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| Science and Crackpots
Posted: 5/29/2008 9:04:19 AM | Hum....
I agree that 99% of crackpot ideas are just that. Still, please don't poupou them outright.
"Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us, that we forget their terrestrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as 'conceptual necessities,' etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors." - Einstein
Let's look at a few "crackpot" ideas from the past:
- Arrhenius (ion chemistry)
- Alfven, Hans (galaxy-scale plasma dynamics)
- Baird, John L. (television camera)
- Bakker, Robert (fast, warm-blooded dinosaurs)
- Bardeen & Brattain (transistor)
- Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan (black holes in 1930)
- Chladni, Ernst (meteorites in 1800)
- Crick & Watson (DNA)
- Doppler (optical Doppler effect)
- Folk, Robert L. (existence and importance of nanobacteria)
- Galvani (bioelectricity)
- Harvey, William (circulation of blood, 1628)
- Krebs (ATP energy, Krebs cycle)
- Galileo (supported the Copernican viewpoint)
- Gauss, Karl F. (nonEuclidean geometery)
- Binning/Roher/Gimzewski (scanning-tunneling microscope)
- Goddard, Robert (rocket-powered space ships)
- Goethe (Land color theory)
- Gold, Thomas (deep non-biological petroleum deposits)
- Gold, Thomas (deep mine bacteria)
- Lister, J (sterilizing)
- T Maiman (Laser)
- Margulis, Lynn (endosymbiotic organelles)
- Mayer, Julius R. (The Law of Conservation of Energy)
- Marshall, B (ulcers caused by bacteria, helicobacter pylori)
- McClintlock, Barbara (mobile genetic elements, "jumping genes", transposons)
- Newlands, J. (pre-Mendeleev periodic table)
- Nottebohm, F. (neurogenesis: brains can grow neurons)
- Ohm, George S. (Ohm's Law)
- Ovshinsky, Stanford R. (amorphous semiconductor devices)
- Pasteur, Louis (germ theory of disease)
- Prusiner, Stanley (existence of prions, 1982)
- Rous, Peyton (viruses cause cancer)
- Semmelweis, I. (surgeons wash hands, puerperal fever )
- Tesla, Nikola (Earth electrical resonance, "Schumann" resonance)
- Tesla, Nikola (brushless AC motor)
- J H van't Hoff (molecules are 3D)
- Warren, Warren S (flaw in MRI theory)
- Wegener, Alfred (continental drift)
- Wright, Wilbur & Orville (flying machines)
- Zwicky, Fritz (existence of dark matter, 1933)
- Zweig, George (quark theory)
Go here for details: http://amasci.com/weird/vindac.html
Here's one I'd like to see. Two suns. (as in 2010) Apparently, if Jupiter had a bit more mass, it could ignite. Can anyone confirm this? | |
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| Science and Crackpots
Posted: 5/29/2008 12:43:04 PM | Is the "crackpot" the one who dismisses a theory or concept outright as "crackpot" or the one who imagined it in the first place? It's like finding a life partner on POF. You try a lot of wrong ones before you find the right one.
I have patents issued and products in production using ideas others dismissed as crackpot or impossible. What has been most enjoyable is develope the concept and technology then ask someone else if it is possible. The greatest obsitcle to advancement is scepticism. Some of the biggest sceptics have been those with the most education. All too often, our universities try to close minds, not open them, and those who display the most closed minds are the educators of the educators.
An earlier poster proclaimed he would believe someone with credentials before he would a layman. I can't think of a better perscription for stagnation. The phrase "all that is possible has been done" comes to mind. If it's not in a text book, it's not possible.
Bring me a crackpot idea and I will find a way to refine it and make it work. If current technology cannot achieve it, chances are, I will identify the technological hurdles that must be achieved first.
Consider the distance from Earth to Jupiter and the mass of Jupiter compared to the sun to get some idea of impact this would have on Earth. (Environmental impact statement?) Here is an interesting twist: Is Jupiter going through an ignition process already? Is it possible that its mass being much smaller than the sun actually slowing its life cycle? So many wonderful (crackpot?) questions to explore. | |
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| Us and Them
Posted: 5/29/2008 3:50:38 PM | Anyone who tries to improve their knowledge of science in a dating forum is in for a rough ride.
Ever heard of universities? | |
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| Us and Them
Posted: 5/29/2008 6:20:25 PM |
Ever heard of universities?
To quote one of my professors a few years after graduation:
"How does it feel to be out of school where you can learn something?"
I found the university environment technically stifling. Whenever I proposed a solution not along the mainstream, I ended up going through the process of appealing and changing the poor grade I received. I tired of fighting the technical stagnation of the university environment.
Anyone who tries to improve their knowledge of science in a dating forum is in for a rough ride.
I don't expect to find in-depth technical answers to the physical world but plenty of questions, observations, and conclusions about human behavior, including myself. Is that science?
Being as innovation and creativity are required for science and they come from human behavior, what is wrong with exploring human nature, including our own, on a site that serves the most basic of human motivators? | |
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| Science and Crackpots
Posted: 5/29/2008 7:21:03 PM |
Let's look at a few "crackpot" ideas from the past:
At a glance, I see one idea after another, which was supported by evidence, at a time when there was much LESS evidence for various laws and theories than there is now. These ideas may have been radical for the time, but they were not "crackpot". Crackpot ideas, on the other hand, have a strong tendency to actually contradict reality. They cannot work because they necessitate things which are not only not in evidence, but are impossible by laws of the universe which we have never known to be violated!
