That Crackpot's Role In Physics? - Debunking Terrible Physics

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]So, to believe that without training, you might be able to solve all of quantum gravity before breakfast or something like that by making vague analogies is probably the wrong way to go about it.

[00:00:17]I came across this kind of interesting post. This was by a guy called Missile Man, Minute of Zombie on Twitter. I refuse to say X.

[00:00:28]And he appears to be one of these kind of zany UAP UFO conspiracy theorist accounts, perhaps slightly more on the self-aware side.

[00:00:39]And he created this post about the layperson's role in science that I'd like to discuss. So, I'll just very quickly read it. So, I realized at some point, not even sure when, that trying to speak intelligently about theoretical physics is essentially impossible without a PhD in physics. I was basically embarrassed to talk about Einstein and Carton with Eric Weinstein.

[00:01:02]As badly as I wanted to express my thoughts that I had because there's an extremely limited number of things that I can say while avoiding saying something totally wrong and stupid. You can't have interesting ideas about something you don't understand. It's like thinking you invented a new way to attack in battle, but you've never read Clausewitz Clausewitz or Napoleon or Sun Tzu or Caesar or Mattis. What you're about to say is probably not novel if you haven't ingested and comprehended the corpus that defined the discipline. The sad is we almost we are almost totally hapless and ineffectual in the realm of developing new theories. We here means everyone involved in the extended physics {slash} exotic science community who don't have PhDs in physics, but have peripheral technical training. So, a retired engineer or something like this.

[00:01:51]There's extremely little that you can do and I can do, and there's literally zero that someone without technical training can do. I'm sorry, it's zero. And they don't want to hear that. That makes me sound like an arrogant elite or gatekeeper. If you don't have a STEM degree of some kind, there's a 0.001% chance you can use the word scalar correctly. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so what? We just keep writing physics fan fic, I guess.

[00:02:15][ __ ] So, the summary of this is basically that he's saying unless or he's realizing that there's all these communities that exist that come up with these crackpot physics theories, but he's finally realized that 99.999999999% of these are going to be trash because the people who work in these fields don't have the appropriate training. So, um Hassan, maybe if I come to you first, what do you make of this idea that it's basically impossible to talk about physics unless you have a PhD in physics?

[00:02:50]>> So, I I think I agree with the spirit of the tweet, but of course there are some parts of the tweet that are not I don't agree with. For example, Freeman Dyson is an example who didn't have a PhD. He was a brilliant physicist. So, there will be exceptions, of course.

[00:03:04]Um but of course he had training. I mean, he's this account is talking about having, you know, proper training. So, of course he Freeman Dyson did have training in physics and maths.

[00:03:13]Um I do agree that if you don't have specialized knowledge of a particular field, it's very hard to contribute because you don't know what the current known paradigm or current known landscape looks like. And it it's true for anyone.

[00:03:26]I'm doing my PhD in physics, but if I want to contribute something to history, I won't be able to do so. If I talk about history to history experts, I will come off as an idiot, to be honest, unless I, you know, you know, do our not do our literally, but like read a lot of history books. So, it will be very hard for me to contribute something about history. Um >> It depends on what you mean by contribute, right? So, anyone can talk about these things and be interested, and you know, you can contribute in the terms of, you know, voting for, you know, science, you know, supportive parties or, you know, trying to learn.

[00:03:59]It's never too late to learn. But, if you want to contribute a theory, as Tim and Christian were saying before, you need to understand like the corpus of knowledge so that you can build upon that, right? You have to put in the work. And there seems to be [clears throat] this kind of bizarre subculture online of people who think that they can contribute theories without knowing any of the background stuff that they need to build upon. It's such an odd sort of setup online.

[00:04:25]>> I mean, most most of the graduate students who work in theoretical physics, they don't contribute theories.

[00:04:30]They only, you know, work on a small problem in a particular existing framework. So, even they don't contribute theories. And one thing that comes here is that I mean, it's kind of a cliche to say that well, education opens your mind to possibilities. It does.

[00:04:44]But, I think one thing about education that is not mentioned a lot and I think it should be mentioned is that it also restricts your mind to some possibilities. It tells you that this thing doesn't work and this is why.

