What separates real scientific innovation from crankery—and how do online “belief ecosystems” turn bad ideas into bulletproof identities?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner pivot from “math-y” geometry to the sociology of science, framing physics and thought as networks of associations—photons, passes, causes, and connections. Rosn distinguishes everyday misinformation “stew” (anti-vax, flat earth) from would-be theorists producing sloppy “science,” then situates crackpot behavior against the realities of peer correction, technical language, and institutional filters. He invokes Kuhn’s paradigm shifts, Mach’s principle debates, and Baez’s crackpot index as a self-awareness test. They discuss “trisectors,” personality-driven cultish belief clusters, and the more durable defense: early critical-thinking habits.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s do something math-y. I was going to ask about the relationship between geometry and mathematics, and the embedding of physical laws, but maybe we have discussed that quite a bit before.

Rick Rosner: Okay, but you did bring it up, and I know where to go with it. Just about everything, especially physics, is about associations: links between and among things. A photon is a link between one place and time and another place and time.

It is like American football: the ball is a link between the quarterback and the receiver. A completed pass is like the emission and absorption of a photon. It shows that two different places and times were situated so that light could pass between them.

The universe is a vast set of these links, and space and time are an efficient way of organizing them—along with cause and effect. The structures we live in are not only this; a significant dimension of them is that space, time, and causality are comprehensible, orderly arrangements of an enormous number of associations between things.

Under a kind of least-action logic, the world is comprehensible because these links are arranged in causal, spatial, and temporal patterns. Everything is about linked stuff.

Our minds are association engines. One thing leads to another in our thoughts—it triggers a cascade of subsequent things. Even things like numbers, which seem immutable, can be seen as networks of associations among different numbers that give mathematics its structure.

That sounded a little circular. But in the current landscape of physics, what do you think characterizes a crank? 

Jacobsen: I sense that the nature of a crank changes as the dominant theories change. So, what would be the character, or content, of a crank in the current period?

Rosner: We have talked about how social media, the internet, and modern tech make it possible for lunatics to find each other and reinforce each other’s beliefs. You see this in politics, obviously, but you also see it in science—with anti-vaxxers and a whole bunch of related stuff. Someone who is anti-vaccine is often likely to believe a lot of other health and nutrition nonsense.

An anti-vaxxer might believe you should drink raw milk, for example. And you get prominent figures making claims along the lines that diet can cure serious psychiatric illness—claims that are not supported by evidence. There is a ton of health and medical misinformation out there. Once you buy part of it, it is easy to buy the rest, because there is so much of it, and the communities around it reinforce it.

If you seriously get into the nonsense, you might become a flat-earther. Believing the Earth is flat used to be a joke, but now there are likely many thousands of people in the U.S. who call themselves flat-earthers. One of them follows me on X, and there is nothing I could say that would dissuade her.

She is also a hardcore MAGA person, and she believes that everything I know is a lie prepared for me by my “mainstream media masters.” I posted a tweet recently saying Trump has a long history of racist behaviour, including the well-documented federal civil-rights case involving the Trump family’s rental practices in the early 1970s, which ended in a settlement with the U.S. government.

Sometimes I link to an article so people can read more, and if they think I am full of it, they can check the details. This flat-earther responded, “NPR—of course you believe their lies.” I wrote back: “I could give you 50 sources; this has been known for decades.” She wrote back: “How do you know all those sources are not made up?” You cannot fight that level of obstinate belief.

So that is one kind of crankiness—quackery where you are simmering in a stew of delusion, facilitated by how much messaging you can access to support your delusion. But that is not exactly what you are talking about. You are talking about somebody who tries to do science, and the “science” they come up with is sloppy and inaccurate.

And again: if you want to believe something crazy, you can find support for a lot of it. If you are doing your own “research” and building your own theories, there is a lot of that, too. If you want to feel like you are a genius—misunderstood, unappreciated by the world—there is a lot of support for that. There is a whole misinformation industry, a delusion industry. 

