Talk:Nobel disease

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Einstein

Albert Einstein should seriously be considered being added to this list.

He received the nobel prize for his contributions to Quantum Physics, with particular focus on the discovery of the photoelectric effect. After that, he spent the rest of his life working on General Relativity, a theory of Astrophysics, at the time a field of study far removed from astrophysics. General relativity to this day has never been satisfactorily combined with QP. Indeed, in many situations GR and QP are in direct contradiction.

So on the one hand his peers reviewed him and accepted his theories in regards to Quantum Physics. However, until the advent of WW2, there was much criticism from his peers in regards to his cosmological theory of general relativity. It is accepted now as 'fact' but that was not always so during his lifetime. Legitimate scientific criticism of GR has never ceased - though in this day and age any scientist critical of GR is usually labelled a 'crackpot' and often lose their employment. A process which is unscientific and irrational. Incidentally, this was exactly how the physics community treated a young mr Einstein at first - ("how dare you question isaac newton, young man?")

I am not 'trolling'. This concept of 'nobel disease' applies perfectly to Einstein.

I put this in the talk page rather than just editing out of respect for the moderators of this wiki. ^{— Unsigned, by: 61.68.206.101 / talk}

OK, a few remarks to this:

(1) If GR was just Einstein's Nobel craziness, then the whole community swallowed it and we must have hallucinated the experimental evidence. In a typical case of ND, somebody like Crick says he has discovered the true science of consciousness and gets mostly ignored. So even if this were an example, it would be a really atypical one.

(2) |GR skeptics are treated as heretics, get laughed at, lose employment." Well, no, GR is not liturgic dogma. Physicists think about the QP/GR problem all the time, and talk about it all the time; it is hardly a matter of getting ostracised just for thinking either one or both are incomplete. On the other hand, there are folks like Stephen Crothers who, instead of focussing on their modest (and perhaps too boring) PhD project decide to prove GR wrong, unencumbered by the required expertise. He missed out on a PhD and a career in science by choice. Lots of people who do a degree and or a postdoc do not go on in academia because they are not good enough - and once out they may claim it is because they did not swear allegiance to some dogma. Academia is corrupt, but in a big-business way, not an organised religion way.

(3) In particular, nobody believes that reality has to be smooth in the mathematical sense at the smallest scale (nor does anyone believe the opposite is necessarily true; it is really an open question). There are mathematical structures that give the advantages of the continuum at sufficiently large scales without being smooth "all the way down" - however, at present there seems to be no clear advantage in adopting any one of them.

(4) There is a general idea that this is not really serious because all problems are confined to the Planck scale. This is a misunderstanding.

(5) You are right, GR and QP are fundamentally incompatible. Quantum superposition invokes states that live in entirely different spacetimes! And nothing in QP furnishes an upper bound to the size of systems in superposition - in practice, cats, marbles, even tiny specks of dust are out of the question - I think a buckyball holds the record - but in theory, such states are permitted. And this means that in principle the problem is not confined to the Planck scale.

(6) Nobody knows how to resolve this. Penrose has suggested that there is a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty in spacetime. He exploits the time/energy variant of Heisenberg uncertainty, arguing that the energy scale here is to do with the self-gravitation of the object that is in quantum superposition, and the associated time scale imposes a lifetime on this superposition.

I would hardly call Einstein's work in GR dabbling in a pseudoscience field. Someone recently opened up the field with another scientific theory called SR. And it is even more mathematically rigorous and has even better predictive power. This is the exact opposite of the typical signature of pseudoscience. Tulpa001 (talk) 14:34, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

Penrose

Penrose is rightly lauded for many contributions to maths and theoretical physics. He has also entertained some truly crazy ideas re consciousness, and some highly speculative ideas re cycles of time and our ability in principle to discern signatures of past universes in the background radiation (somebody correct me if I get this detail wrong) of the present universe. He can be regarded as someone who caught the disease long before winning (deservedly) the NP for his black hole work. This reinforces the idea that NPs are often won by original thinkers easily infatuated with kooky ideas. The prize simply unleashes the winner into the limelight and out of the bounds of normal checks and balances. It is the trigger rather than the cause of the disease. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:B5EE:5200:F399:8C34 (talk) 16:38, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

His views are a lot more nuanced; from what I recall reading the Emperor's New Mind years ago he's very clear and honest in saying that this is outside of mainstream science, that he doesn't have any good evidence for it, and that he's not an expert on e.g. the biology on the brain. From what I've seen, it's the same with his "oscillating big bang" thing that he's been talking about more recently.

IMHO it's not really "Linus Pauling kooky" but more "blue-sky out-of-the-box thinking kooky". It's okay to have weird kooky ideas on the fringes or outside of science, as long as you're honest that they're weird kooky ideas and not proper science, which Penrose is as far as I know. I don't think this really fits the definition of "pseudoscience" and has only a superficial similarity.

I've gone ahead and removed it for the time being. Carpetsmoker (talk) 16:58, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

The boundaries between 'Nobel disease and its affiliates' ('accepted experts and notable people making daft statements') and 'exploring lines of thought that do not fit conventional understanding (and some of which may prove useful generally in the subsequent research') can be vague, and will shift over time (eg discussions over how long the Sun would last before the concept of nuclear fusion was researched).

Perhaps the topic could be extended somewhat - Lysenkoism and the Vatican's attitudes towards the theories of Galileo spring to mind. Anna Livia (talk) 12:20, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Eugenics

How is eugenics quackery? It's just a bad view, like supporting genocide. ^{— Unsigned, by: 47.62.103.217 / talk}

Define Eugenics for me please. ☭Comrade GC☭^{Ministry of Praise} 22:29, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

Both RW and WP place their eugenics pages in the pseudoscience category. The basic problem of considering eugenics as a science, as I see it, is that breeding for improved traits in humans is only rarely clear-cut. Seemingly negative traits can have positive aspects (e.g., sickle cell and thalassemias being protective of malaria on a population-wide scale). Bongolian (talk) 23:00, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

Michael Levitt

I see there have been a few attempts to add Michael Levitt. I've searched around a bit, I think this source seems a quite comprehensive summary (and justification for adding him). ^{— Unsigned, by: 2a02:1810:1433:f800:cae0:ecc2:6049:f359 / talk / contribs}

Can we add Levitt now that Wikipedia has added him? 2A01:598:D032:EE92:15A5:846B:B5A2:7706 (talk)

Yes. Bongolian (talk) 17:42, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Linus Pauling

Wikipedia notes that in later years he promoted " orthomolecular medicine, megavitamin therapy, and dietary supplements." --Vital Forces (talk) 02:59, 1 March 2023 (UTC)