Which nationality is the mathematical physicist who invented a crackpot index to give an idea of what sort of claims and rhetoric were commonplace among pseudophysics proposals he had come across
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Pseudophysics Pseudophysics is a pseudoscientific practice using the language of physics or discussing issues related to or pertinent to physics to promote ideas which are either incoherent or contradictory to known physics (experimental phenomenology). According to physicists, skeptics, and science writers, pseudophysics tends to be promoted by so-called "cranks", whose ideas lack peer review, lack falsifiable predictions, and/or blatantly contradict scientific facts and experimental results. Mathematical physicist John C. Baez famously invented a crackpot index to give an idea of what sort of claims and rhetoric were commonplace among pseudophysics proposals he had come across.
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John C. Baez John Carlos Baez ( ; born June 12, 1961) is an American mathematical physicist and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) in Riverside, California. He is known for his work on spin foams in loop quantum gravity. For some time, his research had focused on applications of higher categories to physics and other things.
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Van der Waals surface The van der Waals surface of a molecule is an abstract representation or model of that molecule, illustrating where, in very rough terms, a surface might reside for the molecule based on the hard cutoffs of van der Waals radii for individual atoms, and it represents a surface through which the molecule might be conceived as interacting with other molecules. Also referred to as a "van der Waals envelope," the van der Waals surface is named for Johannes Diderik van der Waals, a Dutch theoretical physicist and thermodynamicist who developed theory to provide a liquid-gas equation of state that accounted for the non-zero volume of atoms and molecules, and on their exhibiting an attractive force when they interacted (theoretical constructions that also bear his name). van der Waals surfaces are therefore a tool used in the abstract representations of molecules, whether accessed, as they were originally, via hand calculation, or via physical wood/plastic models, or now digitally, via computational chemistry software. Practically speaking, CPK models, developed by and named for Robert Corey, Linus Pauling, and Walter Koltun, were the first widely used physical molecular models based on van der Waals radii, and allowed broad pedagogical and research use of a model showing the van der Waals surfaces of molecules.
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Blaise Pascal Blaise Pascal ( ; ] ; 19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic theologian. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalising the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defence of the scientific method.
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Carl Friedrich Gauss Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss ( ; German: "Gauß" , ] ; Latin: "Carolus Fridericus Gauss" ) (30 April 177723 February 1855) was a German mathematician who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, algebra, statistics, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, geophysics, mechanics, electrostatics, magnetic fields, astronomy, matrix theory, and optics.
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Manne Siegbahn Karl Manne Georg Siegbahn {'1': ", '2': ", '3': 'ForMemRS', '4': "} (3 December 1886 – 26 September 1978) was a Swedish physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1924 "for his discoveries and research in the field of X-ray spectroscopy".
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David Bohm David Joseph Bohm FRS (December 20, 1917 – October 27, 1992) was an American scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind.
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Viktor Petrik Viktor Petrik (Russian: Виктор Петрик ) (born 1946) is a Russian businessman. He claims to have made a number of scientific breakthroughs which he markets through his company Goldformula. His supporters have compared him to Thomas Edison, but mainstream scientists dismiss his inventions as pseudoscience. Petrik gained a notoriety in Russia during the scandal, dubbed Petrikgate, related to the involvement of politicians in promotion of Petrik's pseudoinventions.
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Charles Babbage Charles Babbage {'1': ", '2': ", '3': ", '4': "} ( ; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer.
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Peter Higgs Peter Ware Higgs (born 29 May 1929) is a British theoretical physicist, emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Nobel Prize laureate for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.
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Roger Joseph Boscovich Roger Joseph Boscovich (Croatian: "Ruđer Josip Bošković" , ] , Italian: "Ruggiero Giuseppe Boscovich" , Latin: "Rodericus Iosephus Boscovicus" ; 18 May 1711 – 13 February 1787) was a Ragusan physicist, astronomer, mathematician, philosopher, diplomat, poet, theologian, Jesuit priest, and a polymath from the city of Dubrovnik (modern-day Croatia), who studied and lived in Italy and France where he also published many of his works. He was nicknamed "the Croatian Leibniz" by Werner Heisenberg.
