r/Physics • u/PixelRayn • 11h ago
The things crazy people say mean nothing to them, but they mean everything to me.
I've been somewhat in the public as a physicist and/or student for some time now. I was an active member of the student body with a public facing email address and now, as a member of a working group, I am listed on the university website. Oh boy, the quality of the schizophrenia I am exposed to.
In the student council it was a fairly common occurrence to have people send us crackpot theories either thinking we were some kind of scientific council or asking us to pass along their barely comprehensible write ups. I've been listed on my groups website for about a week (Hooray to university bureaucracy and its speed) and now people think they want me to listen to their insane trains of thought.
I've been getting emails with PDFs, letters asking for help with their nonsense maths, one guy came into my office, last week I got this email which I have yet to decipher:
Can you tell left from right? The object is flying from the left to the right! With the cloud away from the Sun, it is heading directly towards Earth and will reach us in September! Not only can you not calculate the probability of an object of 20km in size moving 60km/s towards us (extremely improbable, yet TRUE!) But you also believe that it moves into the TAIL!??It is moving 5 million + km per day, which means in 24 hours, everything will change!WHERE DO YOU DRAW THE LINE OF BEING ABSURD!??? REVELATION, chapter 8, offers a scientific description of an asteroid hitting the Earth! Should we prepare for an emergency?? Stock up on oil and gas, as there will be 33% less solar energy. This is all **because you can not comprehend Newton's law of gravity. At 99% escape velocity, you reach only 310 000 km distance from the EARTH, which means to get to the Moon, you need to have a SPECIFIC INITIAL VELOCITY between 99-100% of 11.2km/s-Gravity well is real. How do you jump out of a well? Other than having a SPECIFIC initial VELOCITY, or you are in the well forever!ALSO, can you do simple high school math? ORBITAL VELOCITY of an object at a height of 420 km (ISS location) must be like 120,000 km/h, or 30km/s, or half the speed of this asteroid!You believe in FARYTAILS! In MYTHS!! There is an object hanging up in the air called IS(I)S for 25 years, rotating around the Earth at 120,000 km/h.CONGRATS!! One has to have a HUGE Imagination to think that is possible! Continuous human LUNACY! for 25 years Hubble telescope IS A LIE, it does not exist, and of course, this is the source of the claim that it moves INTO THE TAIL!?? Or it is moving from right to the left on the screen (logically) or in the direction of Earth, not Mars!Read more on Substack under hrabmv--more articles that explain what it means to be created in God's image: we have Mind, Soul, and Heart (true psychology! not Id, Ego and Super Ego nonsense!)
3 Denn es kommt eine Zeit, da werden die Menschen der gesunden Lehre ´des Evangeliums` kein Gehör mehr schenken. Stattdessen werden sie sich Lehrer aussuchen, die ihren eigenen Vorstellungen entsprechen und die ihnen das sagen, was sie hören möchten. 4 Sie werden die Ohren vor der Wahrheit verschließen und sich Legenden und Spekulationen zuwenden BRAUNSCHWEIG SHAME ON YOU!!! The town where HITLER STARTED his march!
I do experimental hadron physics, why am I your target audience??? I have no idea what this woman is trying to tell me and I love it. (As long as they don't physically come looking for me) There is not a single coherent thought in there. (Note: in the original email all of this text is written in title font. This is a four page email) The things crazy people tell me is my guilty pleasure. I never respond because this is psych-ward level crazy and I don't want to encourage it but receiving these brings me so much joy and so much bliss. I love collecting them. I can't be the only one who feels this way. It there a public repository of these or does anyone else collect these?
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u/echawkes 10h ago
A well-known phenomenon in science departments. Here is a colloquium from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo's physics department called "Tales from the Box" about their experiences with "Pathological Physics" and the men who love it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXSgp755DSA
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u/starkeffect 9h ago
Hey, that's my talk!
I'm planning to give an updated version of this talk this year to the Physics Club at my current position.
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u/Mithrawndo 9h ago
I'm 30 minutes into this talk right now; Won't lie, I think the Moroccan hells lad might have been on to something. Wait no, that's not right; On something.
You should try turning on the auto-captions, they're predictably hilarious.
I look forward to (hopefully) seeing your updated talk in the not-so-distant future!
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u/starkeffect 10h ago
A dozen years ago I gave a talk about the crackpots who mailed their theories to my former department: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXSgp755DSA
If you need your fill of wacky physics theories, hop on over to /r/HypotheticalPhysics
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u/Mcgibbleduck Education and outreach 4h ago
Ah yes starkeffect. Fighting the good fight against nonsense. Good to see you again outside of the Hypothetical sub!
