Today I received a purported message from the American Physical Society. It was an html page with claims like these:
Not necessaries more experiments, theories and models about the particle and atomic world, because now exists the very simple and real physics of these!
As Moshe would say, this is a typical crackpot comment. However, it goes much further than usual:
We state positively that her paper is the giant revolution of the physics science. We wish with this mail to suggest Prof. Gabor Fekete for Nobel Prize.
Afterward it suggests that I exert pressure on the Royal Sweedish Academy of Sciences to that effect.
Looking at the headers, the e-mail was sent from Hungary. It also has quite a few names of physicists in the top of the advert. It even insinuates that the Nobel prize winners in Physics of last year are endorsing this. The APS would never send a message like this, especially not with such a ridiculously bad English grammar.
I definitely think this breaks the mold and should not be tolerated. Hence, a post with full name and an explicit claim that this is spam and crackpot physics.
PS. If your name is on the header of this advert and you are not a party to endorsing this sending, I suggest that you protest heavily the use of your name in association with this mail.
I got the same thing. He even used the reply-to address of the APS and evidently some names of people who do exist – I’m not sure whether they know, did somebody tell them? I’ve meanwhile gotten used to spam, but think that really goes too far. The guy btw doesn’t seem to have a single paper neither on the arxiv nor on SPIRES.
Since when are geniuses judged by their scientific output? did you know that Einstein worked as a patent clerk? and the Arxiv does not want you to know the truth, and on and on it goes…
But this guy scores very low on any index, not even coherent enough to be incoherent, and is not particularly entertaining, which is why I just deleted the email.
For curious parties, another physicist has posted the spam here
http://dr-phil-physics.livejournal.com/220882.html
I also received this email, or something similar at least. I was pretty surprised by it, since I’d never seen anything like that before.
Protesting to crackpots not to use your name in their writings is a complete waste of your time. It would be better to go down to the playground and try to convince the children to not use swear words.
Meanwhile, this crackpot, (no PhD, no academic affiliation, no papers published, over 50, drives forklifts, etc.) got an “honorable mention” in the 2009 gravity essay contest. What’s worse, it’s for a paper that, among other things, proposes a new theory of gravity.
I don’t want to suggest that you are 3 years too slow 😉 but this genius has sent an identical email to me and others 3 years ago,
http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/06/physics-phds-vs-special-relativity.html
It’s the APS header and reply address that did it for me.
I get regular e-mails about once every two weeks of someone who believes that special relativity is wrong, or that they have proof that they can extract energy from the vacuum, or that they have this wonderful numerology that explains the masses of all particles to 20 or 30 decimal places.
However, they do not have the cheekiness to claim that this is endorsed by some large international scientific organization and that their work is backed by last years Nobel Prize winners.
Suggesting that I nominate them so that they should get a Nobel prize as well is beyond anything I have seen before.
Fake headers suck, indeed. They have become completely common, too. If you have no experience with phishing, think twice to avoid stories like mine,
http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/11/how-they-stole-2800-from-my-account.html
But at the end, it was just fun.
I didn’t get one, so now I feel left out…
🙂
One imagines a cubicle farm of Federally-mandated APS diversity hires told to electronically pick their butts while their diversity manager seeks an ever larger domain. Alas, …CONFIRMED BY THE LAWS OF THE CLASSICAL PHYSICS Newton was wrong. Get over it. APS would be shilling string theory and use a spell checker.
Contemporary physical theory is religion – untestable inerrant statements demanding all who object are perforce unqualified to comment. As with religion, it must be met with empirical observation. Formidable Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary (est. 1635) sitting hard by 45 N latitude does not host an operating Eötvös balance. How the mighty have… fallen.
I feel that it’s more appropriate to characterize the claims and the ideas and not the people themselves. You could say for example that this is crackpot physics and not to refer to the individuals as crackpots.
Hi Giotis:
Impersonating the APS and using very deceptive marketing means I don’t have to be polite.
Yes you are right. These guys definitely crossed the line. I was referring generally to the practice of labelling people. It’s simply wrong. Don’t get me wrong though; it was not my intention to imply that you were not polite or to pretend that I am. I would be a hypocrite.
http://knol.google.com/k/david-degner/the-n-particle-model/tjb7mqwwiwx/1?domain=knol.google.com&locale=en#
http://knol.google.com/k/david-degner/a-string-theorist-meets-the-fishermans/tjb7mqwwiwx/3?domain=knol.google.com&locale=en#
Couldn’t resist, sorry!
She wore the quarks well
from up to down she was swell
Her figure was devine
from top to bottom
And although her charm was somewhat strange
she was just sublime
Shouldn’t we be somewhat sympathetic to some of the ‘crackpots’ on the grounds that they may just be mentally sick and may require professional help (from a psychiatrist or such). Just saying looking at some of the links posted in this thread. And no, I am not being sarcastic here.
Dear Tarun:
Yes, we should be sympathetic to that possibility, which is why I don’t usually make a fuzz.
That does not mean we should (as a community) tolerate them committing various kinds of fraud.
Arguing mental illness is a poor excuse for allowing criminal (or just plain unacceptable social) behavior to continue.
Dear Tarun,
that’s interesting. My experience with hyperactive people with unsound minds is that they’re happy or very happy and they even enjoy some survival advantages in the society as it exists today. The other mentally ill people who may be in real, sad trouble are usually not seen on the Internet.
So surely expect no compassion from my side with the mentally ill people who are found in similar threads. There is nothing to be compassionate about, except for the other people who are affected by them.
Best wishes
Lubos
Dear David and Lubos,
I understand and agree with both of you that any kind of fraud should not be tolerated irrespective of the mental health of the culprit. I only wanted to say that some of the crackpots (and this set would most likely exclude those committing frauds) might not have any malignant intention(s) and may be dealt in a way one might deal with a crazy guy knocking randomly on the doors of very many houses (i.e. with a mixture of annoyance and sympathy).
So my first comment wasn’t quite pertinent to the spammer in question as using the name of APS or actual persons without their consent isn’t quite benign.