Female Science Professor makes an observation about random scientific inquiries made to universities

In some cases, the questions are easy and quick to answer — for example, some people call with a question about something they heard on the news. In some cases, people stop by the department (with or without calling first) and expect assistance. At least 62%* of these people are very strange. On several occasions, I have had random people call me and tell me what I should study in my research. Apparently I have been studying the wrong things. I have not yet, however, been tempted by any of these new and creative ideas, 100% of which have been bizarre.

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Do some departments attract more wackos than others, or do all/most academic departments have their own special kind? Someone should study this

I know that in grad school, we had a folder of crank inquiries kept in the department’s main office, and one of my fellow students was once tasked to inspect some gizmo a random person had brought in to show one of the professors (I suspect at that point it’s better to do this than simply send the person away) because he was convinced it was an over-unity device. It wasn’t, BTW. In physics, most of the crackpots fall into three main categories: perpetual motion, anti-relativity, and anti-quantum mechanics. There are other meta-crackpots that just rail against the whole process of doing physics, claiming it’s flawed.

In the “old days” contact was restricted to mail or a personal visit. In my current job, personal visits are pretty easily avoided (fence + guards helps tremendously, unless you have someone with access who has spun off into Zetaland). But today, with the intertubes being available to all, you can find them everywhere. I’ve mentioned a couple of sites that were accusing mainstream physics of deceiving the general public (or special public, in flat spacetime) about relativity, and there are plenty more. You get personal experience with them if you hang around science bulletin boards, especially unmoderated ones. It’s usually not that hard finding the errors — the difficulty is in getting the crank to accept that they have actually made an error.

So my anecdotal contribution to this is yes, there are specific kinds of wackos, but some of that is a trivial distinction — if an anti-relativity woomeister shows up in the geology department, he or she has certain cognitive issues in play. I think there’s an underlying commonality, though. There’s a decided lack of awareness of how science gets done, which can lead to the high-priest/worship/religion accusations. There is confusion about what the standards of evidence are; “falsifiability” is not a big thing with many of them and asking for evidence is seen as a personal affront to most. I think this ties in with being so wrapped up in a concept that you can’t see that it’s wrong. They’re just so sure that they are right, that any disagreement must be out of jealousy or some other personal motive, and along with this is a lack of an appreciation of the interconnectedness of science — they are fixated on one scenario and don’t recognize how their personal theory breaks down when applied to a broader scope of problem. There are also the ones who can’t do math, which leads to an overindulgence in analogies (quantum mechanics is like a bent rod that twists …). They make up new terminology, as if their machinations aren’t confusing enough, and they always seem to compare themselves to Galileo.