[00:04:55]Right? So, if you don't have the formal training, you don't know that what directions don't work. Because the thing is that you may think that, oh, I'm the first person who came up with this direction. No, this has been studied like 50 years ago by experts in >> I think sometimes they will think that that's a positive, right? Oh, I am not poisoned by, you know, string theory and, you know, the current paradigm. I am here to ask all questions and keep everything on the table like they we said before, but it it doesn't work like that.

[00:05:22]Some things are just broken, right?

[00:05:24]>> I mean, knowing more is never a negative, to be honest. I mean, you don't have to for for example, I know if I knew more about loop quantum gravity, I don't think that it's a negative.

[00:05:34]Although, I'm never going to work on that. So, knowing more is never a negative. How is that a negative? I mean, you don't have to be indoctrinated by a particular theory, of course, but knowing more is always a positive. It's never a negative.

[00:05:45]>> But, what what what I find really interesting in these kind of online communities, um, Christian, is is these people, rather than accepting that they kind of need to learn more, right?

[00:05:55]There's There's good reasons why people don't have a PhD in physics, right? They don't have time to study, they didn't do it earlier in life, perhaps they just couldn't be bothered, they didn't have the money to do it. Whatever the reason might be, I don't I don't judge anyone for not having a PhD in physics. But these online communities, they seem to rather than accept that they need to study, learn more, and you know, and get up-to-date with that corpus of knowledge so that they can contribute, they seem to think that they can just get around it by kind of making simple analogies or or kind of attacking physicists as they are, rather than doing the work. And I just don't understand like how these communities develop. Is it just people who kind of can't be bothered to do the work or or aren't capable of doing the work and therefore they just throw out anything.

[00:06:42]>> I I don't know, but but one thing that I would say is that the there was a tangent to what you said earlier, and that tangent is that, for example, there are these stories that, uh, you know, there was a math PhD student who, uh, you know, who was taking a course and there were some, uh, I think, uh, Dan Sick was his last name, if I remember correctly. So, he was told that, "Oh, these two problems are unsolved problems." And he didn't listen to it because he was late, and he solved those problems because he didn't listen to the, you know, instructor saying that all these problems are unsolved problems.

[00:07:09]>> is this all, you know, kind of folk history of physics great man [ __ ] again, that, you know, I could be the Einstein who comes in and just shreds everything and changes the paradigm, and is that is that where these people think they are?

[00:07:25]>> I'm I'm not sure about that, but I think but I think, you know, Tim or Christian can talk more about it, but this is one thing that I don't know what what the the intentions or, you know, thoughts of these people are. But one thing that I would say, as I was saying earlier, is that there is certainly a psychological thing. For example, if I'm working on a problem and I know that Vafa worked on this problem and he wasn't able to solve it, yeah, I mean my confidence is going to go down, of course, because I know that he's a giant in the field. So, that is certainly a thing. That's a sociological aspect. That is certainly a thing. But, uh you I mean it doesn't mean mean that I won't learn it before solving the problem. I won't say that, "Oh, since but you know, people before me were not able to solve it, so I don't need to need to learn anything before I solve this problem." That's stupid, to be honest.

[00:08:07]So, yeah.

[00:08:08]>> Yeah, I just I just don't understand that actually.

[00:08:10]Christian, any ideas on where these sort of How do these communities develop where they're they're sort of like "We can solve this, but without sort of doing any sort of relevant training in the field."

[00:08:22]>> Yeah, I think it it's probably the great man [ __ ] that we've been coming back to, possibly combined with the advent of LLMs, because many of the cranks that I've I've spoken to say, "Well, I had this great idea and I fed it into a GPT or Claude and it told me that this was brilliant and I've solved everything and here's my paper." So, obviously you need the training in order to audit the output of an LLM and tell whether it's correct. So, I I agree with the others in the sense that the spirit of the treat the tweet is correct in the sense that you do need specialized training in order to contribute to these fields in the sense of proposing a new theory, but as Hassan said, as a PhD student and even I as a postdoc, I don't contribute new theories. I work incrementally on existing theories and that's the best I can do at the moment.

[00:09:08]So, to believe that without training you might be able to solve all of quantum gravity before breakfast or something like that by making vague analogies is probably the wrong way to go about it.

