by those whose beliefs are no more testable than a TV pundits. We need to do better at Science writing.
- nullc 5y ago
  I bet the bad science writing sells much better-- readers enjoy the Feeling of Knowing. You're not going to get much of that feeling from an honest article on a complex subject.
- blablabla123 5y ago
  For me pop sci documentaries were quite a motivation to study Physics though. But yeah, after having studied it I have zero interest in pop sci anymore. It's unfortunately not really explaining things but more show casing things. But what I also learned while reading text books, listening and reading lectures: often the most concise explanations are very close to every day language. (In the lines of https://www.motionmountain.net/9lines.html https://www.motionmountain.net/9lines.html which was recently also posted on HN) Would be great if such things could be included more into pop sci. Maybe in a way that at least the common notations are put in. That doesn't enable you to do meaningful calculations but at least it would be way closer to relevant literature. Unfortunately there's also quite a barrier to university literature in terms of pricing and some stuff is just not published on the Internet. E.g. lecture notes are only sporadically available but tend to be more readable than most books. FWIW Feynman's lectures on Physics really stand out here
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
tom-thistime 5y ago
"Of course, this writing often isn't for the layperson," How do you mean? I think of popular science writing as always being for the layperson.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
I think this is a problem in a lot of areas where you invent new concepts for which we don’t have words yet. Happens a lot in tech and also in science. If you use a metaphor that people can relate to there is a high chance they will latch on to the metaphor and push it into areas where it doesn’t work anymore. I saw that a lot when “cloud computing” came up. I once described one of our systems as “basically a flash drive” which made sense in the context of the FDA regulation we were discussing but a few months later a director was outraged “but you said it’s a flash drive” in a totally different context where the metaphor didn’t make sense. Also saw it around COVID vaccines. I talked to several people who claimed calling it “vaccine” is fraudulent because in their minds a vaccine protects you 100% from the disease and if it only avoids hospitalization or severe cases it’s not a vaccine.
madrox 5y ago
I wonder how much of this relates to public perception of hacking and internet security as well. Many methods and procedures are written about with a romantic air.

bee_rider 5y ago

I also liked: "I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin." In some sense, labeling somebody a "crackpot" assigns a sort of malicious wrongness to them. It is interesting to see somebody who's dealt with a significant subset of these people and discovered more actual, honest misunderstanding than we (or at least I) would have expected.

