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 eminent scientists or old eminent physicists in particular are worse than the general public, but the reasons why any eminent old physicists who adopts a crank view has fallen prey to that crank view. What, exactly, went wrong in their heads that had previously always gone right?
Then why don't they retract when they run into criticism, as they inevitably do?
Well, why would they? After all, the last time they said that revolutionary theory X was correct and everybody thought they were wrong, it turned out they were right! That's why they were prominent!
Strictly speaking, incredible levels of sanity are not necessary to find the truth, they only make it easier to do so. There are sufficiently large populations of physicists who aren't ludicrously awesomely good that some of them are bound to turn out to be right every so often, e...
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.