I have to wonder how many "cranks" get that way because they start out as legitimate scientists or amateur scientists, and somewhere along the way they receive abuse from the people who they expect would know better? I know from firsthand experience how bad it can be. I have also read up on the negative experiences of Velikovsky. He was a very good researcher, and only a bit weaker on physical theory than the rest of the 1950s crowd. I think they drove him a little crazy.

One mistake a person can make when he introduces new theory is to allow himself to be talked into making off the cuff additions to that theory. Even when he qualifies his theory as a "possibility", other scientists take off on him and run his reputation down. Einstein could speculate all he wanted. Reich could not. Einstein might make off-hand speculations and it would become holy scripture. Velikovsky might do the same thing and it's another nail in his coffin.

Something that worries me also is that there are personalities who go on and on about something without making sense, who might be provocateurs or who might have been sort of "steered" by provocateurs into acting a certain way. I am learning firsthand how delicate the process of developing new theory is. It is vulnerable to a sharp word here, a knowing grin there. It is vulnerable to becoming fixated in a form that is not ready for publication. Put a researcher on the defensive often enough, and he is never going to be the same again.

It's too easy for someone's perception of science to become like a personal agenda. Going along with the group makes it safer to act that way that some cranks and crackpots do, and not be called a crank or crackpot. I've said in another thread that "mainstream" science has some definite cracks in it. The list of those cracks would be a good book. I'm going to have to get some of those books that I used to have also, because this theme has been done by some good researchers.

I've been reading some of the history of scientific discoveries. In these stories it becomes clear that science is not rock-steady enough for a particular set of "mainstream" notions to be allowed to be overly dominant. The term "as far as we know" isn't used often enough. Derision and scorn are used against people like Halton Arp way too easily. People have even been banned from the big telescopes for looking at Arp's list of targets, and that slides down the hill from caution into neurosis. How it even occurred to anyone to do a secondary boycott of Arp's work, and what kind of person can treat people that way, I don't know. Arp put out a theory and asked for serious tests of it. He was once a best astronomer, astronomer of the year, something like that.

Some mainstream scientists are just plain abusive of anyone who contradicts them, and I've run into that on the net. This is a social phenomenon that involves science, and I'd like to see people more able to recognize that this exists and is a problem.

So basically what you are saying is that the weaopon is not theory but reputation?

That's with anything. Look at you and look at me. Two nobodies that probably stay up at night with neurons on fire, we'll spend the night scribbling out a theory making sure its written perfectly.
Only to have it fall on deaf ears.

Why?
Becuase no one has heard of you (prole: Velikovsky? Who the hell is Velikovsky? Ah, yes. He wrote Crime and Punishment or Nutcracker. One of those.
Yet this same person has a pet gerbil named Einstein)

And you have no money.
And if they did hear of you and you did have money, your lack of dedication or personality would kill it.
Then again, maybe not.

You have come to find that science isn't scientific. Religion isn't very religious, either. Are you already disillusioned with science, or is that to come?

But do you know why there's so much backstabbing and in fighting in science? Because the stakes are so low.

I am a bit disillusioned with science itself. Some of the notions that are popular in the scientific community are definitely in error. Just for one example, a pool of water on Mars won't flash into vapor if it is at about 2 degrees celsius or a little warmer, the way some qualified people say it will. It won't evaporate as fast as the same pool of water would on Earth at 70 degrees, not nearly so fast. Two "relativistic" formulas that I have seen for gravitational redshift are not wrong. They are meaningless. Some of the people I have had these discussions with act like they know an answer and just won't tell me, but damn me to hell for asking. There was one encounter after I gave a lucid explanation of Olber's paradox, and I have no clue why they banned me. I think it had something to do with asking them to explain what was wrong with the idea. That whole thread had less than ten messages in it.

But one of the most telling things, that tells me that something is wrong, has been the behavior of some people who meet questions with explosions of violent temper, bannings, and strangeness. I'm a little wierded out here because the moderators are acting like moderators and the crackpots are acting like crackpots. It's sort of inside out. I'm used to the moderators acting like crackpots and getting rid of anyone who asks serious questions.

And you know, Gedanken, I think that real science is now being done by the so-called fringe. We are better off abandoning academia and forming a community that is not afraid to speak against popular delusions. The popular press has become the right place to file our reports. It isn't just Bigfoot and flying saucers these days.