Originally posted by playswithmachines
Cranks, yes.
The Wright brothers were cranks, their machine could never fly.
Tesla was a crank, too, with his laughable idea of AC power.

John Logie Baird was totally insane, he had this really stupid idea that you could send & recieve images electronically.

Completely insane, all of them............

The Wright brothers were never considered cranks, and they pursued advanced experimental (and some theoretical) science of the time. There was substantial effort in science & engineering communities to try to do what they were doing and the Wrights were aware of all the latest developments from USA and Europe. They built a wind tunnel and performed substantial experimental measurements. Their primary innovations were in (mechanical) control systems which made powered flight feasible.

Tesla was not a crank early on, and AC power was known before him, but he developed some important technology to make it more practical and effective. Later, he became in all probability mentally ill and was a crank and contributed nothing to science.

John Baird was a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an honor not given to cranks .

None of them were cranks or insane when they were developing their inventions, they were inspired inventors following contemporary science and engineering to the maximum.

These people study the most up-to-date theories and experiments

i'm glad we can agree!

Science is to explore the unknown, in order to explain it, is it not?
How can one do so without venturing occasionally, at least, into the fringe, for it is to encompass the fringe and move beyond it, I would think....
And the most "up to date," contemporary theories, are theories, based upon other theories, for example, that may, in fact, not be correct, for they are based on our limited perceptions. And this could be nothing but compounding an erroneous view, one way or the other. I think most scientists even acknowledge this possibility.

Originally posted by tetra50
Science is to explore the unknown, in order to explain it, is it not?

Science is also the search for constants, and the constants don't require our specific explanations or our abstractions, because they're already written in a language far more robust and real than anything humans have yet come up with. In fact, any explanation we could offer would require the usage of those constants (namely, numbers). Number and nature don't much differ when it comes to first principles of physics and computation, they are mirrored in each other.

The Standard Model evangelists here would have you believe that math and science is purely dependent on human-invented axioms. They believe this, because that was a mantra of the 20th century Western industrial capitalism: 'man creates reality'. Hopefully this notion will be corrected at some point.

Originally posted by tetra50
Science is to explore the unknown, in order to explain it, is it not?
How can one do so without venturing occasionally, at least, into the fringe, for it is to encompass the fringe and move beyond it, I would think....
And the most "up to date," contemporary theories, are theories, based upon other theories, for example, that may, in fact, not be correct, for they are based on our limited perceptions. And this could be nothing but compounding an erroneous view, one way or the other. I think most scientists even acknowledge this possibility.

edit on 9-2-2012 by tetra50 because: (no reason given)

I'd call all of string theory and loop quantum gravity fringe theories,but the people doing them at least make an attempt to fit in with known phenomenology and derive correspondence with known macroscopic physics.

Crank stuff is usually

a) sufficiently underspecifed and unclear that one cannot get a quantitative computation of ordinary phenomena, and the theory does not explain why one cannot (say e.g. as string theory posits phenomenon at Planck energy scales which are experimentally inaccessible).

and b) directly contradictory to known experimental facts

c) violates too many known theoretical principles at once

and with some frequency

d) mathematically mistaken

and virtually always e) shows a profound misunderstanding or ignorance of known science.