It can give you endless examples of doctors and scientists who claim not to believe in germs or vaccines, and who portray themselves as bravely standing against a medical establishment that they say only promotes vaccination for money. If you want to feel like a martyr—like you are the only one who understands, and the world conspires against you, you can get all sorts of support for that feeling from the quack community. Then there are people like me, who believe in almost all of science.

I believe in the scientific method. And there is not just one “scientific method”—you can read about the sociology and history of science. The most famous account is Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I have not looked at it in a while. 

Anyway, that is one way to describe how science can work: a generation of scientists comes up, they build on and support each other’s work, and there are dominant theories for their era. Then, as those theories get rickety—as evidence accumulates that at least partly contradicts them—people develop new theories. 

For newer theories that better account for the evidence to become widely accepted, there can be a long lag, because the older generation has to retire and, in the blunt version of the story, eventually die off. You can see this kind of dynamic in the rise of quantum mechanics, especially in how it displaced parts of late-19th-century classical physics in the early 20th century. 

On cosmology: the Big Bang framework has been repeatedly modified and extended—through cosmic inflation, dark matter, dark energy, and other additions—to address observations and internal tensions. It is an active research program, and sometimes it can feel “patched” from the outside, but I believe in the enterprise.

I do not believe certain aspects of the traditional Big Bang picture, as we have discussed for 14 years. But I am well aware I could be wrong. I am also aware I am undertrained, and that I do not spend enough time thinking about this and interacting with physics professionals to get corrected the way a working scientist would. When I mentioned my dad earlier, if he started talking nonsense, his colleagues and neighbours would have set him straight.

It is similar to crackpot physics: it really helps to live in a world where you interact with other physicists every day. You can throw ideas back and forth and see where you are wrong. Einstein, for example, benefited enormously from close collaboration with strong mathematicians—most famously Marcel Grossmann, who helped point him toward the tensor calculus that became central to general relativity. Einstein did not do all that heavy mathematical machinery alone.

That kind of community pressure can also be suppressive. You can say something like: Mach’s principle—roughly, the idea that inertia depends on the distribution of mass in the universe, or that motion only makes sense relative to the rest of the cosmos—seems intuitively correct. If you were the only thing in the universe, you could not tell whether you were moving, because there is no background. 

To be in motion, you have to be in motion relative to something. Then you could argue: maybe inertia is somehow the combined gravitational influence of everything else in the universe, and maybe when you are moving, you are “more coupled” to things that share your frame—same velocity, same reference frame, whatever. 

You can make an argument like that, and then somebody says, “Yeah, that was calculated decades ago, and it does not work,” or “There is a sign error,” or “The math kills it.” I have heard dismissals like that in the orbit of Mach’s principle. So you can come up with ideas and people can shoot them down—sometimes rightly—based on prior work and, yes, authority: “That cannot possibly work.”

Some decent ideas may not get explored. At the same time, you need the language. You need to be conversant in the techniques—the vocabulary, the methods, the million little mathematical tricks, and the background knowledge. You need enough of it to work effectively, but not so much that it stifles new ideas. And if you are going to have a crackpot theory, it helps—ironically—to be an established physicist with that theory, because you need enough confidence and credibility to keep going when your colleagues call bullshit. That can send you back to your office to do ten or twenty more hours of thinking, recalculating, and testing whether the idea actually holds up.

Take something like Murray Gell-Mann’s “Eightfold Way”—the SU(3) symmetry-based classification scheme that helped organize hadrons into multiplets in the early days of particle physics. Getting to a framework like that is not a one-afternoon doodle; it is a lot of trial, error, and heavy mathematical work to find the structure that fits what the data are telling you. You can imagine how many hours went into pushing brutal equations around to make the classification cohere—and how many colleagues may have been thinking, “What is he doing?”

So that is the promising position in science: you speak the language, you are embedded in a large peer group, you can do the work, and it still has not squashed your creativity.

