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wnoise comments on No One Knows What Science Doesn't Know - Less Wrong
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How do you know when you've "hit the bottom" of a stack of explanations?
When I first learned about curved space and spacetime, I took some of the standard metaphors too literally. I remember speculating that space was a trampoline, but extending in three dimensions rather than two, infinitely thin in the fourth dimension, accelerating (forever!) in the fifth dimension, and of course not actually made of anything. (The acceleration was necessary to make the pieces of matter sitting on the trampoline stretch it.)
Years later I ran across the writings of a crank physicist (edit: I think I found him) whose big idea was that everything is constantly getting bigger (or maybe smaller), and that this explained gravity and maybe some of the other forces too.
Now I see both of these as taking a metaphor too literally because it seems to provide a mechanism. John Baez's Crackpot Index provides
(This artice by Ronald Merrill, "Sufficient Reason and Causality", is related, though it's been a long time since I've read it.)
Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has also proposed the "everything is constantly getting bigger" theory of gravity.
Ah, yes. Another one for the "engineers are more likely to become cranks" files.
Why is this anyway? Are engineering degrees just easy to get? Maybe they don't have to internalize the scientific method? Not enough experimentalism?
My personal belief is that they learn simplified models that aren't quite correct, without enough explicit warnings that they aren't fully correct. Then, later on, they're smart enough to figure out that the models aren't good enough, so start building their own, without the requisite background of what the physicists' actual model are, and why certain approaches have and haven't been taken, and how counter-intuitive experiments have forced certain choices.
It's like the artillery officer who thinks you can't use GR to calculate the trajectory of an artillery shell - you have to use Newtonian mechanics to do it. Not that it wouldn't be practical go use GR, but that it could not be done. He doesn't realize that not only can you calculate it with GR, but that it would be far more accurate, too (it would, of course, be horribly impractical, however).
Scott Adams is not an engineer. He is a cartoonist who writes about engineers.
"Prior to his success as a writer/cartoonist, Adams worked closely with telecommunications engineers at Crocker National Bank as a software developer in San Francisco between 1979 and 1986, and at Pacific Bell between 1986 and June 1995, and draws on their personalities for those of his Dilbert characters."
(His education, though, is in economics and management. Make of that what you will.)
Yes, he worked with engineers, but he would be the first to tell you he is not an engineer himself. From his book The Dilbert Principle (page 171):
I stand corrected. (But I do think he has absorbed enough of the engineer's viewpoint to make it noticeable.)
I'm pretty sure that Scott Adams is not a crank, but a troll.