Halfway down the Danube

Kooistra's Alternate View columns reveal him to be a minor-league crank, at about the level of G. Harry Stine (i.e. he generally thinks he knows a lot more about science than he does, but he only gets really crankish about a small number of topics). Hogan, OTOH, is a major-league crank. He appears to have caught brain-eater disease from the late Petr Beckmann (hence the odd combination of anti-relativity and antienvironmental kookiness) but has gone much further these days.

Someday I ought to carry out a systematic study of the influence of Petr Beckmann in propagating fringe scientific views through the right half of the American political spectrum.

That's par for the course for Kooistra, and same for Hogan. Hogan has been linking to David "Purimfest 1946" Irving through his website, so he's well in the terminal phase of the Brain Eater. I figure he just hasn't managed a way to work the topic into a novel yet. It's only a matter of time. "Hey, maybe the Space People secretly keeping Earth primitive and superstitious were... !"

On the other hand, he's not a cannibal. As far as I know. Yet.

And Kooistra. He reminds me of the kid in grade school who would believe whatever anyone would tell him, on the slimmest of Real World evidence. "Hey, Jeff, they're putting dog dirt in the Sloppy Joes!"

"Are not!"

"Are too! I saw the lunch lady put it in! Right from the pooper scooper! See!"

[Jim shows Jeff a fecal pellet secreted for just such an occasion]

"EUGH!"

And to this day, Jeff is still a vegetarian.

Robert, are you familiar with John Holbo's Discover The Nutwork?

One interesting recent case of misapplied expertise transfer that has caught my eye is Harvard string theorist Luboš Motl. Note the plaints about "PC thought police" and the sidebar links to the junk science sites Junk Science and Tech Central Station.

I don't think you can blame Petr Beckmann for Motl. Although they might share a certain reflexive central European anti-liberalism.

Aye, Carlos, I've had my eye on Lubos Motl for the past year or so. He's awfully close to succumbing to the Brain Eater, if indeed he has not done so already. Dreadful, because he is not only a really smart guy, he is an uncommonly lucid expositor when his oxen aren't being gored.

Among other things, he has confidently predicted that by the end of the year one or more of the contributors to RealClimate will either be in jail or have committed suicide by the end of the year. That's Beckmann-level rhetoric. (You may have noticed that Sean Carroll eventually had to ban him from his blog.)

I'm pretty sure there's no connection to Beckmann, though, aside from national origin. Beckmann came from an "engineering physics" background - IIRC, he once credited one of his Prague professors with inspiring his doubts about relativity. Motl's background is pretty much mainstream theoretical physics - Beckmann's antirelativity would probably make him physically ill.

In any event, about 15 years ago I figured out that Hogan, Dixy Lee Ray, and Tom Bethell (American Spectator) were all Beckmann groupies. Ray directly inspired Rush Limbaugh's more moronic antienvironmental diatribes, and Bethell has been pushing weird relativity as well as HIV denialism in National Review as well as Am. Spec.

Correction: that should be "about 12 years ago", not 15. To be precise, 13 years for Ray and Bethell, 12 for Hogan (his 1993 article on ozone depletion in _Omni_ magazine).

Don't forget the Jim Baen related axis of Beckmanousity. Not only did Ace publish THE HEALTH EFFECTS ETC. but the NIGHTMARISH POTENTIAL OF LNG TO DESTROY, DESTROY I SAY, VAST AREAS IN AN THERMONUCLEAR-LEVEL CONFLAGRATION! scenario from that book popped up in Sandra Miesel's DREAMRIDER/SHAMAN. The first version of that was from Baen's Ace and the second was from Baen's Baen.

I know very little about the distribution of ANALOG, except for reports that neither UNCLE HUGO'S and DREAMSCAPE (?) carries it (These being the SF stores in Mpls). I stopped caring about it when it became obvious carrying it in my store was a waste of money. I had stopped reading it myself years earlier.

Who is this Petr Beckmann?

Hogan definitely seems to have followed the right-libertarian path to disenlightenment. From a recent interview:

DC: So really the only way to find the truth is to work at it? You've got to put an effort into it.

JPH: Oh yeah, yeah, you've got to work at it. It's like just about everything in life. The responsibility for the quality of your own life, ultimately, is yours. I think one of the problems we have is, from babyhood, a constant bombardment with external resources that are going to save our lives, improve our lives, make us rich, make us smart as long as you write a check. Everything is externalized. As people grow up, this attitude seems to be encouraged of being a passive vessel, a sponge waiting to be filled. If I'm broke, somebody should give me a handout. If I'm stupid, somebody should educate me. If I'm bored, somebody should entertain me. If I'm injured, or I'm damaged, or I just feel bad, who do I sue or complain to? They're always frantically looking for the solutions to their problems in the places where they're never going to find them.

I never thought of, say, the Handbook of Physics and Chemistry as a tool of the will-sapping liberal media, but that probably shows I haven't been paying attention.

Working my way through the Analog, BTW. One bad story, one mediocre one. A couple of awful Vincent DiFate illustrations. Carlos, if you see it on a newsstand, pick it up and take a few moments to read the letters pages... they clarify the peak reader demographic quite nicely.

I understand circulation has been headed south for a while now, and I do see why.

Doug M.

