I have a physics degree and ran the Freenode #physics channel for a few years, and so had to deal with a lot of crackpots. It’s easy to tell the obvious nonsense (it raises a lot of standard red flags, like proclaiming a well tested model wrong) but within a well informed professional community ideas ahead of their time are very hard to tell apart from the chaff. Is Tipler’s Omega point nonsense? Is AI fooming nonsense? Is Tegmark’s multiverse nonsense? Is string theory? If you read Not Even Wrong, you can get some idea how hard it is to tell promising ideas apart from the rest.
I have a physics degree and ran the Freenode #physics channel for a few years, and so had to deal with a lot of crackpots. It’s easy to tell the obvious nonsense (it raises a lot of standard red flags, like proclaiming a well tested model wrong) but within a well informed professional community ideas ahead of their time are very hard to tell apart from the chaff. Is Tipler’s Omega point nonsense? Is AI fooming nonsense? Is Tegmark’s multiverse nonsense? Is string theory? If you read Not Even Wrong, you can get some idea how hard it is to tell promising ideas apart from the rest.