Crackpot index

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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. While the indices have been created for their humorous value, their general concepts can be applied in other fields like risk management.^[1][2]

Baez's crackpot index[]

The method, proposed semi-seriously by mathematical physicist John C. 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.^[3] An earlier version only had 17 questions with point values for each ranging from 1 to 40.^[4]

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^[5] which is a field with many famous unsolved problems that are easy to understand for amateur mathematicians.

Gruenberger's measure for crackpots[]

An earlier crackpot index is Fred J. Gruenberger's "A Measure for Crackpots"^[6] published in December 1962 by the RAND Corporation.

See also[]

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

References[]

External links[]

• The Crackpot Index. by John Baez.
• The CRACKPOT Index: A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics