Then why don’t they retract when they run into criticism, as they inevitably do?
Well, why would they? After all, the last time they said that revolutionary theory X was correct and everybody thought they were wrong, it turned out they were right! That’s why they were prominent!
Strictly speaking, incredible levels of sanity are not necessary to find the truth, they only make it easier to do so. There are sufficiently large populations of physicists who aren’t ludicrously awesomely good that some of them are bound to turn out to be right every so often, even if they got to the right reasons for the wrong reasons. Maybe.
What, exactly, went wrong in their heads that had previously always gone right?
Well, why would it be any different for them than for the rest of us? The reason great scientists are great, I assume, has to do with the greatness of their discoveries. But why would only incredibly sane people make great discoveries? Can not just a little cleverness and a sufficiently large amount of luck (a sufficiently large pool of peers) do the same thing?
But they also had to correctly pick out the one which was the revolution—every such scientist faces tons of ideas and hypotheses to consider. Is your hypothesis here a kind of regression to the mean: all scientists are equally vulnerable to holding crankery?
Essentially, yes. They just happened to have had a string of sixes when they threw the dice, culminating in prominence. If you suppose that the crank-susceptible scientists significantly outnumber the crank-immune, you get predictions which resemble our observations that many prominent scientists are susceptible to crank.
Where by crank-susceptible I mean, approximately, susceptible to infection by crank...
Well, why would they? After all, the last time they said that revolutionary theory X was correct and everybody thought they were wrong, it turned out they were right! That’s why they were prominent!
Strictly speaking, incredible levels of sanity are not necessary to find the truth, they only make it easier to do so. There are sufficiently large populations of physicists who aren’t ludicrously awesomely good that some of them are bound to turn out to be right every so often, even if they got to the right reasons for the wrong reasons. Maybe.
Well, why would it be any different for them than for the rest of us? The reason great scientists are great, I assume, has to do with the greatness of their discoveries. But why would only incredibly sane people make great discoveries? Can not just a little cleverness and a sufficiently large amount of luck (a sufficiently large pool of peers) do the same thing?
But they also had to correctly pick out the one which was the revolution—every such scientist faces tons of ideas and hypotheses to consider. Is your hypothesis here a kind of regression to the mean: all scientists are equally vulnerable to holding crankery?
Essentially, yes. They just happened to have had a string of sixes when they threw the dice, culminating in prominence. If you suppose that the crank-susceptible scientists significantly outnumber the crank-immune, you get predictions which resemble our observations that many prominent scientists are susceptible to crank.
Where by crank-susceptible I mean, approximately, susceptible to infection by crank...