Obviously, this depends in part on your concept of "crackpot", but I personally [and many if not most scientists] won't label something as crackpot or lunacy unless it's in clear and repeated violation of reality. Sadly, proponents of such ideas just don't get it. You can smack them in the face with a brick, and they'll still rail on about how they can "mentally faze [sic] through objects because everything is 99% empty space". What? The brick wasn't a CLUE?  Okay, extreme example, but to anyone with an actual scientific background, the actual common examples are just as glaringly ludicrous.
Bob Bakker, by the way, wasn't all that radical. I attended a couple of his talks and spoke with him nearly 20 years ago, when his ideas were "new", but many of those ideas actually dated back to the 1800's, and had simply found new evidence and voice with Bob Bakker, Phil Currie, and others. | |
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| Science and Crackpots
Posted: 5/29/2008 9:12:28 PM |
30 points for allusions to a delay in your work while you spent time in an asylum, or references to the psychiatrist who tried to talk you out of your theory. Hey now.....us geniuses always keep getting labeled as insane by those who want to steal our revolutionary new ideas. It's a government conspiracy, I tell you!! | |
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| Science and Crackpots
Posted: 5/29/2008 9:54:58 PM | Here's one more that has recently been resurected. Lamarckian evolution:
Lamarckian evolution refers to the once widely accepted idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring (also known as based on heritability of acquired characteristics or "soft inheritance"). It is named for the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who incorporated the action of soft inheritance into his evolutionary theories and is often incorrectly cited as the founder of soft inheritance. It proposed that individual efforts during the lifetime of the organisms were the main mechanism driving species to adaptation, as they supposedly would acquire adaptive changes and pass them on to offspring. -- Wikipedia
Epigenetics, while not exactly considered Lamarckian, has shown generational adaptation when parent eukaryote (simple cell) is impacted by environmental stressors, although a direct connection has not been confirmed. | |
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| Us and Them
Posted: 5/29/2008 11:10:18 PM |
"How does it feel to be out of school where you can learn something?"
My thesis advisor said the opposite after I had been away for two years in the ``real world.'' When I returned to finish, I told him that after being in an academic setting, I was amazed that so many people in the real world had so little curiosity about anything and his comment was, ``Welcome to the real world.'' Had I not gone to graduate school, I would not have many of the practical skills I have that enabled me to be the sort of ``jack of all trades'' I need to be to get a technically complex business started.
I found the university environment technically stifling.
I found it quite the opposite. When I was in graduate school, I had lots of freedom to solve problems my own way. I will say that at the undergraduate level it might seem that way because there is a certain amount of information one has to learn to be competent in a given field and because of public pressure for so-called ``standards'' universities are usually forced to measure that learning through tests and grading, which in my opinion do not contribute to learning. Graduate school was entirely different. | |
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| Us and Them
Posted: 5/30/2008 7:20:51 AM |
I was amazed that so many people in the real world had so little curiosity
Why should the brain atrophy of others be so amazing? I do not seperate the "real world" from the academic world based on free thought, only on the politics of the environment. The difference is freedom. In the academic environment, one has little concern for day to day survival issues but little freedom to think outside of the academic "box". At best, in the academic environment, the box is defined for you but your only freedom is to stay within the confines of the contrived box even if it is to wonder into unexplored corners of it. The model is quite left wing politically which is reflected in the political arena. The world as a whole is not so much challenged by contrived issues but by challenges derived from day to day situations that often impact survival itself. "Curiosity" for academic pursuits usually suffers simply because we let it in favor of more immediate needs. People tend to turn off curiosity as they don't see its benefits for their immediate needs. The reality is that everything around us is full of unexplored science. Outside of the academic environment, you have the freedom to explore everything, not just some contrived thesis or other challenge of narrow scope. Its a kind of undiciplined dicipline to always think and always be curious.
If you read some others who post here regularly, you will find some examples of people who exercise that freedom. I love to debate them as I feel we can challenge each other to think. Yea, it's a dating site. Why does that matter? One should never turn off their brain because of their environment. Atrophy will start to set in.
As for hitting "crackpots" with bricks, that usually only serves to harden their position. Try exploring their ideals with them and let them learn. Does throwing bricks at students in a class room do any good? | |
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| Science and Crackpots
Posted: 5/30/2008 7:44:53 AM |
which was supported by evidence, at a time when there was much LESS evidence for various laws and theories than there is now. I agree. Isn't hindsight grand. What evidence was there, for the scientific community, that the world was round? Sure it was there, but they didn't know about it.
Tell me, honestly, that you don't get the least bit excited about the possibility of new discoveries. "Well will you look at that!!"
Arrogance hurts science like feminism hurts women.
-- Chantilas. Red Planet.
[The universe is full of surprises.]
As for hitting "crackpots" with bricks, that usually only serves to harden their position. Try exploring their ideals with them and let them learn. Does throwing bricks at students in a class room do any good? When I was first introduced to probability theory, I got sooooo excited. I was rambling on about all the possibilities to my prof. He sat there listening, and calmly shot me down without smacking me once. His greatest lesson to me was to investigate and dig hard! One of his parting shots were "How many people do you think, who are smarter than you, have thought about it?"
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| Science and Crackpots
Posted: 5/30/2008 10:05:20 AM | http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/05/30/brazil.tribes/?imw=Y&iref=mpstoryemail
Retelling this event to tribe members who were not there would get "the crackpots" killed, or at the least run out of town. | |
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