Alie Ward

He had his own work at Berkeley confiscated and then classified so he didn't have access to it so that it could be used on the Manhattan Project.

And he eventually in his 70s had to have electroconvulsive therapy for depression.

And just the saga and the drama of his life and political affiliations affected the reception of his work, sadly.

Okay, but one hiccup is that the particle surfing a pilot wave doesn't work with other theories, like the relativistic quantum field theory that explains what happens when you smash particles together in a nearly 17-mile particle accelerator tube underground, which, as discussed in the cosmology episode with Dr. Katie Mack, is not called the Hardon Collider.

How often do you think people get stoned and come up with their own theories and email physicists?

Do you have a favorite?

Any simulation theories?

Okay, side note.

This crackpot index is indeed a real thing, and it was published in 1998 by mathematical physicist John Bias.

And one score is determined by points,

with infractions being five points for each word in all caps, 10 points for mailing your theory to someone you don't know personally and asking them not to tell anyone else about it for fear that your ideas will be stolen, 10 points for each statement along the lines of,

I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to just express it in terms of equations.

10 points for each comparison of yourself to Einstein.

20 points for emailing to complain about the crackpot index.

20 points for suggesting that you deserve a Nobel Prize.

30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization.

And...

And now what about a simulation?

OK, what if the reason why we cannot reconcile the wave versus the particle?

Yeah.