Jacobsen: There is another set aside from cranks: people who underestimate their abilities and then pursue something they deem less complicated; and a more significant population who overestimate their skills and try to change the world with some theory.

Rosner: We have talked about John Baez’s “crackpot index”—a tongue-in-cheek checklist by John C. Baez, a respected mathematical physicist and mathematician at UC Riverside. The basic idea is: if you are an unknown person (or even if you are not), and you contact physicists at places like Caltech or MIT, insisting they must listen to your revolutionary theory, that happens often enough that people develop defences.

Chris Cole tells a story from his time at Caltech—details may be slightly off in my memory—but the gist is that he watched someone ask to speak with faculty, and the admin staff were clearly brushing him off. From behind, the guy sounded reasonable, and Cole wondered why they were stonewalling him. Then the man turned to leave, and Cole noticed his glasses were literally held together with duct tape, and it became apparent the staff had seen this movie before. The point is: if you work at one of these institutions, self-styled theorists will approach you periodically with “insane” theories.

When I edited Noesis, there was a retired high-school teacher from Florida who would send in a new article every month “disproving Einstein.” I would not even read them—same pattern, same energy—and sometimes I would publish them just out of laziness, because I did not want to spend the time explaining, yet again, why I was not going to run somebody’s nonsense.

Baez’s crackpot index is basically a points system—dozens of items—where you give yourself points for various red-flag behaviours and claims, and the more points you rack up, the more likely it is that you are a crackpot. And of course, a genuine crackpot would not take the test seriously—they would say it is suppressive nonsense designed to discourage them.

Jacobsen: There is a common joke about students who go to writing-essay help or SAT prep: it is often not the ones who need it least. Similarly, with people taking the crackpot test, the very act of taking it shows at least a little self-criticism—and the ability not to be a crackpot. It is almost a litmus test.

Rosner: The people who need to take the test will not take the test. But the test is also an indicator of where you are relative to the “sweet spot” of actually coming up with new science. The people who come up with new science are not necessarily in the thick of everyday, meat-and-potatoes science.

If you are going to work every day at, say, the National Bureau of Standards—now NIST—or NOAA in Boulder, Colorado, or at NCAR up the hill from NOAA, and you are working on something like calibrating an atomic clock, you are doing serious, essential work. And when something goes wrong, it can be dramatic in that world. 

There was a significant power outage in Boulder recently, and if a timing lab loses power, you can lose continuity and have to re-establish traceability. These clocks are generally accurate to absurdly small fractions of a second, nanoseconds and beyond, so even tiny disruptions matter.

Jacobsen: Do you want to go into the trisectors of Chris Cole?

Rosner: So, “trisectors” are people who try to use geometric methods—straightedge and compass, in the classic version—to trisect any possible angle, even though it has been proven that you cannot do that in general using only those tools. I tried it in junior high because I was a dumb, nerdy kid who didn’t know any of this. It seems like, “Sure—why would we not be able to do it?” I remember working with a friend, and we thought we had it. And you can trisect certain angles; you cannot trisect every angle with those classical constraints. Anyway, trisectors are one species of deluded try-hard. What does Chris Cole say about them?

Jacobsen: If they are trisectors, and he can speak for himself, the general indication is that there is a long history of cranks along those lines: trisectors as one example, but in the broader category and across a wider span of time. There are contemporary forms of that, too. 

I will frame that as a different category of analysis: you have formal communities built around this stuff, but it is not built around a personality. So you have the Flat Earth Society and various informal groups. Then you have other cases where it is built around a personality, and they claim to have some theory, and it is more informal than the structure you find in a Flat Earth Society. They have conferences, membership dues, and stuff, right? So how would you distinguish those?

Rosner: From having had a little contact with this flat-earther lady, I can see that somebody in the flat-earth community has already addressed any objection you could raise. They have a very elaborate account of how a “flat earth” is supposed to work—how the world is contained in some… not the universe, but the world. Do you know what cavitation is?