[00:09:20]And there are other ways to be interested in science as a layperson, as you alluded to. I mean, you can consume science communication, you can vote in favor of pro-science policies. There are many ways to engage with science that do not involve coming up with a theory of everything. and I think maybe it would be better if some of these people who want to come up with a theory of everything sort of reframed their focus and did more of those things.

[00:09:46]>> I I think you can see this attitude that they they want to be the kind of ones, as you said, that that they kind of solve quantum gravity before breakfast.

[00:09:52]I think you can see this in some of the the hero worship you see online. It's always focused on kind of renegades, right? It's always Sabine or it's Smolin or it's or it's Turrock or it's uh Penrose or it's Feynman or it's Tesla. They all have these avatars of these people that they perceive to be, you know, massive renegades who are pushing back against a particular paradigm. Now, that that's not commenting on the science that those people do, um but I think you see that that they want to be the person who kind of cracks all the physics. And as you say, that requires a lot of work to be done. Um and it requires you to understand the corpus of knowledge that that that's gone before.

[00:10:30]>> Yeah, I really think that's it's a it's a consequence of sort of how we tell the history of science as a story that we tell and how we love to tell these stories as these renegade geniuses. Like Einstein came out of nowhere and then solved everything with like a book completely out of out of left field, which is simply false. Uh like Einstein didn't do that.

[00:10:50]Newton stood on the shoulders of giants.

[00:10:53]Uh Galileo built on previous observations. There was recently a very interesting article about uh Jenner who the who is typically accredited with the discovery of vaccines, invention of vaccines. And actually also that is quite a myth. There were a lot of people doing incremental work before that. And he uh in that sense uh completed it, but there was a lot to build up on that. And the thing that is a racist, which I think we are circling around, is the general principle. I don't think that's is it's true just for science. It's almost always true. Is that the beginner learns the rules and the master learns to break the rules.

[00:11:36]It's true in chess. You learn initially, you know, you should protect your pieces, you should control the center, and then when you're really good, you learn when you don't have to do that or how you can get around. It's true in in architecture, it's true in fashion, it's true in mathematics, it's true in physics. You first learn sort of what are the standard axioms, and then later when you're really good, you start playing around and trying to break the rules and see what happens. But you need to know the rules in order to know what happens when you break them.

[00:12:08]>> And they kind of want to shortcut that that responsibility to to learn the rules.

[00:12:12]>> There's one more thing that I would say.

[00:12:13]So, I think one thing that we need to see is that in the current era, who are the scientists who we uh celebrate the most? We don't celebrate sign We don't just celebrate scientists who gave new theories. For example, take the example of Witten. Why is Witten famous? Because of string theory. He didn't come up with string theory. No, he didn't. I mean, not even I I I've said this earlier as well, but not even a single string theory from the five string theories that we know about is given by Witten. Not even a single one of them. And uh so, I ICTP is a is an institute in Italy, and when it turned 50 in the 2004, they published a book called 100 reasons to be a scientist.

[00:12:53]And in that book, they have interviewed the 100 scientists, and Witten's interview is there as well. And one line from that essay I I like like that a lot. It said that it says that one of the senior physicist whom I admire the most told me that in in his estimation, the key to remaining active as one grows older is that one not be one must not be bashful about working on things that other people invented.

[00:13:15]So, this is Witten.

[00:13:16]>> I found this Christian, maybe if I come to you, I found it very interesting that he had this realization that people who don't have any training shouldn't be talking outside of their area of expertise and trying to contribute theories.

[00:13:32]Uh when he was talking to Eric Weinstein, this is the most bizarre time to realize that you shouldn't be talking [ __ ] about things that you don't understand, right?

[00:13:43]>> Yes, I think >> [laughter] >> it's oddly it's almost on the nose because having spoken to Eric myself and had a similar conversation where we're exchanging words and I've no idea what the hell he's saying because I think he's using the words wrong. It's it's kind of funny to see that parallel appear in this tweet.

[00:14:00]>> It's interesting that the guy's had this like very sensible realization while talking to someone who is in desperate need of that realization, right? That they've somehow triggered this they've somehow triggered it in this guy without ever having triggered it in themselves.

[00:14:15]>> If almost it had gone the other way, if this had triggered that realization in Eric, we might be much better off, but I'm glad that at least this guy made the realization and hopefully it leads him to a more productive consumption of of science as as an enthusiast, but I would not trust Eric Weinstein to talk about Einstein-Cartan to save the least among many other things.

