[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is a recursive Crackpot test session we are recording. So you begin and end on the Crackpot test.
Rick Rosner: All right, so it’s well known among people who are in the physics departments at universities that it’s not super rare for a lunatic to show up at the University with a revolutionary theory and try to track down some physics professor to run the theory past and it’s 999 times out of a 1000 the theory is legit shitty/crazy. So there’s this John Baez who’s an expert in group theory and he knows a shitload of math, he knows a lot of physics; he’s at UC Riverside. If you like math and physics he deserves a follow on Twitter at least, I don’t know where else he posts. But he has a lot of interesting math shit that he posts. More than 20 years ago, recognizing that the culture of Crackpots or the phenomenology of Crackpot, he came up with a checklist called the Crackpot index which would tell a Crackpot if they actually listened to any kind of reason or how cracked they are but I guess would tell other concerned people around the Crackpot how lunatic they are and so what’s weighed into it with regard to IC, informational cosmology.
A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics and he says that tongue-in-cheek. Number one – negative five point starting credit. So he gives you the benefit of the doubt, the higher your score the higher your total, the more cracked you are.
Jacobsen: So it’s like golf; you want the lowest score possible.
Rosner: Yeah, it’s like golf.
Jacobsen: With a handicap at the start.
Rosner: Yeah, and I’ll score us as we go. Number two – one point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false. We don’t really do that. Number three – two points for every statement that is clearly vacuous. I don’t know that we do that I mean what do you call it when something is inherently true?
Jacobsen: Truism, tautological, redundant.
Rosner: Tautological, yeah that’s right. We don’t really deal in tautologies so I don’t think we score there. Three points for every statement that is logically inconsistent, I don’t think we do that. Five points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction; that is somebody’s told you that you’re fucked I guess and you persist. Well, no we don’t really do that. Five points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment. We don’t knowingly do that.
Jacobsen: The only one coming to mind would be rolling bang rather than a single bang.
Rosner: Yeah. We’ve been talking about this for forever and I’ve been thinking about it. The more I think about it the more I tend to like give up and think that the universe looks really big bang-y, not that I believe that it’s straightforwardly big bang-y but a lot of the things that just don’t agree with evidence I can live without. Five points for each word in all caps. Five points for each mention of Einstein misspelled, Hawkins misspelled or Feynman misspelled.
Jacobsen: We did this before but it was a dialogue I think at one point.
Rosner: We did this already?
Jacobsen: I think but it was me asking you the questions.
Rosner: So, 10 points for each claim the quantum mechanics is fundamentally misguided. We don’t do that around here, we love quantum mechanics. If anything, we air too far in the other direction. I don’t think you can air too far in the other direction, quantum mechanics has been verified up the wazoo. 10 points are for pointing out that you have gone to school as if this were evidence of sanity; not real really do that. I guess this probably applies to like manifestos or statements that you maybe leave off at the desk of the secretary of the physics department or something or maybe if you’re persistent enough to get into somebody’s office, this is the shit you say.
Jacobsen: Yeah, this was published in 1998. This is the era of big postal code and is the predominant and letters and letters to the editor.
Rosner: So what you’re saying is like most people didn’t start using the internet till the mid ‘90s, so it was not too far…
Jacobsen: This is like the U.S post Office deal.
Rosner: Yeah okay. So people are mailing to it.
Jacobsen: Yeah, it’s the era of Kaczynski and people like that.
Rosner: Yeah, there you go. People mail also, if they’re Unabomber they’re mailing bombs. All right, we’re more than a quarter of the way through. 10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you’ve been working on it. So, I get those points. I’m constantly talking about that, so 10 points for that and 10 more for emphasizing that you worked on your own, not really but not really not but still just 10 points. 10 points for mailing your theory to someone you don’t know personally and asking them not to tell anyone else about it for fear that your ideas will be stolen. No, I don’t think that fear is unusual either in crackpot physics theories or in writing stories and shit but you have to overcome it. A writing professional knows the story ideas are a dime a dozen and it’s the execution that counts and you just have to fucking get over it and take the risk.