ganzuul 5y ago
The unfortunate truth is that humans derive status from belittling others. Being highly educated is apparently no defense against this common weakness.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  I don't get a status boost from letting google label 80% of my incoming email as spam, but I am quite glad that it does.
- Delk 5y ago
  To be fair, it might not be about the desire to belittle or to derive status. I can understand the frustration of those who are educated in a demanding field that also happens to attract people proposing uneducated and usually unsound theories. The wildest of theories -- especially the wildest of them -- would often take a lot of work to untangle and make sense of to the point where it's even possible to discuss and think about them critically. The vast, vast majority of those kinds of theories are wrong yet they take a lot of work to disprove. That probably has little to offer to the expert other than perhaps exercise in the Socratic method with an uncooperative partner. I'm not in the academia myself but I can totally see how the nth time someone offers their "insights" into something they almost certainly don't understand could make you think of them as crackpots.
  - robocat 5y ago
    I mean, one has to wonder how many real physicists are chasing crackpot theories in exactly the same sense. The drive that results in self-delusion is probably the same mentally/emotionally. Also it isn’t just physicists on the receiving end. As a software engineer I get people wanting me to help them with their “crackpot” business ideas (although they sometimes don’t want to tell me their secret, and I heartily encourage them not to!). I have seen an acquaintance explore a crackpot electrical mechanism for perpetual energy. Mathematicians surely get their fair share of crackpots too!
    - ganzuul 5y ago
      Personally I think most of these problems could be easily resolved if we were taught the basics of how to manage emotions and ego in school. Unfortunately, that essential need is still controlled by certain institutional wills that I in turn label crackpot. - Not that I should be throwing stones, living in a house of glass...
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
I'm not sure that "crackpot" implies malice. To me, it implies a totally wrong starting point. You can't build astronomy on a foundation of astrology. Using Babylonian base-60 mathematics won't help you create a unified field theory. The guy who showed me some random velocity that he had picked, and taken c^2 divided by that velocity, had not shown that faster-than-light travel was possible. It's like cargo-cult physics. They (try to) do all the things, but the starting point is wrong, so it can't work. So showing them "where to even begin" is in fact the solution... if they'll listen.
- exolymph 5y ago
  This is admittedly a pedantic nitpicky comment, but humans did build astronomy on a foundation of astrology. Much like alchemy and the legit techniques used during that phase of exploration later got subsumed into chemistry.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    I guess most people haven't read any of Newton's writing on alchemy. What's fascinating is that he's clearly mapping metaphors to experiences, in much the same way he did when writing Principia. The difference is that in P. the metaphors and mappings create consistent experiences for everyone and can be manipulated symbolically using math. That's a huge change, which is why science is everywhere and hardly anyone attempts alchemy today. But under the hood science is still a machine made of metaphors which are partial mappings of experience. I don't think anyone believes all the different metaphors physics uses mesh together neatly, so at least some of them must be misleading. Improving the coverage is almost the definition of physics. But it's also possible the consistent symbolic metaphor approach is limited in ways we don't yet know, and at some point it will reach its limits and have to be replaced with something else.
    - snowwrestler 5y ago
      I really enjoyed Gleick’s biography of Newton, which spends a lot of time on both his math and physics work that panned out, and his alchemical work that didn’t. Newton is the father of modern physics to us because we have perspective that he lacked. At the time he was working—in the moment—it wasn’t yet clear how the universe worked.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
The difference between a real crackpot and someone trying to understand something difficult is that the former is usually genuinely mentally disturbed while the latter is still in Dunning-Kruger territory. Usenet science boards used to have various "personalities" who were clearly ill. They would post variations on the same word salad over and over, invariably claiming that Einstein was wrong about something or other, while they were right, which made them super-geniuses. I understand high-profile physicists particularly tend to attract these people, so dealing with them must be a challenge, and there must be a temptation to skip over anyone who looks like they fall into that group even if they're just asking questions. There was - possibly still is - a crossover group typically made of electrical/electronic engineers who knew just enough traditional EM theory to be dangerous, but not enough to know what they didn't know about GR and QM. For some reason they were also obsessed with trying to prove that relativity was wrong - perhaps because GR is so weird it's almost offensively strange to people who want to live in an un-weird universe.
- mr_mitm 5y ago