Jacobsen: Cavitation is when vapour bubbles form in a liquid due to pressure changes and then collapse—often violently—creating shock waves. It can occur during impacts in water from asteroids, where bubble collapse can send pulses outward.

Rosner: I was thinking more of cavitation in the sense that a boat propeller spins so fast it creates low-pressure vapour bubbles—so it is partly spinning in vapour instead of “grabbing” water efficiently. I may not have that exactly right, but anyway: flat-earthers will claim their model involves things like cavitation.

Then all the usual questions come up—why captains do not run into “the edge,” why planes do not, what about pilots, what about astronauts seeing curvature—and everything gets explained away with either weird pseudo-science or a conspiracy to cover up the truth. There is literally nothing you can bring up that they do not have an answer for. And that is the problem: they believe crazy nonsense, and they are bulletproof. They are impervious to persuasion.

They even use complicated reasoning. It is dumb, but it is elaborate. When you have to invoke concepts like cavitation, something I do not even fully understand, to “explain” the flat Earth, and these lunatics insist this is how it works… how do you fight that?

Jacobsen: It depends on how you do it. There are bad ways and good ways. I am more familiar with the bad ways, because there are more ways to do it badly.

One bad way is: with deeply entrenched, sufficiently intelligent people, if you provide evidence and reasoning against their belief, they will generate more sophisticated reasoning to counter you, which can further reinforce what they already believe. So it gets complicated. That is a bad approach.

Better approaches are: start early, teach critical thinking, and build good epistemic habits. Also, some prominent people who believed in conspiracies, including flat-earth-type views, have gotten out of them. Some former believers become effective advocates afterward. One of my interviewees, for example, became a very effective vaccine advocate and has debated some of the worst anti-vaccine figures who peddle misinformation for money—people whose influence likely contributed to real harm.

Rosner: There are prominent examples. There are former January 6 participants—“J6ers”—like Pam Hemphill, the so-called “MAGA grandma,” who flipped. She saw the light, and now she is very active in saying, “I used to be one of these lunatics. I came around. Now I see it was bullshit.” I love people like that.

Some of my favourite people on X are former MAGA types—former staunch Republicans—who might still be Republican, but have decided the MAGA thing is not for them.

Kaitlan Collins is a CNN anchor and reporter who recently ran afoul of Trump. She asked him about Epstein-related material, and he responded by attacking her personally—comments about her demeanour, saying he has known her for years and has never seen her smile, calling her a “nasty” reporter, that kind of thing.

Collins started her journalism career at The Daily Caller, which is a pretty despicable right-wing outlet. She may still be a Republican—anchors usually do not advertise personal politics—but she is clearly situated in that part of the spectrum while still seeing what is in front of her and recognizing that Trump is, in my view, a piece of shit. I love people like that.

Rick Wilson is a longtime Republican strategist and a prominent anti-Trump voice. Joe Walsh is another example—he was a Republican congressman and later MAGA-adjacent, and then he turned hard against it. I get frustrated with X with the people who have not.

When dictators take over a country, they sometimes round up elites and send them to “re-education” camps. Mao’s China had systems like that, often brutal. Pol Pot in Cambodia took it to an extreme—re-education and death camps. Seeing the lunatics on X, my dictatorial tendencies surface, and I think: Jesus—part of me wishes we could throw you into a camp for a couple of months and force-feed you alternative information. So it is good that I am not a dictator. It is good I am not a cop. I have seen my own tendencies. I might get a little crazy with power.

Jacobsen: Road rage, Rick.

Rosner: I have less road rage now, because you cannot fight City Hall. If everybody is driving like shit, you cannot get mad at everybody. It becomes structural.

You cannot get mad at every American for being overweight, because it is a large majority, so it is not just a moral failure of individuals; it is built into how we live. You cannot get mad at individual people for having normal reactions to the world we are in.

I used to get more mad at drivers when it was just a few individual dickheads. Now that everybody is a dickhead, I have to get angry at the world instead of at individuals.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Photo by Joel Filipe on Unsplash

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