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Comment by tormeh | Hacker News Reader

A prof at a small college I know apparently found something wrong with relativity. Tried to publish, but got brushed off in the peer review. The troublesome thing was that his reaction was "fine, I'll go back to teaching, then". A little bitter, but he just gave up. Maybe he was just wrong, but he's smart and definitely not fanatical.

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There is always the Internet.

No, that's the point. He doesn't care enough to try to make others pay attention. He just went on with his life. Unusually mentally healthy crackpot? Perhaps.

Or maybe he was just wrong.

Yeah, probably. I just like it more when wrong people are angry. Calm, reasonable but also wrong people make me uneasy.

Say that you encounter a conspiracy theorist. When you point out that his theory is crazy, you don't want him to propose to agree to disagree, right? At that point, I feel like I might be wrong, because I'm the most argumentative. Get what I mean?

It might not be of interest to cutting-edge researchers, but I think it's still important from a pedagogical perspective to see what mistakes are made by intelligent, educated, non-crackpots who think they've found a glaring error, or some fantastical consequence.

Usually it would be some common mistake/misconception, eg. applying special relativity in a non-intertial reference frame, but occasionally it might give a real insight into the analogies and methods used to teach a concept.

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