Originally Posted by
Perpetual Student
How does one account for the occasional accomplished professional who strays outside of his/her own field to advocate crackpot ideas? Linus Pauling and vitamin C come to mind. Does it not seem to be a manifestation of narcissism re-enforced (in this case) by a Nobel prize?
We see this a lot in the conspiracy theory area: Engineers tend to be susceptible to this, for reasons we have discussed at length in that forum. In some cases it may well be narcissism, in other cases it may be a predilection for engineers to latch on to a mental problem and try to solve it using the principles that they know. In the case of conspiracy theories, many times, the principles that they know form an incomplete picture of the actual intricacies involved in the "questionable evidence" they are purporting to debunk, resulting in arrival at the wrong conclusions. So it seems to be with crackpot physics: Someone in a tangentially related field knows enough about, say, electromagnetism to be dangerous; but with no knowledge of real quantum physics, his theory of nuclear binding via Coulomb attraction falls flat on its face.