Crackpot index

The crackpot index is a number that rates scientific claims or the individuals that make them, in conjunction with a method for computing that number. The method, proposed semi-seriously by mathematical physicist John Baez in 1992, computes an index by responses to a list of 36 questions, each positive response contributing a point value ranging from 1 to 50. The computation is initialized with a value of −5.

Presumably any positive value of the index indicates crankiness.

Though the index was not proposed as a serious method, it nevertheless has become popular in Internet discussions of whether a claim or an individual is cranky, particularly in physics (e.g., at the Usenet newsgroup sci.physics), or in mathematics.

Chris Caldwell's Prime Pages has a version adapted to prime number research^[1] which is a field with many famous unsolved problems that are easy to understand for amateur mathematicians.

An earlier crackpot index is Fred J. Gruenberger's "A Measure for Crackpots"^[2] published in December 1962 by the RAND Corporation.

See also

• Crank (person)
• List of amateur mathematicians
• List of topics characterized as pseudoscience
• Pseudophysics

References

1. ^ Chris Caldwell. "The PrimeNumbers' Crackpot index". http://primes.utm.edu/notes/crackpot.html. Retrieved October 23, 2007. 
2. ^ Fred J. Gruenberger. "A Measure for Crackpots" (PDF). http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/2006/P2678.pdf. 

External links

• John Baez, The Crackpot Index.
• Michael Shermer, truncated version, Skeptics Society
• Crank Dot Net, a list of websites, roughly organized by subject area and sub-categorised by crankiness, including anti-crank sites.