It's fascinating that this is so well known among physicists but to those of us outside, we are totally unaware that these people exist and that email addresses get deluged.
It seems to be a logical trap: physics is interesting enough to attract amateurs but complex enough that no amateur can hope to contribute.
Which makes me think the reason biology or sociology doesn't have crackpots (or maybe they do... Ive never heard of it though) is either that they just are not interesting to the retired engineer, or they dont take as many years of intense study.
Every sufficiently non-obscure field has crackpots. Most only see ones in their own field, but if you end up as a volunteer handling the wikipedia email queues, you'll see them across all fields.
Some fields have more crackpots and more persistent ones, I think it's an open question if that's due to to the field itself or how it's presented in the media.
I'm confident that if there are frequent high profile articles on the field that talk about "unsolved problems" or "fundamental limits" that this acts like crackpot catnip.
> Which makes me think the reason biology or sociology doesn't have crackpots ...either that they just are not interesting to the retired engineer, or they dont take as many years of intense study.
An alternative, cynical interpretation is that crackpots are indistinguishable from the ordinary output of some fields.
Biology has attracted what you might call crackpots (particularly in the area of human evolution and evolution in general) of all persuasions, some of whom were quite successful in their local arenas (Lysenko in the Soviet Union controlled the direction of biological research for several decades, much to the detriment of Soviet agriculture for example).
Another one I encountered personally was the group of academics who got behind the "AIDS is an autoimmune disorder, not a viral infection" theory. It was a bit uncomfortable talking to them about it, they really had a kind of evangelical / persecuted visionary complex. These were people with advanced degrees and even a university professor (in chemistry, not biology) was involved. A similar small group of academics in paleontology continue to deny that an asteroid impact had anything to do with the extinction of the dinosaurs, despite vast evidence supporting that conclusion.
A common factor seems to be that such people are susceptible to ideological fixation. They get ideas in their heads that they aren't willing to question, and promoting them becomes more of an article of faith rather than something that can be addressed by scientific methods.
Non-math fields have more subjectiveness, for one. Second, much higher barrier to entry. Someone can investigate something, read some relevant literature, and become an amateur historian, but the barriers to being competent at math and physics are way higher.
One of the top people in retrovirology turned out to be a crank when AIDS was elucidated, and he couldn't see it. Peter Duesberg (duesberg.com). Also, HPV doesn't cause cancer, after all? He has got Kary Mullis, 1993 Nobel/chem for the polymerase chain reaction, on his side, anyway.
Geology used to be full of cranks. Not just anti-tectonicists, but anti-catastrophists who could not abide bolide strikes. There are still many who can't accept a strike 13kya; they have fallen back on demanding a crater, knowing not all bolides leave one.
A really great geology book, BTW, is "Reading the Rocks", by Marcia Bjornerud.
I'm surprised abiogenesis hasn't attracted more crackpots. there's no embarrassing dinosaur bones to deny or antibiotic resistance to explain away. lots of hints left in virions, archaea and ribozymes, but still a tremendous amount of complexity in LUCA to explain. I guess there's panspermia, but that just kicks the can down the road, and asteroids are a viable explanation for at least e.g. sourcing amino acids.
maybe because nothing's established enough yet to be dogma, and the field isn't practically important other than just being neat.
It's fascinating that this is so well known among physicists but to those of us outside, we are totally unaware that these people exist and that email addresses get deluged.
It seems to be a logical trap: physics is interesting enough to attract amateurs but complex enough that no amateur can hope to contribute.
Which makes me think the reason biology or sociology doesn't have crackpots (or maybe they do... Ive never heard of it though) is either that they just are not interesting to the retired engineer, or they dont take as many years of intense study.