The fraudulent invention debunkifier
The Crackpot Flowchart(TM) will let you know in an instant whether the invention being touted is not only earth-shattering but whether it will rock the very foundations of modern science itself. No more worrying that you missed out on a Pulitzer, kick the frauds and the deluded into a cracked pot and save the real breakthrough for a sneaky call to the newsdesk at Science and Nature.
Crackpottery does not have refereed literature citations (a 1905 exception). Crackpottery contradicts reproducible observation. If crackpottery identifies a loophole, footnote, empirical falsification… it becomes canon. Blather, rinse, repeat.
Albert Einstein, relativity, 1905 and 1916; Otto Stern vs. PAM Dirac on proton magnetic moment, 1933; Yang and Lee, chiral Weak interaction, 1957; Charles Pedersen, crown ethers, 1967; Karry Mullis, PCR, 1983; Barry Marshall, gastric ulcers, 1985. Nylon, Plexiglas, SuperGlue, polycarbonate, sulfa drugs, Valium, valproic acid for epilepsy, cosmic background radiation, white dwarfs, pulsars, black holes, plate tectonics, fractals, CVD diamond… all began as crackpottery.
The first application of methyl cyanoacrylate forever fused the closed prisms of an Abbe refractometer. Proper management would have fired/incompetence the bastard then sued for corporate losses, and the discovery then deep sixed. Failure of management was the guy’s boss also being a scientist. He gets axed for insubordination. As it was, SuperGlue and its ilk were tremendous cash cows for all the wrong reasons.