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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that "crackpot" implies malice. To me, it implies a totally wrong starting point. You can't build astronomy on a foundation of astrology. Using Babylonian base-60 mathematics won't help you create a unified field theory. The guy who showed me some random velocity that he had picked, and taken c^2 divided by that velocity, had not shown that faster-than-light travel was possible.

It's like cargo-cult physics. They (try to) do all the things, but the starting point is wrong, so it can't work.

So showing them "where to even begin" is in fact the solution... if they'll listen.

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> if they'll listen

This is where I find the line easier to draw. Starting from a wrong premise and reaching a wrong conclusion (even if reached rationally and logically) does not, itself, make a crackpot. The crackpot is the one who won't listen to the counterarguments. And when they do listen, they just shift the goalposts instead of actually adjusting their basis to better fit reality.

Agreed.

A looser, less perfect, but more easily applicable and economical heuristic that I have is:

- Is my (layperson) interlocutor mostly contrarian and skeptical of others? Then there is very little chance that trying to point them in the right direction will be productive. Being a reasonable contrarian requires a very high level of expertise.

- Is my interlocutor mostly curious and skeptical of their own understanding? Then my friend, this person is a rare golden perl, and I will spare no effort or patience, because in almost every case these people are the ones who haven’t lost the capacity to learn.

This is admittedly a pedantic nitpicky comment, but humans did build astronomy on a foundation of astrology. Much like alchemy and the legit techniques used during that phase of exploration later got subsumed into chemistry.

I guess most people haven't read any of Newton's writing on alchemy. What's fascinating is that he's clearly mapping metaphors to experiences, in much the same way he did when writing Principia.

The difference is that in P. the metaphors and mappings create consistent experiences for everyone and can be manipulated symbolically using math.

That's a huge change, which is why science is everywhere and hardly anyone attempts alchemy today. But under the hood science is still a machine made of metaphors which are partial mappings of experience.

I don't think anyone believes all the different metaphors physics uses mesh together neatly, so at least some of them must be misleading. Improving the coverage is almost the definition of physics.

But it's also possible the consistent symbolic metaphor approach is limited in ways we don't yet know, and at some point it will reach its limits and have to be replaced with something else.

I really enjoyed Gleick’s biography of Newton, which spends a lot of time on both his math and physics work that panned out, and his alchemical work that didn’t.

Newton is the father of modern physics to us because we have perspective that he lacked. At the time he was working—in the moment—it wasn’t yet clear how the universe worked.

> his alchemical work that didn’t.

Call me a crackpot, but didn't it?

Newton is forever remembered as [one of] the granddaddy[ies] of physical sciences.

Alchemy, from any initiated source seems to be a series of rituals designed around the refining of the self into its full potential, rather than a material goal of becoming wealthy by being able to produce gold. That is, it's metaphorical.

I haven't read anything by Newton on his alchemy, but if I were to take my rudimentary understanding of mystical thought and read it against Newton's example—I would think he were quite successful having produced such novel mathematical and scientific breakthroughs—whether he was aware of that or not.

If there was gold to be found in a human experience and work, I'd say he produced endless amounts of it...

edit: I'm not making it up. Whether or not you want to believe in whatever, this is what alchemy is to magicians like Newton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeticism#Alchemy

He didn't endeavour to just turn physical lead into physical gold. I know we shit on humanities around here, but facts still exist in that sphere.

Further, this isn't my opinion but that of Keynes - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2012.005...

> Keynes underlined the last sentence of this passage, which could easily substitute for his own assessment of Newton's use of experimentation in ‘Newton, the Man’, that ‘His experiments were always, I suspect, a means, not of discovery, but always of verifying what he knew already’.13 Keynes repeatedly referenced Newton's ‘intuition’, calling it ‘pre-eminently extraordinary’, almost to the point of relying on mathematical proof and experiment only as a matter of social convention, rather than as a means of revealing some insight that had not already occurred to him. The mathematical proofs in Principia were alleged to be ‘dressed up afterwards—they were not the instrument of discovery.’

The purely metaphorical interpretation of alchemy is popular in some circles, but alchemy has a clear experimental basis. Newton did some pretty wild alchemical experiments. Metals are weird.

https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/videos-recreate-isaac-ne...

Attempting to transmute a metal in the material was a ritual act coinciding with the "Great Work". That tandem practice is built into the philosophy of performing the act. That is, to the "mundane" it was just chemical experimentation, but to the initiates of the magical (or other enlightenment) orders was a dual act reflecting one of their core intuitions (paraphrased): "as above, so below" or what is external to the mind is reflective of what is internal. In other words, irreducible to one or the other (mental or physical act).https://news.ycombinator.com/news

I'm teasing at proposing, after Keynes, that maybe his alchemy worked, and he just didn't understand how.

But there's no salvaging the storybook version of Newton here. Newton was many things, but the innocent, curious monkey sitting under an apple tree he was not. (well, he was—at least insofar as we all are, anyway)

> Newton is the father of modern physics to us because we have perspective that he lacked. At the time he was working—in the moment—it wasn’t yet clear how the universe worked.

His trial and error gave that perspective as a result. Somebody had to waste time on alchemy to then succeed in physics, the time spent on alchemy was not a waste.

Alchemy sired Chemistry and Medicine, not Physics. Physics comes from the natural philosophers pondering ballistics and not the people hoping to make gold out of lead.

Anyway, Newtons contribution with Principia was to collect facts known in his time and put them into one unified mathematical framework, he didn't actually discover any of "his" laws (as predicted by Stigler's law).

I agree.

I would also recommend Gleick’s book. The best part for me was the extensive quotations from Newton’s correspondence. You really get a sense of his personality from these, and how different he was from basically everyone he corresponded with.

Westfall's Never at Rest is pretty good too

Assuming a unified field theory is possible, it is surely equally correct in any numerical base; calculations in base 60 will give you the same results as calculations in base 2, base 10, base ½(1 + √5), base 2i, or any other base.

If I understand the parent correctly, he's referring to the specific idea that base 60 math leads directly to the "right" answer, that solves the unsolved problems. I don't remember who was promulgating that idea, but the response you made (a) is correct, and (b) was rejected by the "crackpot" as not understanding the idea.

Oh, like how the Larouche nutcases promote 256-Hz tuning because of solitons?

> I'm not sure that "crackpot" implies malice.

It pidgeon-holes and ridicules people, we know it's insulting, and we use it anyway - that seems close enough to malicious.

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