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Edward Andrade Edward Neville da Costa Andrade FRS (27 December 1887 – 6 June 1971) was an English physicist, writer, and poet. He told "The Literary Digest" his name was pronounced "as written, i.e., like "air raid", with "and" substituted for "air"." In the scientific world Andrade is best known for work (with Ernest Rutherford) that first determined the wavelength of a type of gamma radiation, proving it was far higher in energies than X-rays known at the time. In popular culture he was best known for his appearances on The Brains Trust.
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Newton's law of universal gravitation Newton's law of universal gravitation states that a particle attracts every other particle in the universe using a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers. This is a general physical law derived from empirical observations by what Isaac Newton called inductive reasoning. It is a part of classical mechanics and was formulated in Newton's work "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica" ("the "Principia""), first published on 5 July 1687. (When Newton's book was presented in 1686 to the Royal Society, Robert Hooke made a claim that Newton had obtained the inverse square law from him; see the History section below.)
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Lewis Fry Richardson Lewis Fry Richardson, FRS (11 October 1881 – 30 September 1953) was an English mathematician, physicist, meteorologist, psychologist and pacifist who pioneered modern mathematical techniques of weather forecasting, and the application of similar techniques to studying the causes of wars and how to prevent them. He is also noted for his pioneering work concerning fractals and a method for solving a system of linear equations known as modified Richardson iteration.
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Isaak Izrailevich Prezent Isaak (Isay) Izrailevich Prezent (Russian: Исаа́к (Исай) Изра́илевич Презе́нт; 27 September (O.S. 15 September) 1902 – 6 January 1969) was a Soviet philosopher of biology, best known for his work on Marxist methodology of science as one of the key figures of Lysenkoism.
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Alan Sokal Alan David Sokal ( ; born January 24, 1955) is a professor of mathematics at University College London and professor of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. He is best known to the wider public for his criticism of postmodernism, after the Sokal affair in 1996 when his deliberately nonsensical paper was published by Duke University's "Social Text". He also works to counter faulty scientific reasoning, as seen with his involvement in criticising the critical positivity ratio concept in positive psychology.
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Pseudodoxia Epidemica Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths, also known simply as Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors, is a work by Thomas Browne challenging and refuting the "vulgar" or common errors and superstitions of his age. It first appeared in 1646 and went through five subsequent editions, the last revision occurring in 1672. The work includes evidence of Browne's adherence to the Baconian method of empirical observation of nature, and was in the vanguard of work-in-progress scientific journalism during the 17th-century scientific revolution. Throughout its pages frequent examples of Browne's subtle humour can also be found.
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Fictionalism Fictionalism is the view in philosophy according to which statements that appear to be descriptions of the world should not be construed as such, but should instead be understood as cases of "make believe", of pretending to treat something as literally true (a "useful fiction"). Two important strands of fictionalism are modal fictionalism developed by Gideon Rosen, which states that possible worlds, regardless of whether they exist or not, may be a part of a useful discourse, and mathematical fictionalism advocated by Hartry Field, which states that talk of numbers and other mathematical objects is nothing more than a convenience for doing science. Also in meta-ethics, there is an equivalent position called moral fictionalism (championed by Richard Joyce). Many modern versions of fictionalism are influenced by the work of Kendall Walton in aesthetics.
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Karl Popper Sir Karl Raimund Popper {'1': ", '2': ", '3': ", '4': "} (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian and British philosopher and professor. He is generally regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers of science.
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George Sinclair (mathematician) George Sinclair (Sinclar) (d. 1696) was a Scottish mathematician, engineer and demonologist. The first Professor of Mathematics, Glasgow, he is known for "Satan's Invisible Works Discovered", (c. 1685), a work on witchcraft. He wrote in all three areas of his interests, including an account of the "Glenluce Devil", a poltergeist case from c. 1654, in a 1672 book mainly on hydrostatics and dealing also with coal.
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Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov (Russian: Алексе́й Алексе́евич Абрико́сов ; 25 June 1928 – 29 March 2017) was a Soviet, Russian and American theoretical physicist whose main contributions are in the field of condensed matter physics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003.
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Philip Morrison Philip Morrison (November 7, 1915 – April 22, 2005) was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is known for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II, and for his later work in quantum physics, nuclear physics and high energy astrophysics.