How to become a bad theoretical physicist

It is much easier to become a bad theoretical physicist than a good one. I know of many individual success stories.

Don't worry: if I don't quite agree with your theories or methods, that by itself does not imply you are a bad theorist. You might still make great discoveries, or even win a Nobel Prize if you're lucky.

Good theorists as well as bad ones all make mistakes. Science advances in spite of people making mistakes. We produce theories, even ones which cannot be entirely correct, and test them in every odd way we can imagine. Eventually, we manage to remove the errors and obtain marvelous new insights. The difference between a good theorist and a bad one is that good theorists are usually the first to detect the shortcomings of their own theories. They are never afraid of discarding a theory if it appears to be beyond repair. While learning about physics as a student, we all have the ambition of making great discoveries, so we soon start constructing our own theories. They are usually wrong, but never mind, we learn from our mistakes.

Here is how to become a bad theorist:  Compare yourself with Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, or other celebrities in theoretical physics, and reach a conclusion in favor of yourself. Note that good theoreticians do not consider these famous physicists as saints; none of them were infallible, but the few instances where they could be corrected are well-known by historians of science, and do not have any effect on modern physics.

You may consider the option of connecting your work with mystery topics such as telepathy and consciousness. Make outrageous claims of having solved long standing problems. Of course, you expect that you will become famous, but unfortunately, only a few really good theoretical physicists have equations and effects named after them. This is because colleagues recognize their importance and since they want to give names to equations and effects anyway, they bestow the discoverers with that honor.  The bad theoretical physicist, in anticipation, names his own equations and effects, and even his entire theories, after himself right away. The impudence to attach your own name to whatever you claim to have discovered is considered improper in science, and in practice it betrays amateurism and incompetence. If a good theoretician refers to an equation to which colleagues have attached his/her own name, he/she uses a different description if available.

On your way towards becoming a bad theoretician, take your own immature theory, stop checking it for mistakes, don't listen to colleagues who do spot weaknesses, and start admiring your own infallible intelligence. Try to overshout all your critics, and have your work published anyway. If the well-established science media refuse to publish your work, start your own publishing company and edit your own books. If you are really clever you can find yourself a formerly professional physics journal where the chief editor is asleep. To recognize such a journal, look for one where, in the list of board members on the cover, more than 50 % has already deceased. Accuse all your critics of the short-sightedness that you actually suffer too much from yourself. It is easy and pleasant, it does not require the hard work of checking and re-checking your results, and if you are sufficiently eloquent, you might even gather some admirers.

Your next step should be to advertise your work. Your reputation may have caused the xxx ArXives and Wikipedia to refuse your submissions (congratulations, they are not really peer-reviewed), but in that case you can still start your own weblog, and buy pop-ups in Google. Do not mention the number of citations you received in the established literature (you probably did not receive any) but instead install a counter that identifies the number of times someone by mistake downloaded your papers. Some people just download anything so you are guaranteed to get many hits there, and you can proudly announce those numbers

BY : Gerard 't Hooft