# a blog about things that I've been thinking hard about

# How (Not) to Create and Promote Your Non-Mainstream Theoretical Science Website

12 February, 2006
Advice on how to create and promote your non-mainstream theoretical science website, based on my own personal experience. Since I haven't been very successful in getting anyone anywhere to take any notice of my ideas on a wide range of subjects, which include thermodynamics and evolution, consciousness, dreams, neuroscience and (most recently) music, it could also be read as advice on how not to create and promote your non-mainstream theoretical science website.
by Philip Dorrell

## What is Non-Mainstream Science?

On the Internet one can find definitions of various kinds of science, such as pseudoscience, junk science, and voodoo science. These definitions usually focus on the features of these types of science which demonstrate that they are "bad" science, i.e. they are not really science at all.

Standing in implicit contrast to these bad kinds of non-science is "mainstream" or "real" science. This is the kind of science that we think of when we use the word "science" by itself, without any further qualification.

The important difference between "real" science and other kinds of science is its credibility. In the very long run, the only thing that matters about science is whether or not it correctly describes and explains something about the world. But in the short term, it can be difficult to predict which science will turn out to be correct, so the following criteria have evolved in order to distinguish "real" science from the not-so-real:

- Real science is done by scientists, who are qualified to do their job as a result of getting a Ph.D.
- Real science is published in peer-reviewed journals.
- After having passed these two rigorous criteria, real science is disseminated to the general public through various media such as science magazines, popular science websites and paperback books. The books are written either by popular science writers or by the scientists themselves.
- In some cases, where a particular scientist has pre-established credibility as a scientist, i.e. they have a Ph.D and they have published important results in peer-reviewed journals, then that scientist may choose to publish some of their more speculative thinking directly to the general public (and to other scientists) without going through the peer-review hoop.

In the very long term, these criteria are irrelevant, and when we look at the history of science we find important science done by amateurs. And if you go back far enough, they didn't even have peer-reviewed journals. But the long term can be very long, and some unfortunate scientists were not properly recognised as such until decades after they made the discoveries for which they are now famous. In some cases this meant they were dead before anyone recognised their work.

We can define a non-mainstream scientist as someone who attempts to do science outside the framework defined above, and who nevertheless hopes to get recognition for their work sometime in the near future, and preferably before they die.

## Success Criteria

The Internet should be the answer to every non-mainstream scientist's dreams. At almost zero cost, you can publish anything and make it instantly available to almost everyone in the world (these days even poor countries have Internet).

Unfortunately, it's one thing to make your ideas and theories available, which might only take minutes, and another thing to be taken seriously, which still seems to take decades.

It is possible that the Internet actually makes it harder for the non-mainstream scientist to be taken seriously. Because almost anyone can publish their own "science" on the web, a lot of wannabe scientists do publish their science on the web. This has the consequence that approximately 99.9% of non-mainstream science websites are rubbish, and for many people, 99.9% is indistinguishable from 100%.

How can we measure the "success" of non-mainstream science? By definition, it isn't published in peer-reviewed journals, so this criterion cannot be used. (I will discuss below some of the reasons why non-mainstream scientists might choose not to try publishing in peer-reviewed journals, and these reasons may or may not be good reasons, but for the moment let's just assume that they don't publish in peer-reviewed journals.)

My own particular interest in non-mainstream science is in theories applying to questions which modern science has not yet satisfactorily resolved. The final success of a theory is that it makes hard predictions about real-life phenomena. But there is a lot of mainstream scientific speculation, discussion and theorisation that falls short of this criterion, so it would be unreasonable to apply it to non-mainstream science.

Taking these difficulties into account, I will define the following criteria for the "success" of a non-mainstream scientific theory:

- When mainstream scientists discuss the relevant scientific question, they at least occasionally make some reference to the theory, and they usually include it in lists of possible answers to the question.
- When popular science writers discuss the relevant questions, they often mention the theory.
- When the question is discussed by interested amateurs on Internet forums, the theory is usually mentioned by at least someone.
- Books mentioning or explaining the theory appear on shelves in major bookstores.

