God bless the cranks!

Will the scientific community realize it when they meet the next Einstein or read about his or her ideas? Don't count on it, say the scientists themselves.

"Maybe there is an Einstein out there today," said Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, "but it would be a lot harder for him to be heard."

Especially considering what Einstein was proposing.

"The actual fabric of space and time curving? My God, what an idea!" Greene said at a recent gathering at the Aspen Institute. "It takes a certain type of person who will bang his head against the wall because you believe you'll find the solution."

Perhaps the best examples are the five scientific papers Einstein wrote in his "miracle year" of 1905. These "thought experiments" were pages of calculations signed and submitted to the prestigious journal Annalen der Physik by a virtual unknown. There were no footnotes or citations.

What might happen to such a submission today?

"We all get papers like those in the mail," Green said, "We put them in the crank file."

The barriers to any innovation are tremendous, as AP Science Writer Joseph B. Verrengia notes in that report. First you've got to get past the naysayers in your family, then the naysayers among your friends and associates, then the naysayers among your professional acquaintences. Not to mention the press roadblock.

It's not to say it can't be done. A chemist 40 years ago noted that the number of transistors able to be placed on an integrated circuit would double every two years. What a flake, right? The law has come to be known as "Moore's Law." And that crank chemist was Gordon Moore, a co-founder with crank Robert Noyce of Intel. Both Moore and Noyce were underlings of crank Robert Shockley who invented the transistor (which incidentally came about in 1947 shortly after a space ship allegedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, not that I'm hinting there's any connection between the two). The first integrated circuit was developed by a Texas Instruments scientist, crank Jack St. Clair Kilby, in 1958, just 11 short years after Roswell ... er, uh ... after the invention of the transistor.

Cranks are working on flying cars and crank Paul Gilster is still thinking about how to get us to Alpha Centauri.

God bless the cranks among us. In fact, as Einstein showed, He did.

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I've updated my post "Who's spinning you and why?"

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Porn spam Easter egg of the day:

The thing that contributes to anyone's reaching the goal he wants is simply wanting that goal badly enough