  These characters still exist on Reddit and elsewhere. They typically also stick to trying to disprove SR, because it barely requires more than high school math. No one ever tries to disprove the foundations of condensed matter physics.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Doesn't condensed matter physics heavily feature harmonic analysis? It's a pity -- if math weren't so damn difficult, we could point all the "crystal resonance" crowd in a productive, fascinating direction.
    - boppo1 5y ago
      I'm a mathlet who is working slowly on learning more. Can you elaborate on the connection you're drawing?
      - 5y ago
photochemsyn 5y ago
For a while I held onto this archaic 1950 textbook on geology, solely because the introductory chapter included something like "the now thoroughly discredited crackpot theory of plate tectonics, which we will not consider here."
- np_tedious 5y ago
  That's fun. I had the converse experience when I discovered and read an old pop science article that discussed the light ether as if it were established fact. I was quite young and it was several years until I learned in high school physics class that this was complete bunk.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Khelavaster 5y ago
    And it's not until further studying that you learn about the Anderson-Higgs effect in superconductors--how a gravity wave burst is generated every time a type 2 superconductor becomes superconducting. Light-ether is real. It's [very oversimplifying] the EM pressure from maintaining every EMF-free zone (the insides of particles superconductors), plus pressure of all the cosmic background radiation.
- antognini 5y ago
  When I was a kid I read a book published in the 1980s called Yes We Have No Neutrons. It covered various episodes in pseudoscience like N-rays, cold fusion, and Freudian psychology. But there was also a chapter on neural networks that did not age very well at all.
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    The phrase "neural network" is itself a kind of pseudoscience, in being neither neural nor a network -- but an essentially pseudoscientific description of an algorithm better called "ensembled regression" or something of that kind. NNs do not model the brain, and have basically nothing to do with it. I'd imagine rereading that chapter would be a good idea.
pramsey 5y ago
There's a wonderful exploration of "crackpots" in the aptly-named "The Crackpots" by Harlan Ellison in his short story collection "Paingod" (which is excellent). https://sckool.org/paingod-and-other-delusions-harlan-ellison.html?page=5 https://sckool.org/paingod-and-other-delusions-harlan-elliso...
- robocat 5y ago
  Harlan writes about the story: “Think of someone you know, even someone you love, trapped into a corrupt or self-destructive or anti-social behavior pattern by an inability to get around the roadblock of erroneous thinking. [snip] Polly wouldn’t permit such an evil to exist-as an unconscious understanding of the massmind of the general Analog readership, which is at core and primarily engineers, technicians, scientists, men of the drawing board and the spanner. [snip] [I wrote the story] to see if I could gig the Analog readers of thirty-and-more years’ good standing, who would have coronary arrest at seeing Ellison in the hallowed pages of their favorite magazine. You can imagine my joy when I saw the issue on the newsstands, with my name on the front cover with Isaac Asimov’s, knowing that Analog’s faithful would be gagging, and knowing the little jibe I had waiting for them inside”…
  - Intermernet 5y ago
    I always get the feeling when I read either Harlan Ellison or Philip K Dick that they're giggling to themselves at some knowledge that they have, that no-one else has. They both play with form, straddle the line between puerile and innovative, and seemingly come up with original ideas with a wave of their hands. They're both definitely in my favourite author list, of any genre.
    - blaser-waffle 5y ago
      I always got the vibe that Harlan was giggling, but in a malicious, "screw you" sort of way.
      - Intermernet 5y ago
dahdum 5y ago
> In some sense, labeling somebody a "crackpot" assigns a sort of malicious wrongness to them. The naive enthusiasm, self directed exploration, and passion many of these crackpots have are winning traits in many pursuits. Just a bit of poor luck they picked an especially high wall to scale with theoretical physics.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- XorNot 5y ago
  It's closer to "none of them are good at math, and aren't trying to learn". It's why they rage at people not taking them seriously - if anyone tries to show something mathematically they can't understand it, don't want to admit it, and either wander off or ignore it and go back to the extensive prose.
cmollis 5y ago
I've run a 'crackpot consultant business' for like the past 30 years. except in the US it's called the 'Fortune 500'.
jstgord 5y ago
Although mostly horrified / entertained watching a flat-earther documentary a while back with my teenage son .. I was also kind of impressed at one point when the flat earthers did a measurement with a laser over some kilometers to 'prove' the flatness of their landscape. Needless to say the experimental results differed slightly from their theory. But what struck me is, they were actually doing science .. which is wonderful. I remembered thinking if only our local schools would do a little bit of science, or math for that matter..
- jhanschoo 5y ago
  I believe high school curricula (at least at the good ones) meet aspects of that in two ways: 1. There are labs / practicals as part of a scientific curriculum, though ultimately in a controlled fashion. 2. There are projects that allow a student to pursue an open-ended like of inquiry.

