Time for the Crackpot or Not game!

[danaeris]

This guy was handing out cards at one of the symposia I visited.

http://www.alexandermayer.com

If you search Google for him, you'll find that his website used to be hosted by Stanford, but has since been taken down. Nor is he in their directory of people. the cached site
It does appear that the format personal sites on Stanford's website follow is www.stanford.edu/~username... but that doesn't mean he was there for physics-related, academic reasons. He could have been any kind of staff person.

The people I've seen him chatting with seem to be hanging on his every word. Commentary online seems to be very mixed however. Half the people think he's a crackpot on the order of Time Cube, and the other half think that he is the next brilliant theoretician to break into physics.

I haven't read the documents yet. But I thought I'd throw this out to you, my readers. Any thoughts?

Comments

[ebenezer.livejournal.com]

1. I know basically nothing about physics.

2. I have not read anything about Alexander Mayer, including the link you provided.

That said, I can state clearly that I have come to believe that physics is a field filled with hero-worship of a scale not seen in other disciplines. More than math, more than computer science, more than engineering, physics seems to attract people who (a) appreciate complexity more than simplicity and (b) try to draw metaphysical conclusions about their empirical findings. I think that (a) and (b) are clearly true. It is up to you whether you agree with my inference that (a) means that people are quick to worship false heroes because they see their own ability to understand something as a sign of its value or that (b) means that researchers are sometimes quick to overstate their findings in order to aggrandize their work or the field.

[ebenezer.livejournal.com]

In the last sentence, I said "ability" but meant "inability".

[stollman.livejournal.com]

It looks like the reason he's no longer got a stanford web page is because he's no longer at stanford, and when he was at stanford it was in the capacity of a "Visiting Academic" or some such; at least according to someone who looked him up in the directory when he was still there.

I looked over the presentations, and all I can say is this:

IF the facts he presents as evidence are true, and
IF his math is correct, then
It seems like a reasonable theory, and I look forward to hearing about the results of tests to confirm or deny it.
ELSE (if his math is wrong)
Oh well, he's incompetent. Nothing new there.
ELSE (if the facts he uses as evidence are untrue)
Garbage in, Garbage out.

I'm really not qualified enough to develop any personal opinion about the physics of the thing, but I have a LOT of experience distinguishing substance from snake oil in other realms and to me, this doesn't smell like snake oil.