[tired_and_awake]

I remember attending a big American Physics Society conference, maybe 4000 physicists attending. They had many parallel tracks for presentations, labeled A through T or something like that. I remember reading through these and it was fascinating the breadth of topics covered, condensed matter through fluid dynamics, chaos, some astrophysics IIRC.

So at the end of the program there's some special session labeled Z and it was for "special physics". All of the talks had bizarre names filled with jargon terms "hyper quantum zener matrix dimensions".

I gather it was the APSs solution to quietly enable the quacks to talk amongst themselves instead of denying them any platform.

[leephillips]

The APS rules are that any member can submit an abstract, which will be printed in the Bulletin, and be allowed to either give a 10-minute talk or stand next to a poster. The abstracts are printed without regard to content, as long as they are in the right format. So they have to put the crank ones somewhere, and this is one solution.

There is a rule that the submitter of an abstract must attend the meeting to present. In the Fluid Dynamics division, there was a guy who submitted weird, incomprehensible abstracts every year for many years—but he never showed up as far as I know. You could recognize his abstracts immediately because he jammed as much as possible in there. Each abstract referred to previous ones, as if they were publications. He built his own little empire of self-referential, unreviewed abstracts. The APS handled that by (eventually) scheduling his talks at the ends of sessions so that the no-show would not disrupt the schedule. They could have banned him for repeat submissions without appearing to give a talk, but they erred on the side of allowing an obvious crackpot to have his say, which I thought was both wise and kind.

I don’t know if the current APS would be so thoughful; I hope so. I got fed up with them years ago and stopped paying my dues.

[foob]

This is absolutely the case. When I was in physics, I was told that the moderation policies had previously been more strict and were only relaxed after one of the quacks was rejected and murdered someone in retaliation. I don't know for certain whether that's true or an urban legend, but it was told to me by a physicist who would never joke or lie about something like that.

There's also viXra [1] which is like arXiv for fringe content that arXiv won't accept. One of the people who publishes there underwent a huge email spoofing campaign where they would send emails from one of my coworkers to others in the field promoting the papers. It was a really difficult situation because the coworker didn't know exactly who they were being sent to unless they replied, so it damaged his reputation without him getting a chance to explain what was happening.

[1] - https://vixra.org

[ssivark]

ArXiv similarly has the "gen-ph" classification for preprints. See: https://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/what-counts-as-science