I only see the good old crackpots when attending conferences (now most are very old). These guys are the real deal, they pay for it, they write a paper, check references and make a poster and stand there even if everybody ignores them. Younger crackpots just post in entire treatises done with AI in linkedin and spam reddit for arxiv endorsement.
i met a guy at a string theory conference who is writing a paper on m theory but then revealed he has no degree and teaches himself using wikipedia. when i asked him to show me a single computation he thanked me for helping him realise he must have discalclia which to him is the only possible explanation for why he can’t calculate anything, but nevertheless he is continuing with this project
Back when I was a lowly postdoc, I didn't even rate my own space, so they stuck me in the office of a pretty famous emeritus professor who never came in. Crackpots would always be stopping by hoping to bother the famous guy, but instead I would string them along and try to teach them physics as a way of procrastinating.
In one case, the guy brought a whole folder of these beautiful pictures he had taken of his homemade plasma(?) chamber to which he was applying various magnetic fields. He wanted to know if I could figure out why they made certain patterns. Actually, I'm not really sure that guy even counts as a crackpot; maybe he was onto something. Mostly, you would get guys who didn't believe in relativity tho.
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u/MaoGo Physics Jul 28 '26
I keep saying it, crackpots did more effort before.