buescher 5y ago

Most impressive: "One of them might even publish a paper soon. Not a proposal for a theory of everything, mind you, but a new way to look at a known effect. A first step on a long journey." Hossenfelder must have the patience of Job and a deep teaching vocation. If you are ever even around physics or math at all, you will see the crackpot letters. I was a little surprised engineers are largely unaware of the phenomenon and are shocked, for example, that anyone seriously tries to make perpetual motion machines at all. Here's a couple links about the mathematical equivalent: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/beware-cranks https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/beware-cranks https://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/whattodowhentrisectorcomes.pdf https://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/whattodowhentrisectorcomes.pdf

nerpderp82 5y ago
When I was in Physics this dude from off campus stapled up all these posters that said the inverse square law was rubbish and to come to a conference room in the library on a certain day. There were like 10+ physicists and 10+ grad students in this meeting, they respectful when they smoked this time crystal guy, but of course he just used it as an example of the cabal keeping the truth down.
more_corn 5y ago
Remember when google offered that “ideas to save the planet” contest? I used to wade through those. They fell into a couple easy categories. Perpetual motion machines, casual ideas that are obviously impractical, fundamentally failing to understand the subject area. Not a single one of them seemed new or useful. Then again Nicola Tesla had some strange ideas. Turns out half of them were brilliant and the other half still seem weird. Efforts to demarcate crackpot and real might be approaching the problem from the wrong direction. I like the author’s strategy of helping people gain the knowledge to understand what they’re trying to talk about. Teslas ideas about motion and flow as it pertains to physical health were weird but that doesn’t mean he was unable to learn about biology, had he spent time learning about it, maybe he’d have brought his ideas back to reality and contributed something interesting. We should celebrate people for their curiosity, encourage them to gain the knowledge that has already been discovered and help them express their ideas in ways that others can relate to.

lumost 5y ago

This was such a common problem in my undergrad. I'd say over half of all incoming majors had at least some form of miss-understanding of what physics was and how it really worked coming off of pop sci. Even those who stick it out through Grad School and post docs often lament that they toiled away always believing that the grandiose visions of research presented in pop sci would eventually come true for them. While pop-sci has been radically successful at making physics concepts appear accessible, it has woefully failed at making actual physics accessible. It's no wonder that Americans increasingly view science as either the tony stark like practice of wizards - or as a ceremonious endeavor practiced by those whose beliefs are no more testable than a TV pundits. We need to do better at Science writing.

nullc 5y ago
I bet the bad science writing sells much better-- readers enjoy the Feeling of Knowing. You're not going to get much of that feeling from an honest article on a complex subject.
blablabla123 5y ago
For me pop sci documentaries were quite a motivation to study Physics though. But yeah, after having studied it I have zero interest in pop sci anymore. It's unfortunately not really explaining things but more show casing things. But what I also learned while reading text books, listening and reading lectures: often the most concise explanations are very close to every day language. (In the lines of https://www.motionmountain.net/9lines.html https://www.motionmountain.net/9lines.html which was recently also posted on HN) Would be great if such things could be included more into pop sci. Maybe in a way that at least the common notations are put in. That doesn't enable you to do meaningful calculations but at least it would be way closer to relevant literature. Unfortunately there's also quite a barrier to university literature in terms of pricing and some stuff is just not published on the Internet. E.g. lecture notes are only sporadically available but tend to be more readable than most books. FWIW Feynman's lectures on Physics really stand out here
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tom-thistime 5y ago

"Of course, this writing often isn't for the layperson," How do you mean? I think of popular science writing as always being for the layperson.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

I think this is a problem in a lot of areas where you invent new concepts for which we don’t have words yet. Happens a lot in tech and also in science. If you use a metaphor that people can relate to there is a high chance they will latch on to the metaphor and push it into areas where it doesn’t work anymore. I saw that a lot when “cloud computing” came up. I once described one of our systems as “basically a flash drive” which made sense in the context of the FDA regulation we were discussing but a few months later a director was outraged “but you said it’s a flash drive” in a totally different context where the metaphor didn’t make sense. Also saw it around COVID vaccines. I talked to several people who claimed calling it “vaccine” is fraudulent because in their minds a vaccine protects you 100% from the disease and if it only avoids hospitalization or severe cases it’s not a vaccine.

madrox 5y ago

I wonder how much of this relates to public perception of hacking and internet security as well. Many methods and procedures are written about with a romantic air.