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Comment by intrepidhero | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, Tesla was pretty kooky. Brilliant and kooky. They aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

They are mutually exclusive. Tesla's ideas were grounded in real experiments and observations. Kooks live in a fantasy world. Pais is the latter. If you don't have a nose for physics psuedoscience, then ask yourself these questions:

   - Is it an outsider?
   - Is there a conspiracy to explain why their revolutionary ideas are not accepted by mainstream?
   - Do they operate outside of or attack the peer review process?
   - Is there one clear egomaniacal leader with a cult of personality?

There are some truly out there ideas in astrophysics and electromagnetics right now (look up magnetic monopoles, as an example). All the ones worth anything are published in peer reviewed journals.

Pais at least claims to have experimental evidence of a new physical effect. I've only got a background in undergraduate physics, but I'd say his description of his theory gives off huge kook vibes. I don't really care about that: plenty of non-kook theories are still not reflected in reality, and if he has found an actual physical effect, then his kookiness becomes brilliance. Or maybe not, but even if his theories are wildly off-base, if he has observed a new phenomenon, that's pretty big.

Of course, I suspect even his claim of observing a new phenomenon is a scam (a scam that he might have conned himself into believing), but someone should be able to reproduce it.

If you don't have one foot in a fantasy world, how does one know what experiments to pursue and how does one persevere to breakthrough past the conventional wisdom?

Jad: The version I know is that he was actually sitting at his desk looking out the window, and he was imagining window washers falling from their scaffolding, but it's the same exact idea.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91726...

> They are mutually exclusive.

Well, Newton had lots of very kooky ideas. And yet...

Sir Isaac Newton, President of the Royal Society, an outsider? The same guy who published laws of motion and helped develop calculus, yet did not publish any of his religious or alchemic studies is a kook? I'm not sure what point you're making here.

And notably also didn't publish his work on calculus until after Leibnitz, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculu...

> They are mutually exclusive.

No they aren't. It's actually the opposite. Everything we accept as science started off as "kooky". Germ theory was started by a "kooks" who thought there were small invisible organism that made us sick. It wasn't until microscopes were invented that they were validated.

From mendel to copernicus, much of science was viewed as "kooky" and rejected initially by the educated elites. The idea of continental drift was ridiculed and mocked for decades until it was found to be correct.

> All the ones worth anything are published in peer reviewed journals.

Actually, all the ones worth anything aren't published in peer reviewed journals initially. The truly transformational ideas are almost always rejected because journals exist to maintain the status quo.

Also, you have a slavish reverence for "insiders" when they are flawed creatures as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man

All great science is "kooky". But not everything "kooky" is great science. So not mutually exclusive at all.

"Paradigm-breaking" and "kooky" are different. Pais's language is gibberish, refers to yet-unsupported effects named after himself, and betrays a lack of understanding of basic principles in the field he seeks to revolutionize.

It is overwhelmingly likely that he's simply a crackpot.

Science requires tests for demonstration and refutation. Things that don't describe the real world are outside the realm of science.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, especially if they're as simple as imagining matter being built out of tiny blocks or disease being caused by tiny invisible things.

I see a lot of people arguing and not a lot of testing. He’s filed several patents all of which describe how to build each invention and all of which rely on the same basic principle. If you really consider yourself a qualified man of science then get building. As for simple ideas, they’re all obvious in hindsight once those tricky details have been worked out and equally obvious paradigms have been broken.

>Everything we accept as science started off as "kooky".

An excellent example of this from modern times:

>An Israeli scientist who suffered years of ridicule and even lost a research post for claiming to have found an entirely new class of solid material was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals.

“People just laughed at me,” Shechtman recalled in an interview this year with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, noting how Linus Pauling, a colossus of science and double Nobel laureate, mounted a frightening “crusade” against him, saying: “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.”

After telling Shechtman to go back and read the textbook, the head of his research group asked him to leave for “bringing disgrace” on the team. “I felt rejected,” Shachtman remembered.

https://www.reuters.com/article/nobel-chemistry/corrected-up...

If someone really did have a revolutionary theory of physics, they would almost certainly be excluded by your criteria.

Tesla would never survive in modern academia or get tenure.

So you’re claiming that the physics community is driven by blind tribalism and is in fact, not scientific? That’s a big case condensed into a two sentence defense of psuedoscience.

That's a preposterous overreaction to what I said.

No, I'm not claiming that---but you're doing a good job of making it look that way!!!

It would be nice for you to respond thoughtfully and rationally to what I said instead of merely launching a defensive attack. I wasn't trying to put you on the defensive.

What is thoughtful about “don’t trust the experts”? I am helping readers coming across this by discrediting this tired and ridiculous notion.

I didn't say that. Can you read what I actually said, and consider it?

I've been in academia. Have you?

I have read and considered what you said. Would you restate it?

Not that it’s relevant, but I’ve been in academia for the past ten years. I’ve been working with physicists for the past two years.

Tesla most likely had undiagnosed and untreated OCD: He was obsessed with the number three, compulsively walking three times around a building before entering it. When swimming he would do 33 laps, and if he lost count would have to stop over before being able to leave.

Tesla was disgusted by earrings. He had to calculate the volume of his food to enjoy it. Pretty clearly he had mental issues, which is usually what the more crude expression "being kooky" implies.

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