quote:

this crackpot name calling is all a political thing.

That's what the crackpots say.

Note such items as:
23. 20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if they were fact.

24. 20 points for defending yourself by bringing up (real or imagined) ridicule accorded to your past theories.

34. 40 points for claiming that the "scientific establishment" is engaged in a "conspiracy" to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike.

37. 50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.

Throw in conspiracy theories, belief in communication with dead spirits, references to long-dead mystics and alchemists as having hidden secrets, etc. etc. and you have a sense of what drives ME crazy when reading posts on this board.

"Crackpot" is a mild word indeed...

Jeff

Jeff, actually Tony calculates particle masses for all particles including the Higgs and force strengths and cosmological constants. Superstring theory calculates nothing correctly, that's why Peter Woit can write a book claiming Superstrings are so wrong that they are "Not even Wrong" (to paraphrase Pauli).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit

Considering that the creator of your crackpot index loves Tony's website and uses it for his famous "This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics", I'm thinking Tony has a lot of ideas that your crackpot index creator likes. Pauli was into Jung and synchronicity, Kaku is into UFOs, Brian Greene has an article in the same issue of the same Enneagram journal as one of my Enneagram Papers:

http://tap3x.net/EMBTI/j6greene.html

Nobel Prize winner Brian Josephson is into telepathy. David Deutsch is into real parallel universes. I personally don't think of anybody as a crackpot, I just look for their math mistakes, if they don't have any that I can verify, I just look to where I disagree with their mapping of math to physical properties and simply call it a disagreement. You won't find a math error with Tony.

You need to check things for yourself more, it's tough talking about Tony and Lisi with someone unwilling to actually look at their math and physics. What about Smolin and Baez and Loop Quantum Gravity, do you know anything about that or are you just a superstring guy only? What do you like, does it bother you that superstrings have no predictions?

Tony's a quite successful lawyer. A lawyer creating a lawsuit isn't a crackpot thing or else all lawyers would be crackpots; in fact he first got into the lawsuit aspect on behalf of someone else. It creates reasonable doubt when you had no problem getting on to the archive yourself until helping that guy with legal advice. There's additional reasonable doubt when someone with a model almost like yours, who thanks you in his paper, not only gets in the Archive, but also has the most downloaded paper.

I just wish you'd stick to the math and physics for Tony, the way your crackpot index creator does for Tony, the way people do for Kaku, Pauli, Josephson, Greene, Deutsch, etc. Good math is good math! Actually for my use of Tony's ideas, it's only Tony's math not his physics that has to be correct. Even if only Tony's math is good and not his physics, that still makes Tony not a crackpot since someone like Baez could make good use of Tony's math. I personally love his physics precisely because it does such a good job of illustrating Tony's almost certainly good math (certainly has been good enough to use for Baez's math articles).

-- John G.

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Jeff,

I bet you're going to be surprised at this, but I really liked John Baez's Crackpot Index! I just may save it, in fact. I was laughing out loud at a lot of those items. It's obvious he was being facetious, and who knows? Maybe he was even laughing at himself in a few places. Still, it's useful for weeding out some of the more obvious nuttery. I have to comment on this item, though:

quote:

23. 20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if they were fact.

TRUE...I agree with that, but only if a writer quotes such works *AS IF* myths were scientific fact, or were proof of scientific truth in themselves. But if a writer uses ancient myths as an ANALOGY for a scientific truth, or a way of stating it poetically, not only will I not subtract points, I'd be very much inclined to give him or her extra credit, possibly quite a bit of extra credit (depending on the theory as a whole).

I believe in the truth of the Hermetic axiom, "As above, so below," This is the belief that the same universal laws govern the beginning of the universe AND the behavior of atomic and sub-atomic particles AND the evolution of all living creatures, including humans. The microcosm in the classic understanding of the Hermetic axiom is generally understood to be Man.

"Belief" isn't even a strong enough words for what I mean. I'm absolutely convinced of the truth of the correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm, to the point where I don't understand how anyone could believe otherwise. In the Alan Watts article I posted a couple of days ago, he points out that science was invented by mystics.

That's inevitable when you think about it. Science absolutely depends on predictability, which depends on SOME kind of holistic understanding of the Universe, whether you postulate a Creator-God or not. Without that there could be no such thing as science, because it would be impossible to predict anything. Henry's favorite argument to use with the creationists is that if each species was a "separate creation," species that appeared similar superficially could have a completely different set of internal organs that don't resemble each other at all. In fact, it wouldn't even be possible to classify them into species. Everything--animal, vegetable, mineral, celestial or cosmological--would be nothing more than a random collection of unrelated phenomena.

It is ONLY the theory of evolution that takes into account the both unity and diversity of the created/manifested Universe. As soon as it was articulated, "creationism" was finished. It's been dead for a hundred years, but apparently a few cranks on Panda's Thumb and elsewhere keep trying to keep it on life support.

I believe the same thing holds true for other branches of science, especially physics. What I mean is that I don't think I'm a crackpot whatsoever for believing that a Grand Theory of the Universe is not only possible but inevitable. Just because nobody has gotten it right yet doesn't mean they'll never get it right. Maybe somebody has already gotten it right, but it isn't generally known yet.

I don't think I'm a crackpot for speculating about it, and I don't think anyone else is either.

--Linda

quote:

Considering that the creator of your crackpot index loves Tony's website and uses it for his famous "This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics", I'm thinking Tony has a lot of ideas that your crackpot index creator likes.

John,

I wonder how John Baez would score on his own Crackpot Index. I bet he knows but isn't telling anyone, although you could probably rate him if you have nothing better to do.

--Linda

Linda, the nice thing about John Baez is he's really much more into the math than the physics. He's known as a Loop Quantum Gravity guy but that was really for his related math work and he's really not overly happy about anything in physics. In 2005 he said:

"Work on quantum gravity has seemed stagnant and stuck for the last couple of years, which is why I've been turning more towards pure math...

When you do theoretical physics, sometimes you feel the high of discovering hidden truths about the physical universe. Sometimes you feel the agony of suspecting that those "hidden truths" were probably just a bunch of baloney... or, realizing that you may never know. Ultimately nature has the last word.

Math is, at least for me, a less nerve-racking pursuit, since the truths we find can be confirmed simply by discussing them: we don't need to wait for experiment. Math is just as grand as physics, or more so. But it's more wispy and ethereal, since it's about pure pattern in general - not the particular magic patterns that became the world we see. So, the stakes are lower, but the odds are higher."

Both Tony and John Baez are into those wispy ethereal patterns. It all ends up in the form of math no matter what else was looked at.

-- John G.

Everyone,

This has absolutely nothing to do with Enneagrams or Grand Theories of the Universe. However, it's a wonderful article on the Gurdjieff "Work" I just discovered while blog-hopping on Facebook. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I'm sticking it here on this topic so I can find it again. Hopefully, a few other people will find it worthwhile too.

The Art of Personal Transformation

Hey, I started this topic so I can use it as filing cabinet if I want to, right? Right!

--Linda

quote:

Hey, I started this topic so I can use it as filing cabinet if I want to, right? Right!

Well, as everyone is entitled to your opinion, I suppose so!

Henry