If my own theories were successful by these criteria, then the following would hold:

- Any public discussion of dreams would mention my "Dream-Maker" theory as a serious contender.
- Any public discussion of lucid dreams would mention the important role of non-lucidity according to the same theory.
- Any public discussion of thermodynamics and evolution (almost always in the context of defending or refuting creationism) would mention my resolution of this issue.
- Any public scientific discussion of consciousness would mention my theories about consciousness.
- Similarly for any discussion of free will.
- Any public discussion of the basic scientific mystery of music would mention my "super-stimulus" theory of music.
- Any public discussion about the science of musical scales would mention my theory of musical scales.

Since none of these things have come to pass, and as far as I can tell none of my theories about anything are ever mentioned in any public discussion of any scientific topic, we can conclude that all of my non-mainstream scientific theories have failed. Of course when I mean "fail", I do not mean "fail" in the sense of being found wrong. Non-mainstream science can "fail" even if found to be correct, if the science in question is rediscovered by mainstream scientists who do not acknowledge the priority of the non-mainstream scientist (usually because they are not even aware of the earlier discovery).

There are a number of scientific "discoveries" made in the last few years where I have found it necessary to document my own priority, which in most cases depends on public archiving of Usenet or of web pages. Examples of this documentation can be found at A note on "The Evolution of biological complexity" and Dreams Update.

Given the failure rate of 100% of my own non-mainstream science efforts, you might want to keep in mind the caveat stated in the blurb – that this article might really be advice about how not to create and promote a website which describes and discusses your non-mainstream scientific theories.

## Is There Any "Real" Non-Mainstream Science?

Optimistically I like to think that my own scientific efforts are "real" science. So I could rewrite this question as: "Is there any other "real" non-mainstream science?"

One answer is historical. There are well known examples of scientific theories that took a long time to be taken seriously, for example, Wegener's Continental Drift theory, or, going further back in time, Boltzmann's radical theory that thermodynamic entropy is actually a measure of probability. However, although these theories were not taken seriously, their discoverers were still professional qualified scientists, so they don't fully qualify as "non-mainstream".

Gregor Mendel was an example of someone who would not have been regarded as a "scientist" if he had lived in modern times. His only significant scientific work was his experimental and theoretical work on genetics, and it is precisely this work which was ignored until someone else rediscovered it. The modern concept of the "PhD" qualifying its holder to be an academic researcher did not exist as such when Mendel studied at university. His work was published in the "Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brunn", following his giving a lecture about it to the Natural History Society of Brunn. The journal was presumably a journal of record, rather than a peer-reviewed journal, although I am unable to verify this.

Even in slightly more recent times, scientific journals were not quite as exacting in their publication standards as they are nowadays, and a classic example is Albert Einstein's paper On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies which introduced (what we now call) the Special Theory of Relativity, and which did not have any references.

These historical cases are interesting, but they don't really answer the question of whether any good non-mainstream science theories exist now. Maybe the conditions that prevented the acceptance of those historical theories no longer apply. Maybe the scientific mainstream is now so efficient that it correctly identifies and absorbs all valid science, and 100% of what is left over is invalid.

The only completely satisfactory way to answer the question positively is to actually find one or more good credible non-mainstream scientific theories on their owner's websites. So if you know of some good links, please send them to me. (However, before you do so, check out the bogus-science detection criteria in the section after the next one.)

## Theoretical and Other Science

You'll notice that my discussion of non-mainstream science is qualified by the word "theoretical", and you might be wondering what the story is with non-theoretical science, i.e. experimental and observational science.

With experiments and observations, the issues are different, because the results must themselves be credible if the associated science is to be credible. Publication of results in a peer-reviewed journal may be a necessary evil for the non-mainstream scientist who wishes to achieve this credibility. The only exception would be if the results were so repeatable that almost anyone could repeat them.

With theoretical science, there is, in principle, no absolute need for external verification, because, in principle, the logic of the theory and its relationships to known facts speak for themselves.

## Bogus Science Detection

There are a number of popular (and authoritative) web pages out there which explain how to detect various forms of "bad" science.

