We had a forum for our final year undergraduates on Friday. This was to allow them to give feedback on what the Department is doing well, and more importantly what we, and the rest of the Uni, could do better. The coordinator will gather together the feedback and send it round – maybe I’ll do a post on it later.

But this post is inspired by chat over the post-forum drinks. Jim Al-Khalili, ‘cos he appears on tv, gets lots of emails, letters, etc from crackpots. He has printed out some of the most bizarre of these, and the students were reading them.

The emails tell about how one or more of Newton, Galileo, Einstein, etc, are wrong, and how the email writer has found the ultimate theory of everything, etc, etc. Sigh.

But crackpots are not completely without a use, as they can help us to define what good science is. A mathematical physicist called John Baez, who works at a university in California, has an absolutely excellent scoring system for scoring crackpot science. Warren Siegel also has an excellent page.

The idea of John Baez’s scoring system is simple, the email starts with an initial score of -5, but then marks are added for every non-scientific nutty statement. The larger the final score, the nuttier the email. For example, there are:

• 3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.
• 10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a “paradigm shift”.
• 30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization (without good evidence)
• 50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.

Note that the largest penalty is for not suggesting any testable predictions. If you cannot test a theory, then it is simply not science. I also like the “(without good evidence)” bit. If you have good evidence of an extraterrestrial civilisation, we would all like to hear it, but just claiming that aliens told you is less impressive. Evidence is important in science.