Who are your favorite cranks?

>why the emdrive creates anomalous thrust
but it doesn't

his claim not mine user, i think the mdrive is almost certainly bunk

he claims warp bubbles form in thunderstorms in rare cases and that they've caused pilots to zoom hundreds of miles off course. it's truly bizzare shit but i love it.

Yes he's a crank and a bullshit artist. I challenged him on one of the claims he made, that he could explain the low power at large scales in the Cosmic Microwave Background with his model. What he fails to appreciate is that at small scales the fit to the CMB is incredibly accurate, but if you remove dark matter from standard cosmology (LCDM) you get a different result and it doesn't fit. He handwaved it all away claiming the powerspectrum will just magically revert to that of LCDM at small scales without even trying to explain why. The CMB is only anomalous at large scales in the context of standard cosmology, you can't try to explain it with a different cosmology. It's just crazy. If you want to use a different cosmology you need to start again and calculate the powerspectrum in that model.

Pretty much all of his cosmological claims are bullshit and he doesn't understand science as a process.

I figured.

So in other words, this guy hasn't created anything noteworthy, and he hasn't written anything noteworthy. He's either a mentally ill degenerate or a genuine conman, and the proper response in either case is to shun him.

I don't know about favourite but the most worrying cult in my field is the nutjobs at the Electric Universe. They claim that all of astronomy, cosmology and modern physics is wrong and the universe is powered by giant electrical currents and plasma. It mostly grew out of a concept of a plasma cosmology started by Hannes Alfven (which died for many reasons), velikovskian catastrophism and new age woo, it was started by some electrical engineers a couple decades ago and now they have fucking conferences.
They don't do anything quantitative, many of them reject "mathematical physics" entirely. No simulations, no calculations. It survives on the basis that it isn't written down and so it can't be debunked but any observation they don't like is probably fake anyway. It now has a huge following of utter retards sucked in by this pseudoscientific crap, you used to see it posted here and on /pol/ now and again. It's as if /x/ tried to do science. It is fucking mind cancer but they have hours and hours of mental diarrhoea on youtube. I refuse to link to it as they make money on ads.

briankoberlein.com/2014/02/25/testing-electric-universe/

Ron Maimon

This guy writes long winded articles on vaccines, chemtrails, god, wireless being dangerous, and a whole bunch of other quackery.
thefullertoninformer.com/

The rest of my current favorite quacks are vgcc guy, geometric unity, the guy on Veeky Forums who claims to be god, and Frank Slauenwhite.

Jonathan Tooker. He spams all kind of physics forums and faculty email lists and Veeky Forums with some kind of numerology of physical constants. He has extreme delusions of grandeur, from thinking that physicists are stealing his work, to thinking that religious imagery refers to him and that he is God. This indicates he is schizophrenic or bipolar. You can read his nonsense here, such as his "proof" that evolution is false:

vixra.org/author/jonathan_tooker

Geometric unity is this guy

that and poor writing skills O_o

He seems super ernest but the methodology I think wouldn't detect what I think he's trying to detect after seeing some of the eagleworks stuff on how they are trying to detect warp fields.

John St. Clair and his numerous inventions are good for a laugh.
google.com/patents/US20040102810?dq=ininventor:"John St. Clair"&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjNttHAz7jVAhUDQSYKHTvMD98Q6AEIUjAG

Bump

Bill Gaede

He believes the mediator of gravity and the electromagnetic force are one and the same. Ropes

youtu.be/pE-ZunMoGpY

Yeah. i still follow him, he's a great source of entertainment and i've even spoken to the people in his team a few times,they strike me as determined amateurs,remind me of all the people noodling around with emdrives and whatnot. Power to them. They're not hurting anyone and hey, every now and then.amateurs can discover interesting things.

but honestly this type scenario where good old america invented in the garage type story would be the absolute greatest story/history for future generations. similar to PCs only exponentially more important

it has a near zero percent chance of happening, all the cool shit is very hard to discover now, takes billions of dollars and swarms of researchers.

I want ot be wrong, but i'm not.

Nevertheless, good luck to the professor pares types of the world. hope is a very addictive drug.

I love Electric Universe. The adherents are adorably retarded.

youtube.com/watch?v=e0vu-jQWCZo

WEW LAD you weren't kidding

Smolin and Woit

gregory hensley. he took his website down but while it was up it was glorious. hand-made html with frames. offered services as an inventor for hire with expertise in every field under the sun and thousands of hours of training and inventions in every discipline

web.archive.org/web/20160215184843/http://www.gregoryhensley.com/

Francis E Dec. His writings and revelations about the gangster computer god are inspiring.

bentoandstarchky.com/

Oh yeah I love that guy. He was mentioning that he's entering a math PHD program this autumn.

