It’s a mystery to me how tenaciously someone can hold on to a scientific proposal after it has been rigorously demolished, as happens with cranks, crackpots, woomeisters, quackademics, etc. Even after you separate out the charlatans who are trying to scam a few spacebucks out of somebody, and the ones driven by some ideology, there’s a whole host of folks who won’t let go if their pet hypothesis that disproves relativity or quantum mechanics or whatever.

The process of science is to disprove things, and most things get disproven. Benjamin Schumacher has written a nice little summary of it, and how it tends to pervade our thinking.

On occasion, some idea of ours turns out to be right, and then we’ve made a discovery. These occasions are wonderful and gratifying, of course. They are also rare, because most new ideas are wrong. The trick is to be verifiably wrong most of the time. If our ideas are verifiably wrong, then we can eventually get rid of them

The main factor that distinguishes the behavior of scientists is that scientists tend not to take it personally when contrary data is presented that slays our pet theory, while a crank takes it as a huge insult. They don’t like getting rid of their wrong ideas, except when somehow it doesn’t affect their conclusions at all.