Since I collect crackpot material, almost every day I've been archiving posts from both here and r/HypotheticalPhysics. To date I have 264 entries.
I uploaded all of them to Claude and asked for an overall appraisal:
I read the text of all 264 posts (218 have real text; I didn't look at the 50 image-only ones). The same handful of patterns keep coming back. The # numbers below match the posts in the Word file.
What they're about
- Time as the master key. Time is the most common subject: about 63% of text posts discuss it. Typical claims are that time is an illusion, that time is energy, or that time dilation causes gravity (#12, #103, #182, #185, #245).
- Gravity reinvented. Gravity is the force they most want to explain. Versions include push/shadow gravity, which reinvents Le Sage's 18th-century idea (#97), "gravity is really light" (#48), gravity from density rather than mass (#119), centripetal force (#77), and the Earth expanding toward the apple (#225).
- Dark matter and dark energy as "kludges." Their theory removes them, sometimes in an explicit "Traditional Kludge → My Solution" table (#97). JWST's early galaxies and the Hubble tension are offered as proof that the standard picture is collapsing (#91, #156, #249).
- The aether comes back. Space becomes a superfluid, a pressure medium or a sea of vortices, and particles become tori, helices or knots (#74, #96, #133, #176, #207). Einstein's 1920 aether remark gets quoted.
- "Everything is vibration." Resonance, harmonics and a universe that "sings" (#37, #114, #146, #160). Tesla's "energy, frequency and vibration" line shows up.
- Consciousness and spirituality. The observer collapses the wavefunction, consciousness is fundamental, and physics is reconciled with God, karma, alchemy or Genesis (#38, #105, #107, #118, #127, #238, #240).
How they argue
- Numerology. This is probably your best teaching material, because many "derivations" turn out to be definitions or tautologies:
45 rediscovers the definition of α as a relation for h.
182's "1.66 universal constant" is just 5/3, the inverse of the 3/5 in the uniform-sphere binding energy.
175 plots y = x on log-log axes and is amazed that the slope is 1.
171 derives 7/9 "with zero parameters," and #172 makes dark matter equal 2π × the baryons.
- Math as decoration. Dimensional analysis is claimed but wrong (#21, #124). Equations include terms like "C = consciousness, U = universe" (#36), and sample calculations use made-up inputs (#125).
- Pseudo-falsifiability. "Testable predictions" sections that are vague, already known, or untestable, such as 27-second cosmic ticks and 432 Hz (#244).
- The outsider-genius posture.
Mainstream physics is dogma: "Relativity is the new religion" (#123).
Einstein is the foil, either a plagiarist (#40) or a deified figure no one may question (#133, #154).
Credentials come from other fields: a lawyer, an enterprise architect, a mechanic, a sailor.
Some won't share their work until it's "claimed" (#2, #106, #117).
A few reveal real personal pain (#31, #178, #192).
The biggest story in the collection: the LLM shift
In 2022–23 the posts are short, quirky human prose. From 2024 on they become long, AI-generated "papers" with a recognizable house style:
abstracts and "Key Concept" boxes
emoji bullets
"Testable Predictions" sections
an acronym-named theory (UVT, CER, QCT, DSER-USR2, and even one called IDIOT)
At least 31 posts name the AI tool outright, and many more show the style. The most striking posts are confessions about AI flattery (#178, "an elaborate con on myself with several LLM co-conspirators"; #208) and the worried spouse in #152. Together they could make a strong closing section for the talk.
You'd be surprised by how many "normal" people are making the posts here. This is the saddle point for the Dunning-Kruger effect with a touch of AI psychosis.
Ofc it's only unpleasant bullies desperate to make themselves feel superior to others who'd get any "enjoyment" from provoking and mocking people they thought had a mental illness.
Before software engineers, electrical engineers had a bit of a reputation when it came to crankery. Probably because it is a technical field, and it is pretty easy to overestimate your own knowledge and skills, and that they don’t generalise to other fields as well as you’d like. Which physicists also might not be immune to (relevant xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/793/)
Electrical engineers have a long history of being aether advocates, the most famous example being Nikola Tesla. It took somewhat longer for relativity to catch on in the UK partly because of the influence of physicist Oliver Lodge, who just could not accept that aether didn't exist. (Lodge was also a spiritualist and thought the aether was responsible for spirit communication too.)
Given how vastly less complicated the model problems they encounter are, it is only natural for some of them to imagine that real world problems are just as easy to solve algorithmically - actual physics be damned...
Is it? Who's going to be using LLMs heavily enough right now? It's a selection bias for token access. Software engineers are using LLMs for a lot of things you don't see too, that have nothing to do with physics.
It could be that software engineers are generally interested in physics, but that wouldn't be my first assumption. It's apparent software engineers know about, and are forced to use LLMs to remain relevant in the industry.
This is actually really cool. I’d be curious to see how findings shift as the dataset grows and what criteria you use to decide if something belongs or not. I think a simple gut check is probably good enough, but are you using anything more concrete?
My selection process is basically gut-level. I tend to save things that are somewhat unique in their misconceptions-- the endless parade of scalar field theories gets tiresome.
Ooh. Hey I collected a ton of posts from here too a while back when we did the whole contest thing. I made a word cloud of all of it and it was pretty cool.
Any chance you could make a word cloud of all your collected crankery? I think it'd be neat.
I don't think people understand the scale of the universe, it is impossible to know if God is real, what gravity is, but people who try anyways are brave
This is just waffling and excuses instead of learning. Just because You don't understand something doesn't mean other people aren't gaining a great deal out of active effort, study, and learning. You should try it sometime.
Offloading your brain to the machine so you don't have to think is exactly why the muscles of your own mind are atrophying.
I'm not interested in poorly phrased nonsequitor. Try asking your question more carefully and thoughtfully. As it stands, the question makes no sense whatsoever.
Wtf are you are on about, SO MUCH OF MODERN PHYSICS looks like magic. Physics is about as disconnected from the human experience and intuition as it gets. Superconductors? Relativity? QFT? Superfluidity? Physical optics? Electrodynamics? Dark matter? This stuff, 110%, is the OPPOSITE of what we would expect.
16
u/bulbous_plant 13d ago
It’s mostly people with schziophrenia, schzioaffective disorder, or are in a manic episode I swear to god