[00:14:36]>> I do I do I can understand how somebody would come to a realization that physics is incredibly hard, niche, and dense after talking to Eric like you said because he's an incredibly incredibly bad He is a terrible scientific communicator and a terrible advocate for his own ideas because he intentionally speaks in confusing and and cryptic language.

[00:15:01]Either and I think 100% like you because half of the stuff he doesn't even understand.

[00:15:06]And then on the other flip side of it I I think he does it for effect as well, right? To make things sound overly complicated. The a great example in the discussion he had with Sean Carroll when he was on on Piers Morgan.

[00:15:18]Basically just talking about, you know, SU SU2 cross blah blah blah blah blah, talking about the uh standard model. All he had to say was >> The most amazing >> is the structure of the standard model like this, but he decided to go into technical jargon that nobody's going to understand to make it >> he he he goes into derivation sometimes, so he only needed to say that cosmological constant needs to be a constant which anybody who has taken general relativity knows, but he also said that because that's the only term that you can add because it's divergence free on both sides. I mean, you don't need to add add that. I mean, he only added that so that people can see that he's smart and he knows.

[00:15:53]>> This is the thing, right? He completely falls down when he talks to an expert, but when he talks to someone who doesn't know, Jesus, I don't understand what that means. That must be amazingly impressive.

[00:16:02]>> The most amazing part of that discussion with Sean Carroll was when he could have said geometric quantization, two words.

[00:16:11]And instead, he says, "Oh, we can locally write the symplectic form as the curvature of the line blah blah blah."

[00:16:20]Everyone >> got wrong, by the way.

[00:16:22]>> Which he got wrong.

[00:16:22]>> Also got wrong, as I think you pointed out on Twitter, right?

[00:16:25]>> That's right. He got it wrong. In particular, I mean, for several reasons, but the main one being that sort of just being locally the curvature is not good enough. You need it to be globally the curvature.

[00:16:36]>> Yep.

[00:16:38]Also, you know, I would never explain GR to Sean Carroll. I mean, he is the author of the book on GR.

[00:16:44]>> [laughter] >> Right?

[00:16:45]>> I he he was so good in that that he just was like, "I'm not even going to talk.

[00:16:49]I'm just going to let this [ __ ] bozo hang himself." Like, Like, the the the eyes and stuff that he was doing were just great. He's just like, Yeah, fantastic, masterful display.

[00:17:00]The thing is, I think people like Eric Weinstein, I think they abuse and take advantage of groups like this, right? So, Eric is sort of the poster child for this. I have geometric unity. I'm being kept down by the powers that be.

[00:17:16]So are you. You can have brilliant ideas. Just come and listen to what I'm saying.

[00:17:21]These people have been led astray by frauds like Eric Weinstein, right? This is This is how these communities get together and they're they're having 5 hours listening to Eric Weinstein talk absolute [ __ ] when their time would be much better served just opening up a, you know, a basic physics textbook and trying to to to do some of the basics.

[00:17:42]But I I think he he takes advantages of of these people, right, Tim?

[00:17:46]>> Yeah, he does. Uh, the funniest part is that sort of he complains that he's being kept down and nobody's listening.

[00:17:53]But he hates these people. He hates that he is grouped together with these other cranks because he considers himself, of course, the establishment in exile.

[00:18:02]Uh, so he definitely he wants to be the establishment. He wants to be the one keeping these people down. Instead, he has to entertain these people.

[00:18:11]Uh, and they have to and he has to talk to them and they have to listen to him.

[00:18:15]Uh, and it's a very unpleasant experience for everyone involved.

[00:18:18]>> The The last thing I kind of wanted to to note on here was at the very end of this, he says, "And the people who I'm talking to don't want to hear this. It makes me sound like an arrogant elite or a gatekeeper." And I think this comes back to the things we were talking about earlier, right? Is that this to say these things that you don't understand, you can't, unfortunately at this stage, contribute much is a heretical thing to say in these groups, but it's correct and obvious, right?