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u/difras 6h ago
When I was a graduate student (female), the department passed on a request for tutoring. As a struggling student, I was happy to take the job. We met at the physics bldg on campus on a saturday, when very few people were around (huge mistake! never did that again). As soon as he sat down he pulled out a pile of papers and started explaining his (completely wacko) theory to me. It was absolute nonsense, like random equations plugged into each other. I was really scared, very aware that nobody could hear me, and couldn't wait to get out.
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u/alphgeek 10h ago
That ramble sounds like she's been hearing/obsessing about 3I/ATLAS, an interstellar comet that's been in the news recently. The size, the velocity, and the apparent "moving into its tail" match various points in the news.
One scientist made a regrettable comment that it could be an interstellar spacecraft, which is the kind of thing people latch on to.
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u/dr_fancypants_esq Mathematics 6h ago
When I was a graduate student in math, occasionally some of these folks would spam the entire department with their missives. But the best was when one day someone from the local Larouche sect came to the department lounge, and inserted a flyer into every mailbox explaining how "mathematics is a CULT" and how we are were "members of this CULT, damaging young minds".
My takeaway was that it would have been kind of awesome if we all had to wear hooded robes during our studies.
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u/Mithrawndo 11h ago
I'm only commenting to see if a repository of this stuff shows up; Absolute gold.
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u/highnyethestonerguy 5h ago
When I was a grad student I started getting these unsolicited crazy emails.
I thought I’d collect them and make a coffee table book or something.
I like the idea of a dramatic reading! Make a YouTube channel
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u/Cultist_O 4h ago
I'm a biologist. Once, upon hearing this, I had a woman declare that spiders and crabs had hybridized to form a new species in her washroom, and that this demanded study
For the record, it would be extremely difficult for anyone to ever get much further from the nearest wild crab than that lady and I would have been at that moment.
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u/bk7f2 2h ago edited 2h ago
It can be useful for you, as a young person, to realize that this planet is inhabited mostly by plain idiots. In average, may be one in ten individuals can be considered as a normal one with a minimum basic cognitive skills. This knowledge can save you a lot of nerves, time, and energy during your life in the coming horrible age.
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u/Nature_Sad_27 3h ago
Around 2007 or so I got high and tweeted Neil DeGrasse Tyson and asked if everything going into a black hole could be feeding a new universe being created inside the black hole. And if maybe we’re in a black hole. He didn’t respond. I laughed about how crazy that idea was for years.
Now I’m seeing videos about how some astrophysicists are hypothesizing we could be in a black hole. So I guess I’m not as crazy as I thought!
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u/PixelRayn 3h ago
The basis for this is, that the expansion of the universe behaves very similarily to the way space dilation works inside the event horizon, but as far as I'm aware no one has worked the idea into a serious theory yet.
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u/Sea-Lettuce-5331 3h ago
I think a lot of these people aren't actually mentally ill (beside maybe narcissism), but they know just enough about physics to get it terribly confused and be gullible to whatever conspiracy babble sounds the smartest on YouTube. Lots of really-interesting-yet-already-disproven theories sound probable when you learn just a little bit about physics, or have it explained with goofy, ill-fitting metaphors. And as mentioned, a lot of these people are too arrogant to process when you tell them just how their genius breakthrough has already been disproven.
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u/gangukko 3h ago
If it's any help, chapter 8 of revelations talks of 6 of the 7 angels blowing their horns in Rev. 8:5 an angel casts a fiery incence vial down to earth (you could maybe interpret this as an asteroid.)
Then, as the angels blow their horns, a third of most things are destroyed or disappear: land, trees, grass, water, fish, and most importantly a third of the sun, moon and stars disappear. The day loses a third of its light. Thus the comment about 33% less solar energy.
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u/gangukko 3h ago
The German part is also a bible verse from 2 Timothy 4: "For the time will come, when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap themselves teachers, having itching ears;
And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables."
Braunschweig or Brunswick gave Hitler German citizenship so he could run in the 1932 presitential election.
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u/zedsmith52 1h ago
This does explain a lot.
I’ve recently found some interesting equations that I wanted to discuss with physics under NDA but had no idea that it was with this sort of background of insane nonsense.
I’ve actually given up on sensible conversation at this point and just going to patent and profit, but I have an awful lot more sympathy for the people I’ve reached out to, if all and sundry have some theory they feel is the most important thing in the world (or ChatGPT has told them is extremely important!).
I think my mistake has been to assume that anyone else would prove out theories before writing to anyone else 😳🤭
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u/GoldheartTTV 24m ago
Hey... You're a quantum physicist? I kind of need the perspective of one.
Also I may know that woman and that message may be for me but I'm not sure.
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u/Graveyard_Green 11h ago
A mate of mine would do dramatic readings of the weird shit that got sent occasionally to his molecular biology group. It was excellent. I hope you share more, i love these.
Though I hope people stop turning up at your office with their insane shit. That is a bit scarier.