To merit their attention, professionals say, an outsider would have to show that he’s done his homework. Serious contenders have to understand the language of physics and get their math right. Most importantly, any new theory must agree with past experiments.
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Frustrated amateurs can be aggressive, clamoring to have their ideas heard. Not surprisingly, physicists are more receptive to polite questions than to lengthy treatises accompanied by angry rants, and if the science is solid, they may listen.
To this I would add, you have to make sure it’s science to begin with.
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Overturning science merely requires disproof of a founding postulate. Special Relativity becomes General Relativity (GR) by postulating the Equivalence Principle (EP): all local centers of mass vacuum free fall identically. Find two lumps that do not fall identically and GR is toast. From observation,
1) All lab compositions of matter validate the EP, now sensitive to one part in 20 trillion difference/average.
2) Relativistic and quantum distortions of paired pulsars PSR J0737-3039A/B validate, http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609417
3) Pulsar plus sun-type star (huge composition, B/mu, spin, magnetic field, binding energy, strong vs. weak field… divergences) validate, PSR J1903+0327, http://arXiv.org/abs/0805.2396
4) Paired disparate black holes validate, http://arXiv.org/abs/0803.2077
What remains that could falsify the EP? What is different about stuff that does not arise from its composition? NOTHING! With one exception,
5) Challenge spacetime geometry with test mass geometry: Do chemically identical left and right shoes violate the EP?
Teleparallel gravitation theory wholly includes GR as a special case, EP=true. Only the excess EP=false part is interesting. Weitzenböck spacetime A^4 and Hayshi’s “New General Relativity”, Phys. Rev. D 19(12) 3524 (1979), wholly substitute spacetime curvature with spacetime torsion. The vacuum can be a (metaphoric) left foot. Left and right shoes will fit with different energies and fall along non-identical trajectories. Try walking a closed-eyes straight line while wearing two right shoes.
Somebody should look. The gold standard for lab EP testing is the Eotvos experiment. Opposite shoes would be solid single crystal spheres (no direction bias) of left-handed and right-handed quartz. All quartz’ atoms are identically contained in parallel helices, all either right-threaded or left-threaded within a given single crystal. 1200+ tonnes of quartz are hydrothermally grown each year for electronics applications.
General Relativity could be demonstrably wrong for a footnote and a pair of shoes… without contradiction. All ordinary lumps of stuff are socks that fit equally well on both feet. How’s that for “Outsider Science”?
My answer to “what’s physics and what’s not” has always been not to argue with anyone about our ideas of what’s real science and what’s pseudoscience. It’s simply to ask what their theory says will happen that current theories don’t predict. If their theory can only (supposedly) account for what we do see, it’s useless. That approach saves the trouble of debunking off-the-wall theories – just ask where their theory diverges from accepted theory and have them propose an experiment to differentiate the two.