Crackpot of the Week #1

After a chat with various officemates today, we thought it would be amusing to highlight on a blog the various crackpot theories that make their way to our inboxes.

You might not know it, but there is a suprisingly large group of sociologically interesting people who think that while they have no formal training in math or science that they have discovered the next theory of everything in physics. These people (known by those in the biz as "crackpots") frequently try to contact actual scientists and even us graduate students to try and convince us of their crazy theories. They do not usually listen to reason. There are way more of these people than you'd might expect. Every year at the CTP, security has to actually escort a number of them from the building. Some of my favorite crackpot related resources on the web are:

John Baez's crackpot index
Great "This American Life" where crackpotisim is discussed. In particular the program follows around some dude who, while mostly sane, seems to think Einstein is all wrong (he has no formal training in physics). He seems to think that E=mc, not E=mc^2 (my favorite quote is "It's not that big a deal, Einstein wasn't too far off").

Anyway, I hope to, from now on highlight some of the crazy ass theories that we get here in our email. Now, some readers might question the taste of me posting crackpot theories in order to make fun of them. Those readers might have a point. However, some of these theories are quite funny, and their humor deserves not to be lost.

Our first crackpot of the week is the author of the new and groundbreaking gravity-spheres theory, which, as far as I can tell, depends on the very intimate relationship between gravity and spheres. In contrary to the old, dogmatic belief that the gravity of an object exists everywhere, the author informs us that, in fact, it only exists within (you guessed it) spheres. In fact, "The structure of the [gravitational] force field is simple: a bubble within a bubble within a bubble… Spheres." Niiiiice. This simple idea, evidently, also "answers just about ALL questions in astronomy and all relating questions in astrophysics, clearly and unambiguously." Sweet. For example, it answers why there are rings around Saturn. because "If you spin an object on a string, you will notice that the object and the string form a flat circle and that the object tends to remain in the plane of that circle called the plane of rotation. What happened around Saturn is something similar – with the debris as the object and Saturn’s gravity as the string."

Also, the author seems to have a vendetta against LIGO (the ground based aparatus for detecting gravitational waves that will be coming online soon). Though he conceeds the existence of gravitational waves, he thinks it exceedingly obvious that the waves won't radiate to us. Of course, instead, they will stay in their spheres!

Oh, and also Einstein was horribly wrong and the special and the general relativity are incorrect.