The Road to Crackpotia*

Sean Carroll muses on scientists gone crackers in The Varieties of Crackpot Experience - or, more exaxtly, on one particular physicist. No, not the one you were thinking of.

Frank Tipler is a crackpot. At one point in his life, he did very good technical work in general relativity; he was the first to prove theorems that closed timelike curves could not be constructed in local regions of spacetime without either violating the weak energy condition or creating a singularity. But alas, since then he has pretty much gone off the deep end, and more recently has become known for arguments for Christianity based on fundamental physics.

I will leave the details to Sean and Wolfgang, but I think I know the moment at which Tipler went off the rails. At least twenty years ago he had a paper published in Phys Rev Letters, in those days the most prestigious physics venue, which purported to refute Hawking's black hole radiation argument. At that moment I thought wackjob (as well as what in the hell were the editors thinking?).

Alas, the nutbag is not an uncommon destination for the brilliant. An editor of PRL went to a talk by a fairly elderly Arthur Eddington and decided that he had gone into deep space. Turning to his companion at the talk he asked: "Is that going to happen to us?"

The companion thoughtfully replied: "Relax Sam. A genius like Eddington may go nuts, but guys like you just get dumber and dumber."

Godel was nuts enough to starve himself to death for fear of poisoning. Groethendieck is wacko. Linus Pauling, who won two Nobels and narrowly missed a third, became a vitamin C nut in his elder days. Some fairly competent molecular biologist became a crackpot HIV/AIDS denialist. Richard Lindzen, a fairly distinguished atmospheric physicist now devotes his efforts to global warming denial, a cause otherwise mainly in the hands of corporate flacks and minor economists.

Tipler was never in the Eddington - Godel - Groethendieck class, of course, but it seems that non-geniuses aren't actually immune.

I myself am working on a unified field theory of science crackpots, but haven't yet made my (soon to be) epic discoveries.

* Rhymes with Cappadocia.