Unfortunately, some of these criteria come dangerously close to assuming that all non-mainstream science is bad science. For example, we see criteria like:

- The author lacks formal qualifications in the relevant area.
- The author has not published in a respectable peer-reviewed journal.
- The author emphasises how long they have been working on the problem.
- The author has been working alone.

There is much bad science which satisfies these criteria, but if there is any good non-mainstream science out there at all, it is very likely to satisfy them as well.

So I am going to classify these bogus-science-detection rules as themselves bogus, and I am going to choose a more conservative set of rules which reflect my own approach to detecting bogus science theories (which I sometimes even apply to "real" science):

- The author has a proof that existing accepted theories are all wrong, and the author provides their own replacement theory. Typically the replacement theory has less mathematical sophistication than the theories it replaces, it fails to explain everything (or even anything) that the existing theories explain, there is no clear explanation of what it does explain, and the author completely fails to recognise or acknowledge any of these difficulties.
- The author says things so obviously wrong that the author must be an idiot.
- The author has a hidden or not-so-hidden agenda, for example to prove that the first chapter of Genesis is really true. An agenda is not necessarily fatal in itself to the credibility of a theory, but it is a strong warning sign. Agendas are OK if they are actually "pro-science" in some way, i.e. the author believes more strongly in the scientific comprehensibility of reality than everyone else does. However, even a pro-science agenda can get you into trouble, if it makes you become attached to one explanation for a phenomenon because you think there cannot possibly be any other scientific explanation for that phenomenon.
- The theory contradicts conservation of energy. (There are any number of other basic physical laws that junk theories could contradict, but for some reason the conservation of energy is the one that gets contradicted the most. This usually relates to the agenda of the author, which is that they want to pay less for their electricity.)
- The theory implies the existence of some form of magic. (This can be regarded as a special case of a hidden agenda, but it deserves its own rule.)
- UFOs

It's worth noting that agenda-driven bogus science is often popular with an audience that shares the same agenda, i.e. they want to believe in God, magic, UFOs or free electricity.

## What (Not) to Do

Having defined what I think non-mainstream theoretical science is, if it exists at all, I can now give you the practical advice on how to create and promote your own non-mainstream theoretical science website. All of this advice is based on my own experience, so it is guaranteed to be tried and tested.

### 1. Copy the Example of Other Good Non-Mainstream Theoretical Science Websites

It's always good to look at other people's success, and see if you can apply some of their strategies to your own situation. The only problem is, I haven't yet found any other successful, non-bogus, non-mainstream theoretical science websites. The depressing thing is that the most "successful" non-mainstream theoretical science websites, in terms of public visibility, are quite obviously bogus. They are visible, and well known, but they don't feature in serious discussions of the relevant science.

The lack of good amateur theoretical science creates a vicious circle. Anyone wanting to create a credible science site must systematically exclude any science that is clearly not mainstream, because at least 99.9% of non-mainstream science is rubbish (compared to science published in peer-reviewed journals, where maybe no more than 50 or 60% of the content turns out to be wrong in the long term). So if you are an amateur scientist, you will never get mentioned on a science web site that places a high value on credibility. (I exaggerate slightly, because there are some news-type science blogs that have created links to my site or to my book. These sites can be moderately popular, but they lack any scientific authority in themselves, precisely because they do not apply the sort of quality control that would exclude my own site from the list of sites that they link to.)

The prospects for credible amateur science on the Internet seem so dim that I would lose all hope, if it were not for examples found outside the area of science, and in particular, in the world of software and computer science.

The rise of open-source software has meant the rise of the serious amateur. There are no rules saying that software has to be peer-reviewed before it is taken seriously. Software, however, does have advantages over both experimental and theoretical science, with regards to publication and credibility:

- You don't publish articles about the software, you just publish the software itself.
- If new software contains some kind of theory in its design, that theory can be verified by the observation that the software actually does something, and this verification can be made by anyone who has downloaded and installed the software. The idea of open-source is also important, because software published in this form automatically provides a means by which other software developers can build upon the ideas contained in the software and add new ideas in the form of improvements and extensions to the software.

