Yeah, Gold and his abiotic oil (IMO) is another example, although at first blush it was not a bad conjecture, just didn't account for some of the notable details. Lots of Grand old Men of Science (does not seem to happen to women as much, or is it just their under representation in science?) take to musing in fields other than their expertise, and this sometimes ends badly.
The multiverse indeed strikes me as nuts also, but I know it has regained some traction in recent times. I took QM in both undergrad and grad school, but never took graduate Gravity, so don't have much understanding of the physics behind cosmology theories. Sometimes the nutty notions are more interpretations of the math, rather than reality. I use Fourier Transforms all the time, and they are very useful in a wide range of engineering tasks, and do provide useful insight by making you think in frequency vs spatial domains, but the +/-infinity aspect is of course physically nuts. You have to be awake to when that poses a problem, and you certainly don't want to let it start you off on some philosophical tangent about reality. |
