Appendix: Science for Crackpots

Appendix: Science for Crackpots As a bonus here is a short spoof written a few years ago by the author of this book. It originally appeared online on the Mad Scientist Journal website in October 2014, and was reprinted in Mad Scientist Journal anthology #11 (DefCon One Publishing, Kindle edition, 2014). Science for Crackpots? I know what you’re thinking: “Crackpots don’t need to read textbooks because they already know everything”. You’re right, of course. But this isn’t a text- book, just a collection of useful tips based on my own thirty years of experi- ence as one of the world’s leading crackpots. The Scientific Method The heart of mainstream science is something they call “the scientific method”. This is a kind of Masonic handshake that scientists use to keep insiders inside and outsiders outside. In reality the scientific method is like the Emperor’s New Clothes—it sounds fancy but there’s nothing really there. As a crackpot, you won’t lose any credibility if you ignore the scientific method altogether. Many promising young crackpots are put off by the mistaken belief they have to plough through piles of books with boring titles like “Integrated © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 163 A. May, Fake Physics: Spoofs, Hoaxes and Fictitious Science, Science and Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13314-6 164 Appendix: Science for Crackpots Principles of Zoology” or “Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity”. This simply isn’t the case. These books were written by scientists, and scientists don’t know everything. If they did, the world wouldn’t need crackpots. One of the founders of quantum theory, Max Planck, observed that “new scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher.” So where will the next great scientific idea come from? It might be your head—in fact, it probably will be. Belief Systems One of the first things the aspiring crackpot needs to do is choose a belief system. Be as imaginative as you want—you can always change it later if you decide you don’t like it. As the great philosopher Rudolf Steiner pointed out, “Truth is a free creation of the human spirit, that never would exist at all if we did not generate it ourselves.” The belief system of modern science has passed its use-by date. Many of its ideas are still rooted in the avant-garde aesthetics of the early twentieth cen- tury. A perfect example is Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which is a slap in the face to common sense in the same way that Picasso’s cubist style—which emerged at the same time—was a slap in the face to representational art. Just as the art establishment deified Picasso, the science establishment deified Einstein. Fortunately the world of ideas is a free market, and you can pick and choose what you wish to believe or disbelieve. Most crackpots feel an instinctive aver- sion to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and can easily come up with a simpler and more satisfying theory of their own. In fact, there is a standard Relativity Test that can be applied to aspiring crackpots: If an individual feels no urge whatsoever to come up with an alternative to the Theory of Relativity, they will probably never make a good crackpot. Scientific Dogma Mainstream scientists take a relentlessly dogmatic approach to methodology. They insist on starting with the evidence, and then looking for a theory to explain that evidence. With a mindset like that, it’s no wonder science makes such slow progress. Appendix: Science for Crackpots 165 On the other hand, crackpots are more open minded. They avoid the dogma trap by starting with an explanation and then looking for evidence to support it. That’s why the field of ufology has made such enormous progress in the last sixty years. If you adopted the mainstream approach, it would mean examining all the eyewitness testimony and leaked government documents and YouTube videos, then formulating an exhaustive set of mutually exclusive hypotheses and going through the laborious process of testing them in a sci- entifically rigorous way. You wouldn’t get anywhere at all—which is why mainstream science hasn’t made any progress whatsoever in understanding the UFO phenomenon. On the other hand, if you take the more rational, level-headed approach of assuming from the start that UFOs are interstellar spacecraft piloted by small grey humanoids from Zeta Reticuli, and then fitting all for available evidence to the theory, you will know exactly what we know today: that UFOs are interstellar spacecraft piloted by small grey humanoids from Zeta Reticuli. Falsifiability Of all the concepts in the philosophy of science, perhaps the most bizarre is that of the falsifiable hypothesis. “Falsifiable” sounds like a bad thing, but—in the eyes of mainstream science—it’s actually a good thing. Why on earth is that? What person in their right mind would want their pet hypothesis to be falsifiable? Yet that’s exactly what scientists want – most of them won’t even look at non-falsifiable hypotheses. They refer to them as “Not Even Wrong”, and make it sound like a pejorative. But right and wrong are opposite extremes, so “Not Even Wrong” is somewhere in the grey area between the two. That’s the best place for a crackpot to be. Wherever possible, crackpots should stick to non-falsifiable hypotheses and leave the defeatist, angst-ridden concept of falsifiability to the mainstreamers. The latter may formulate a hypothesis such as “Gigantopithecus is extinct”, since it is falsifiable. If a Gigantopithecus is caught on a YouTube video, that proves it’s not extinct and so the hypothesis is false. On the other hand, a crackpot is better off with a non-falsifiable hypothesis such as “Gigantopithecus is not extinct”. No matter how much you search the woods without finding Bigfoot, that doesn’t disprove your hypothesis. “Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence,” as Galileo said to the Spanish Inquisition. 166 Appendix: Science for Crackpots A Role Model Ah, yes—Galileo. He’s my role model, and I bet he’s your role model too. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) lived at a time when, like today, the establishment authorities were blinkered, short-sighted fools. They believed the Sun orbited around the Earth, and they believed heavy objects fell faster than light objects. They were wrong, and Galileo told them they were wrong, but they stuck to their erroneous views and persecuted him into the bargain. That’s a situation most of us can relate to – but we can take heart in the fact that his- tory has vindicated Galileo and made a laughing-stock of his persecutors. Just like you, Galileo was told his ideas were nonsense. And just like Galileo, you will be proved right in the end. Reporting Your Results Having come up with your revolutionary new theory, you will of course want to inform the world about it. There’s a right way and a wrong way to go about this. The wrong way is to post a Facebook status along the lines of: “Hey, guess what you guys!!! You CAN travel faster than light!!! I just PROVED it!!! Albert Einstein was a LOSER!!!” Strange as it may seem, the mainstream scientific community usually ignores devastatingly important announcements of this type. If you want them to take your work seriously, you have to write it up in the correct aca- demic style—with plenty of footnotes, references, equations and diagrams. This may sound daunting, but it’s not that difficult when you get the hang of it. To mainstream scientists, style is more important than substance. Ultimately, the whole issue of scientific credibility comes down to the effective use of jargon. For the crackpot, one of the most insidious aspects of mainstream science is the concept of peer review. It wouldn’t be a problem if the reviewer really was a peer, i.e. another crackpot. In practice, however, it’s more likely to be a member of the scientific Thought Police with a vested interest in suppressing the work of outsiders. For this reason, most crackpots choose to boycott the peer review process altogether. Appendix: Science for Crackpots 167 Occam’s Razor William of Occam, who lived around 700 years ago, made a famous observa- tion to the effect that “it is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer”. This gave rise to the principle of Occam’s Razor, which is one of the fundamental tenets of the scientific method. In simple terms, it says that if there are two competing hypotheses which describe the facts equally well, then the simpler theory is more likely to be correct. It’s obvious that by espousing Occam’s Razor, scientists are shooting themselves in the foot. Mainstream theories are always obscure and over- complicated, while crackpot ones are simple and straightforward. So crackpots will win out on the grounds of Occam’s Razor every time. As an example, consider the field of ufology. Scientists are always falling over themselves to debunk UFO sightings, but they do it “with more things rather than fewer”. As such they are automatically wrong, by a simple applica- tion of Occam’s Razor. They invoke swamp gas, weather balloons, the planet Venus, flocks of pelicans, attention-seeking hoaxers and mentally retarded witnesses. That’s six different explanations, and they don’t stop there.

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