For an example of a website which provides a credible outlet for the efforts of serious amateurs, I draw inspiration from one particular computer science website, which is Lambda the Ultimate. The owner of this site is Ehud Lamm, although it also has a number of "contributory editors" who decide what can or can't be posted as items on the main part of the site. The general criterion for items being posted is that they have some relevance to those interested in the more theoretical aspects of computer science. There is an emphasis on computer programming languages that have a mathematical basis, in particular functional programming languages.

Most of the content on this site is "professional" rather than "amateur", but there are occasional postings of content from authors who are not obviously academic or employed by large companies, for example when someone invents their own programming language which is claimed to be of some interest to the regular readers of Lambda.

The mixture of professional academic and serious amateur content found in this website must ultimately be a consequence of the site owner's own views on what the site is for (and this applies even if the site owner delegates some of the day-to-day decision making to other trusted site users). This view is I think confirmed by the following paragraph from the site's Getting Started page (even though it's talking about readers rather than contributors) which says:

> Yet it seems to me that the situation right now is that LtU has readers with very different backgrounds, among them many readers who haven't studied PL formally. Others come from academia, and study PL theory for a living.

Websites like this may be the solution to the professional/amateur separation found in Internet science websites, i.e. if we want amateur theoretical science to be taken seriously, then someone should start a theoretical science website that deliberately straddles the line between authority-driven academic content and serious amateur content.

There is another relatively new type of website that effectively mixes "professional" and "amateur" web content, and this is the vote-driven website, of which Digg and Reddit are the prime examples. The distinction between "amateur" and "professional" is a bit fuzzy when one considers websites in general, but a typical "amateur" item might be a page which is just some person's blog entry on a particular topic, whereas a "professional" item might be a news report written by a professional reporter belonging to a well-known newspaper or other news organisation.

Neither Digg nor Reddit are particularly oriented towards serious theoretical science, partly because they tend to emphasise more lightweight material. The emphasis on lightweight material may be caused simply by how quickly newly submitted items "fall off" the new items list if they don't get voted for. This helps to maintain a steady flow of new material, but it stacks the odds against material which is more difficult to digest. (Note to self: maybe I need to provide explanations of my ideas which are really, really easy to understand, with pictures, cartoons, movies, interactive games and whatever else it takes to get the point over to the audience in 10 seconds flat.) This suggests that a vote-driven theoretical science site might need to be designed so that it gives more time for readers to comprehend, review and finally vote for more difficult items.

### 2. Add Content to Wikipedia

If your new theory of reality is a correct description of the world, then it's only natural that it should be included in an encyclopedia. Even if your theory is one of several possible answers to an unsolved question, it deserves a place in the list.

Unfortunately, you can't put an unknown theory of unknown credibility into an encyclopedia, because that undermines the whole intention of an encyclopedia.

This hard fact of life creates a conflict, and there is a policy page on Wikipedia devoted to categorising those types of original content which should be excluded, deleted and not even mentioned within the content of the encyclopedia, and what to do if someone persistently posts that kind of content.

Despite this difficulty, if your website contains a serious and informative discussion of the issues that relate to your theory, you might get away with including a pointer to your website in the "External Links" section of a relevant Wikipedia entry.

### 3. Don't Publish in Peer-Reviewed Scientific Journals

I once attempted to publish one of my theories in a academic peer-reviewed journal, and this was in a journal about consciousness, where indeed every article is necessarily speculative, since everyone admits that they are clueless about what the answers are or even what the question should be. Nevertheless, my paper was returned with comments indicating that it was unlikely that I would be able to make any changes to my paper such that it would be worth publishing.

Despite the very speculative nature of consciousnessology, or maybe because of it, publication in the world of consciousness science is extremely authority driven. Even the newsgroup "sci.psychology.consciousness" used to be published like an academic journal (I don't know if it still is, because, like many other people, I don't read Usenet anymore).

Publishing in peer-reviewed journals is difficult enough for authors in academic environments. For "amateurs" it is even more difficult, because:

- A proper paper has references to everything and anything that might be relevant to the content of the paper. In order to get these references, you have to have access to the journals that contain the papers. Academic journals are expensive. Sometimes content is available online, and sometimes it isn't. This isn't a problem in an academic environment, because you have access to a library which has subscribed to all the important journals, and if it hasn't, you can probably access them via some service provided within the library. To add insult to injury, academic institutions are very unlikely to grant access to these resources to enthusiastic amateurs who are not members of the institution.
- If and when you do publish, your content becomes trapped within commercial copyright restrictions, i.e. you can't even republish your own paper.