[00:18:48]It's not having a go at someone. I'm not judging you because you don't know what string theory is or you don't know, you know, what quantum mechanics is. You have to do the work to understand these things. It's not being an elite or being a gatekeeper to say that you need to know the basic rules of how things work to be able to contribute at the top end of physics. That >> I think not >> that this sort of science populist just wider populist sort of rhetoric is stopping people from doing the basics, right? That instead of me not understanding, which is the self-evident truth, it must mean that I'm being kept down because nobody's taking my basic analogies about something complicated seriously. And I just find that very sad that that kind of thing is sad.

[00:19:35]>> one thing here. I think I disagree that it's not keeping out gatekeeping. I think it is gatekeeping, but the thing is that gatekeeping has been turned into a negative word. I think it's a good thing.

[00:19:45]Peer review is literally gatekeeping.

[00:19:48]Right? And it's not bad. Right?

[00:19:49]Gatekeeping The thing is that the connotation attached to gatekeeping because of online discourse has become a bad connotation. It shouldn't be because, you know, people see gatekeeping as, you know, as, you know, this practice that you don't allow other people to come into your field. That's literally not what gatekeeping is.

[00:20:06]Gatekeeping means that you like the field that you work on very well. And you want to you you don't want to corrupt it with, you know, bad practices. That's what gatekeeping is.

[00:20:15]It doesn't mean that, oh, we are, you know, in this group and no one else can come in this group. No. It it just means that you need some prerequisites if you want to, you know, talk about some topic or if you want to contribute to some topic. That's it. Gatekeeping is not a bad thing. I mean, people have made it a bad thing you know, on the internet for some reason.

[00:20:32]>> Absolutely.

[00:20:33]>> funny how the meaning of the words evolved, I think. Because so gatekeeping originally was about like fandoms, right? And people who were like a really big fan of some show and then they said to some somebody else like, you are not a real fan because you don't know this or you don't do this. And sort of that is bad and stupid, right? Let people enjoy things, etc. And it's funny how it the meaning of the word migrated to be like, oh, you're not you're not allowed to be an expert.

[00:21:05]Like there's no such thing as expertise.

[00:21:07]Anyone can contribute.

[00:21:08]>> So, the other one was quite subjective, right? You're not a fan of Star Trek or whatever. That's fine. It's kind of a subjective thing. But, now it's become like, you don't even need the objective skills of being a physicist. Like, you should just be let in because otherwise, it's gatekeeping.

[00:21:23]>> I quite like the final sentence uh with that we just keep writing physics fan fic, I guess. It's a good analogy, I think. I think physics fan fan fic is a very good phrase to capture crackpot theories with cuz it's just like, oh, you you take the main characters from physics and you write your own little story about that what they do every day. And that's, you know, but there's no rules, there's no constraints. You just write whatever comes out.

[00:21:51]Um, and it fits very well in that sense.

[00:21:54]And like with fan fic, you know, we would like there to be some constraints to who gets published in a bookstore and who publishes on Tumblr.

[00:22:04]>> Absolutely.

[00:22:05]>> Yeah, it needs to be good fiction.

[00:22:07]But, even if it's fiction.

[00:22:09]>> Absolutely. So, there are many ways that you can still contribute to physics. As Christian said, you can vote for pro-science parties, you can read science communication, you can support your favorite science communicators.

[00:22:21]But, if you want to contribute in the field, even if you don't have a PhD and you don't have to have a PhD, but you're going to need to learn the basics.

[00:22:29]You're going to have to >> By the way, sorry, I'm sorry. There's one thing that I would say. There is a quote from Steven Weinberg that people abuse all the time. And the quote is that don't need to know everything before you do research. It's said in a very specific context. I mean, it just means literally what he says, that you don't need to know everything. That's what it means. It doesn't mean that you don't need you don't need you shouldn't know anything.

[00:22:49]You right? He did never say that. So, people use that quote all the time in a bad sense.

[00:22:53]>> That's the attitude nowadays, isn't it?

[00:22:55]Just start. Just dive in. You don't know anything, but just dive in. But, no, you do need to >> dive in. Dive in, but dive in in learning, not research.

[00:23:03]>> I want to know what you think, because you're the scholars of enlightenment that I do this for. So, please take a moment, if you wish, to let me know down in the comments section. And if you like this video, please consider leaving a like, subscribing, setting up notifications, and sharing this video more widely. I can't tell you how much these simple actions help me out, and how much I'd appreciate it. Thanks for watching.

[00:23:33]Thanks for being scientific.

[00:23:35]Thanks for being bad.