Spousal Unit (a Prof of physics) gets a shocking number of emails annually from people who believe they have found the Theory of Everything and email everyone related to physics at their local uni to try and propose it.
Wait, do you as a religion prof NOT get those emails? Except about people's theories of the Bible, God, and everything even tangentially related to religion?
I’ve gotten a couple, but more often because I’m in history I get the “can you help me with my ancestry research?” emails and it’s like “bro unless your ancestor was Uqba ibn Nafi’ you picked the wrong name….”
Which is to say, yeah, there is a critical mass of folks out there who think they alone can fix it and/or are lured by that rhetoric (alongside healthy doses of skepticism of actual experts).
I Have a buddy who's a geologist. One time a fellow philosopher and I were complaining about our wierd emails (similar tone to "I alone found the answer to everything" but oft involving some wacky woo BS, or aliens). The geologist said "I mostly get pictures of cool rocks to identify."
back when i was at a big state R1, we used to get ppl who would call the department either (a) wanting to "discuss life" w #philosophy professors or (b) to tell us their deep insights into the nature of reality and "the meaning of it all"
well, it's the philosophy (or religion, or physics) dept. like the automotive dept or the sporting goods dept. it's where you got get philosophy or religion or physics. preferably on discount.
Krugman wrote a post in Slate once defining cranks & that in economics it's harder to show than in hard sciences. Even worse: political science. Everyone thinks they know politics so hard to 'prove' an idea is patently absurd & you're puzzled others can't see it. And then they get elected president.
physics and philosophy are the big fields for getting these sorts of crank emails bc they attract people who think they worked out the Theory of Everything alone in their basement
I used to get rambling e-mails from what appeared to be a crackpot Mexican archaeologist (?). I think he’d harvested my university e-mail from an academic society where I was an officer, because I was then at a decidedly nonfamous small university...
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Meanwhile, I'm now a research professor whose ideas get shot down at least weekly