Joseph Newman, built
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newman's_energy_machine.
They made a documentary about him not long ago, even though I think the machine is nonsense the movie does give a view about the lack of professionalism of USA's patent office at that time (of course the movie shows only one side while further reading may show otherwise).

What a goof. How was the copper supposed to be breaking down, and why wasnt his home powerex by these things?

Also has very catchy tunes

vmpcfunction.com/pnp.php
claims to have solved p vs np

Now say it with me class:
CIA
>CIA
Niggers
>Niggers
Glow
>Glow
In the
>In the
Dark!
>Dark

Good, good. Now here's 2 shekels for your obedience. Also I don't care if Terry A. Davis but he's still insane and I'll throw him in this thread anyway

>inb4 go back to pol

that michozuki dude

I'm 30 minutes into an hour and a half explanation.

Source on papers, math, etc?

My favorite crank

eoht.info/page/Libb Thims

Libb Thims (whole website is his)
>writes about geniuses
>writes about self in third person
>gives himself an IQ of "200+"
>thinks reductionism is a revolutionary concept

also lacks a lot of mathematical and conceptual skills, reads textbooks on an "as-is" basis without making any intuitive leaps or constructive output

>get introduced to electric universe through one of the less batshit videos
>guy talks about how magnetic fields and electric currents can account for some of the astronomical phenomena we see
>look more into the theory
>tosses everything conventional out and goes full batshit.
Why do these people have to throw everything away and go full crazy? Why can't they just use their theory to provide an explanation for previously poorly explained phenomena?

The Institute of Noetic Sciences. Founded by Apollo astronaut Ed Mitchell, it basically grows out of the idea that his experience in going to the moon really blew his mind, and THIS MUST MEAN SOMETHING.

Now the Mitchell is gone, I would expect their limited claim to be taken seriously at all (and funded) ill likely fail, and that'll be the end of them.

That was "flat earth tier" shit there.

16:35

Fuck, if I'd known that earlier, I could have tested it during the recent eclipse.

>All the videos that have 5,000 ads
Nope, not giving these hacks views.

This guy has thousands of videos, averaging like 20 minutes each, where he is obsessed with 3 and 8. He just rambles on and on about things he did during his day and how it relates to the divine trinity, by means of modular arithmetic on the value of the letters of some words he heard

youtube.com/watch?v=EIgNFVp_bb8

fug if this guy rolls an epic get he might commit suicide

>velikovskian catastrophism
Is that the one where planets bounced around like billiards in the (geographically) recent past? I love that one.

>not using adblock
Viruses bruh.

>geographically
Fuuugg how did I make this mistake.

Lmao, nice try Luboš.

Tom Paladino and scalar energy. The man claims that putting a pic of the disease in a box with his picture cures him of said disease.

youtube.com/watch?v=83Y5qZFGEuc

Hes actually on vixra if you care to go the extra mile. I personally really like his theory, I always wondered if math that described his model would work even a little bit.

Honestly, it'd be incredibly romantic having some random small town clerk or mechanic inventing a warp drive in his garage.

I'm personally partial to some small dictatorship inventing the warp drive and him and his inner circle and some colonists fly off into space only for humanity to encounter their prospering space empire centuries later.

I can see it now.
>Small town inventor accidentally warps his house to a distant system and inadvertently starts an interstellar war.

I'm not trying anything, just contributing to the thread.

Sounds like a bill and ted spin off

still shouldnt the fact that every apollo astronaut came back waaay different then the way we sent him up give them some credibility?

>george lucas looking
that's old mark whalberg

Forgive us, Uncle Terry.

His ketchup video is fantastic
youtube.com/watch?v=i6SW3mdmW-Y

how

Because the original motivation of their entire paradigm was to become a visionary thinker--not to pursue the truth.

The general absurdity of it and the buildup from 7:18

"... for the mathematical glory of god"

>posted this at 3 views, now has 27
good feel

Enormous experiences tend to change people, and I can't think of one quite as amazing as being a moonaneer.

>cute and earnest
sigh

27 is a multiple of 3. 3 times 3 times 3 is 27. Add 2 and 7 from 27 you get 9 which divides by 3 to get three. 27 has two digits, the word two has three letters, again giving us three.
I think this dude might be on to something.

jeebus...

this guy. (Nothing to do with religion)
bigbangneverhappened.org/

I want to believe..

Is this the guy with the dodge neon covered in 8s?

I kinda like that Miles guy that everyone dismisses and adhoms because muh pi=4 he's written like a huge book on his crazy theories and you gotta give him some props for trying so hard.

>still doing cutting edge fusion research