This is a very outside view on these ideas. I think from the inside there’s a lot that often separates obviously bogus ideas from possibly real ones. Ideas that might pan out are generally plausible now given the evidence available, even if they cannot be proved, whereas bogus, crank ideas generally ignore what we know to claim something contradictory. This can get a bit tricky because ideas of what people consider “known” can be a little fluid, but the distinction I’m trying to draw here is between ideas that may contradict existing models but agree with what we observe and ideas that disagree with what we observe (regardless of whether they contradict existing models), the former being plausible, ahead-of-their-time ideas that might later be proven true, and the latter being clearly bogus.
(Of course sometimes, as in the case of not observing star parallax without sufficiently powerful instruments, even our observations are a limiting factor, but this does at least allow us to make specific predictions that we should expect to see something if we had more powerful instruments, and would lead us to conclude against a promising idea if we got really good observations that generated disqualifying evidence.)
Ideas that might pan out are generally plausible now given the evidence available, even if they cannot be proved, whereas bogus, crank ideas generally ignore what we know to claim something contradictory.
I think this is an important point to recognize. If an idea agrees with observation but makes predictions that can’t currently be tested, it should be given more consideration than an idea which contradicts existing observations.
This is a very outside view on these ideas. I think from the inside there’s a lot that often separates obviously bogus ideas from possibly real ones. Ideas that might pan out are generally plausible now given the evidence available, even if they cannot be proved, whereas bogus, crank ideas generally ignore what we know to claim something contradictory. This can get a bit tricky because ideas of what people consider “known” can be a little fluid, but the distinction I’m trying to draw here is between ideas that may contradict existing models but agree with what we observe and ideas that disagree with what we observe (regardless of whether they contradict existing models), the former being plausible, ahead-of-their-time ideas that might later be proven true, and the latter being clearly bogus.
(Of course sometimes, as in the case of not observing star parallax without sufficiently powerful instruments, even our observations are a limiting factor, but this does at least allow us to make specific predictions that we should expect to see something if we had more powerful instruments, and would lead us to conclude against a promising idea if we got really good observations that generated disqualifying evidence.)
I think this is an important point to recognize. If an idea agrees with observation but makes predictions that can’t currently be tested, it should be given more consideration than an idea which contradicts existing observations.