lpetrich

<a href="http://www.crank.net" target="_blank">http://www.crank.net</a>

A big listing of crackpottery sites, including some opponents of crackpottery.

One of its recent additions to is <a href="http://www.skeptica.dk/arkiv_us/pa_us002.htm" target="_blank">this one on Velikovsky's sources</a>; Velikovsky had done a lot of creative editing on the quotations he had made.

This subject brings to mind an affliction suffered by many well-known scientists: they are often besieged by what Carl Sagan's staffpeople had called the "fissured ceramics" set.

Carl Sagan himself had once been written to by a woman who was talked to by inhabitants of the planet Venus through her shower head, and an inmate of an insane asylum who had reported that some dethroned deities were also present there.

Isaac Asimov had also gotten plenty, such as a letter from someone who incoherently argued two theses: that Einstein had stolen the theory of relativity from some poor hardworking scientist who shall forever remain unknown, and that relativity is all wrong. Also, he got lots of indignantly emotional letters from creationists, who object to the simian ancestroy of our species, but to no other result of evolution.

Bertrand Russell had gotten a response from someone who could not understand a statement in one of BR's books, that Julius Caesar is dead. "Why?" "Because I am Julius Caesar." Also, he got a letter from the Egyptian god Osiris, who, by his description, was alive and well in a suburb of Boston.

And a century ago, Simon Newcomb had gotten plenty from anti-Newton crackpots, such as one who indignantly denied the existence of the force of gravity. A force that pulls him down to Earth he accepted, but he believed that it does not go all the way to the Moon.