There is a lot of comments about crackpot physics in the web, you know, the kind that mathematicians call «circle squarers» or «trisectors» even if now they are about Riemann Hypothesis. What I am amazed is that none of the commenters seem to be aware of Feynman remarks on the topic:
I get a lot of letters with such content. But I must say that such remarks are perfectly obvious and are perfectly clear to anybody who’s working on this problem. And it doesn’t do any good to point this out. The problem is not what might be wrong, but what might be substituted precisely in place of it.
Messenger Lectures on “The Character of Physical Law” at Cornell University on November 9, 1964. Lecture 7.
If you say anything precise, for example in the case of a continuous space, suppose the precise proposition is that space really consists of a series of dots only. And the space between them doesn’t mean anything. And the dots are in a cubic array. Then we can prove that immediately is wrong, that doesn’t work.
You see, the problem is not to change or to say something might be wrong but to replace it by something. And that is not so easy. As soon as any real, definite idea is substituted, it becomes almost immediately apparent that it doesn’t work.
Secondly, there’s an infinite number of possibilities of these the simple types. It’s something like this. You’re sitting, working very hard. You work for a long time, trying to open a safe.
And some Joe comes along, who doesn’t know anything about what you’re doing or anything, except that you’re trying to open a safe. He says, you know, why don’t you try the combination 10-20-30? Because you’re busy, you’re trying a lot of things.
Maybe you already tried 10-20-30. Maybe you know that the middle number is already 32 and not 20. Maybe you know that as a matter of fact this is a five digit combination.
So these letters don’t do any good. And so please don’t send me any letters, trying to tell me how the thing is going to work. I read them to make sure that I haven’t already thought of that. But it takes too long to answer them, because they’re usually in the class try 10-20-30.
And as usual, nature’s imagination far surpasses our own. As we’ve seen from the other theories, they are really quite subtle and deep. And to get such a subtle and deep guess is not so easy. One must be really clever to guess. And it’s not possible to do it blindly, by machine.
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