Come to think of it, compartmentalization effects (like with religion) might allow one to be brilliant for a while until the disjoint beliefs finally interact. Were the physicists who became cranks eventually ever particularly good at dealing with the flaws in reasoning of crankery while they were still respectable?
Similarly, it's possible that as they became more prominent, they needed less and less to justify any given statement to the people with which they interacted, having gained more and more authority, and thus just lost socially enforced habits of thought...
Actually, the simplest explanation I can think of is that it takes the span of time from youth to middle age just to build up the reputation necessary for your eventual fall into crankery to be considered newsworthy... Are physicists really more likely to develop cranky beliefs over a set period of time as the general population?
Similarly, it's possible that as they became more prominent, they needed less and less to justify any given statement to the people with which they interacted, having gained more and more authority, and thus just lost socially enforced habits of thought...
Then why don't they retract when they run into criticism, as they inevitably do?
Are physicists really more likely to develop cranky beliefs over a set period of time as the general population?
Gosh, I hope not. The general population is pretty pathetic. I'm not interested so much in whether old emin...
Freeman Dyson writes in the New York Review of Books about people who took up the crackpot offer. Not just complete cranks, but eminent scientists such as Eddington who got into crankery in their later years.
New thing I learnt: Dyson was not only a good friend of Immanuel Velikovsky, but considers him a greatly underappreciated poet.