10 points for offering prize money. Nope. 10 points for each new term you invent and use without properly defining it. No. 10 points for each statement along the lines of I’m not good at math but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations. Maybe one-third credit for that because I’ve been fantastically lazy at trying to… I mean I poked at it but no, the theory should be much more mathic than it is. So we’re up to about 13 points not including the initial minus five. 10 points for arguing the current well-established theory is only a theory as If this were somehow a point against it. No. 10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly it doesn’t explain why they occur or fails to provide a mechanism. A whiff of that but really I don’t know. All right, I’ll take two points out of 10 for that. 10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein or claim that special or general relativity or fundamentally misguided. No. (Without good evidence he allows the possibility that you’ve discovered something).
10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a paradigm shift. No, but I kind of think it, if I’d take two points out of ten for that. 20 points for emailing me and complaining about the crackpot index saying that it suppresses original thinkers are saying that I misspelled Einstein in item eight as he did for points. Again, this is Dr John Baez’s Theory. 20 points for suggesting you deserve a Nobel Prize. 20 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Newton or claim the classical mechanics is fundamentally misguided. No. 20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if they were fact. 20 for defending yourself by bringing up a ridicule according to your past theories. Nope. 20 points for naming something after yourself. Nope, though there is the Rosner way which was coined by Dave Schechter in high school. He said, “There’s the right way and there’s the Rosner way.” So I mean somebody else named fucking up after me.
20 points for talking about how great your theory is but never actually explaining it. No. 20 points for each use of the phrase hide bound reactionary. No. Only ten more to go. 20 points for each use of the phrase self-appointed defender of the Orthodoxy. No. 30 points for suggesting that a famous figure secretly disbelieved in a theory which he or she publicly supported. No. 30 points for suggesting that Einstein in his later years was groping his way towards the ideas you now advocate. No, though I fantasize about going back in time and badgering Einstein but that’s not going to happen. 30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization. No.
30 points for allusions to a delay in your work while you spent time in an asylum or references to the psychiatrist who tried to talk you out of your theory. Now I have had six shrinks but yeah that’s just because they have good insurance, like two of those shrinks have been couples counselors. So, no. 40 points for comparing those who argue against your ideas to Nazi Storm troopers or brown shirts. No, I do compare certain Trump things to Nazis which is bad policy but there’s a principle I forget the name of it, you probably know it that once you’ve compared something to Hitler or the Nazis you’ve lost your argument. But you know what I was talking Nazis on Twitter today and I have to note that Trump is complicit in the deaths of more than a million Americans. He’s our deadliest president ever. Hitler murdered 11 million people; six million Jews and 5 million Roma also known as gypsies, gay men, communist people he didn’t like politically polls, Soviet citizens, and prisoners of War; he straight up murdered 11 million people. Add to that another 19 plus million people who died from fighting in World War II and the aftermath but fucking Trump with his million plus people is roughly, if you include everybody who Hitler just straight up murdered Trump has more than one tenth of a fully inclusive Holocaust of 11 million and if you’re just going off of the Jews of 6 million, Trump has more than one-sixth of a holocaust based on his just politicizing Covid and blowing it off and then some other shit he promised to address and never did as president.
All right, so anyway 40 points for claiming that the scientific establishment is engaged in a conspiracy to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame. 40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo suggesting that a modern day inquisition is hard at work on your case and so on. 40 points for claiming that when your theory is finally appreciated present-day science will be seen for the sham it truly is. 30 more points for fantasizing about show trials in which scientists who mock you are now forced to recant. Science changes over time, it’s like everybody does their best. 50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions. No. Is there shit that is older than how old the universe appears to be…
Anyway, that was the last one. 50 points makes you pretty annoying and deluded and then 80 points means you’re a real crazy asshole and over 100 or 120 points and you’re full on the guy who the college should probably get a restraining order but I think we kept it to under 20.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 