Beckmann was an emigre electrical engineer -- and already, the warning bells should be going off -- who devised his own alternative to relativity. Not just general relativity, oh no, but special relativity as well. He called it "Galilean electrodynamics".

He was something of an alternate energy crank too, although not in the usual direction. Have you ever seen that factoid about how one single Liquid Natural Gas tanker had more energy than the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima? That's Beckmann's.

Before he died, he discovered the joys of Usenet, where Google will store his unhinged rants for as long as Mountain View, California, exists. A sample: "By the way, did you spend the Thanksgiving holidays in Germany setting fire to Turkish homes?"

He was also friends with Jerry Pournelle.

He did write a not actively bad book on the number pi, although there have been better since.

Ah, here's an interesting obituary.

He really does need a place in the Nutwork.

Jesus, did you read the _rest_ of the interview? Where they start going off on how you can't buy anything on-line and you should pick up 5 of anything you find to get you through the "swing of the pendulum"? It's even better than the first half. They sound like a couple of cranky grandfathers kvetching on bingo night. A regular pair of futurists, there. Bleeding edge.

I read the Analog letter column. While not all the addresses were from retirement communities...

One comment stuck in my mind: a longing for the good old days, when the hero would have a blaster in one hand, and a voluptuous brunette in the other. I see your point entirely.

I wonder if many readers from that time period read SF as a form of, well, pornography. But a demure, soft-core pornography, defined by its absences.

C.M. Kornbluth once commented to Fred Pohl how that era's fetish magazines had all their sexual content removed. (This factoid got used in a Kornbluth short story.) In the same way Katie Tarrrant edited out all visible sexual content from Astounding.

Hence the weird, inchoate rage many of the Old Guard felt when SF became more literary. The New Wave was messing with their fetish!

(This may be why Niven and Zelazny of that era still have a fun, hip quality about them, even though they are so retro in so many other ways. They were the Playboy writers of SF. IMS, Niven was even published there.)

That would make the current Analog's letter column something like a geriatric version of Penthouse Forum. "I remember when I was young, thinking that this would never happen to me... needless to say. Now where was I?"

That NR piece by Bethell is actually a pretty decent bio of Beckmann, given that it's written by one of his most fervent acolytes. I didn't know the part about his having gone to Britain in 1939.

A few things to add to what's been given above: in addition to his popular books (_A History of Pi_ and _The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear_), and his antirelativity manifesto _Einstein Plus Two_, Beckmann also wrote some decent textbooks on applied mathematics (one on Orthogonal Polynomials, one on Probability Theory) as well as technical monographs in his own area of specialty, Electromagnetic Wave Propagation. He had a serious scientific career, and didn't really succumb to the Brain Eater until about 1975. Even "Einstein Plus Two" (published early 1980's) is more clever than most antirelativity stuff - it's basically a revival of "ether-dragging" theories that date back to the first decades of the 20th century. It’s when it gets into the “plus two” stuff – where he attempts to derive of Bode’s Law and the Bohr/deBroglie quantization rule from purely classical considerations– that it really turns crankish.

Beckmann’s most influential publication, outside of academia, was “Access to Energy”, a four-page monthly newsletter printed on pink paper consisting of roughly equal proportions of nuclear power advocacy, popular science tidbits, anti-environmentalist diatribes, and right-wing political rants. (AFAIK, he is the only person who has ever described Margaret Thatcher as a modern-day Neville Chamberlain. He _really_ didn’t like her favorable reception of Gorbachev, not to mention her friendly visit to NCAR and her strong support for banning ozone-depleting CFCs.) _AtE_ appears to have been very popular in the nuclear engineering community. During my first two years (1992-3) on usenet I kept running across posts from otherwise reasonable people claiming that stratospheric ozone depletion was a scientific fraud on the basis of totally whacked-out notions about atmospheric chemistry. I quickly figured out that most of them were getting their stuff from Beckmann, who in turn was getting it from the Lyndon LaRouche literature. Beckmann also used to run a BBS called “Fort Freedom”, which has been archived on the web. Among other things, it includes a piece that argues that Tchaikovsky probably wasn’t gay.

A few months before he died, Beckmann turned _AtE_ over to Arthur Robinson, a self-employed biochemist living in Cave Junction, Oregon. Robinson is an interesting figure in his own right – he was a protege of Linus Pauling, who appointed him President of his institute. Later on they had a falling out (the reasons for which are disputed) and Pauling had Robinson fired. Robinson sued the Pauling Institute for wrongful termination and eventually won his case; he used the settlement to establish the “Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine”, which afaict consists primarily of his own family plus a few distinguished right-leaning scientists who have agreed to have their names listed as board members. OISM was in the news about 10 years ago when it published the “Oregon Petition”, a list of some 17000 “scientists and applied scientists” who have expressed doubts about global warming. Not surprisingly, Robinson has expressed support for Duesberg’s “HIV does not cause AIDS” heresy as well as for the Intelligent Design stuff.
After Beckmann died Robinson published a special issue of _AtE_ including testimonials from a number of more-or-less celebrated figures, including none other than Edward Teller. Teller devoted a significant proportion of his eulogy to explaining, as gently as possible, that for all of his other virtues Beckmann was wrong about Relativity and that Einstein, in spite of all that icky socialistic stuff, was right.