### 4. Don't Get a PhD

If you got a PhD, then you would be mainstream, and that should solve the problem (of being non-mainstream). Unfortunately, getting a PhD takes a lot of time, effort and lost earnings, and unless you are intrinsically motivated to get one, it's probably not going to happen.

### 5. Send Emails to Academics

It's a well-known cliché that crackpot amateurs with crackpot theories are continually sending emails explaining and promoting their theories to academic staff at universities, who for the most part will ignore and discard emails of that type. Nevertheless, I do occasionally get a positive response from my emailings, although so far no one has been enthusiastic enough about my ideas to make me famous by academic word of mouth. (Note: it's a good idea to keep a record of all the emails you have ever sent, to avoid the embarrassment of sending twice to one person.) The best response I got was from one professor who invited me to give a seminar on my theory. He was in a different country, but as luck would have it, we were planning a trip to visit my parents who lived not so far away in the same country. The seminar was well received (although unfortunately the audience was very small, because our trip had to be in the school holidays, which are also university holidays), but it still doesn't seem to have made me famous in the world of music science.

### 6. Buy a New Domain

If you've discovered a really good new theory, it obviously deserves its own special website, and every special website deserves its own domain name.

The problem with a new website with a new domain name is getting good Google PageRank. When I purchased "whatismusic.info", I naively thought that all I had to do was point to it from my old website, get a few good links from other websites, and the traffic would come rolling in.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, my new website got an extreme and long-lasting case of the "Google Sandbox". There seems to be something about amateur theoretical science websites that makes them unpopular with Google. To this day, a search for "What is Music?" returns entries that link to my theory's website, but no entries for the site itself (at least not in the top hundred results), even though the site has a PageRank of 5.

### 7. Carefully Argue the Points in Favour of Your Theory

Some amateur science websites are so nonsensical that they get attention just for being amusingly daft. They even get stories in Slashdot. If your theory is a serious one, and fails the bogus detection criteria listed above, then it will probably be neither amusing nor interesting, and you won't get into Slashdot. The nearest my "What is Music?" website has ever got to suffering the "Slashdot effect" is an indirect "Digg effect" (and maybe a few indirect "Reddit effects").

### 8. Use Sensible Restrained Fonts and Layout

Some amateur science sites use extreme fonts and bizarre layout to add to the amusement value of their nonsensical content. You won't do that, so it won't help you to get a story on Slashdot.

### 9. Write a Book

Take half a year off work. Write your theory into a book. Self-publish it if you can't get a real publisher to take you seriously. (Since you are an unknown person writing a theory which lacks authority-driven scientific credibility, and your theory probably doesn't cater to the general public's anti-scientific agendas, like free electricity, or life after death, and the material is sufficiently technical that it is not a light Sunday morning read, any rational publisher will realise that hardly anyone is going to buy your book.)

People should take you seriously just because you put so much effort (and money) into writing the book. (Shouldn't they?) So far sales of my book are into double digits, and almost half-way to triple digits. Profits haven't yet covered the cost of printing proof copies.

### 10. Write a Blog ...

And link to your science theory website at the bottom of every single blog entry. Promote your blog entries to vote-driven news sites, if they seem appropriate. (I guarantee that you'll never be able to predict which entries are more popular and which are less popular.)

### 11. Post Links to Your Own Web Pages on Delicious

I'm still waiting for any of my pages – other than the one about doing cube roots in your head, which hit the Digg front page, and which hardly counts as theoretical science – to go into double figures.

### 12. Buy Some Google Ads

I bought some Google Ads for the keyword phrase "What is Music?". Despite a great click-through rate, no book sales eventuated, so it was not commercially justified to continue the ad campaign.

### 13. Print Some Business Cards

I printed some cards with a design based on my book cover, and I hand them to people whenever it seems appropriate.

### 14. Print Some Copies of the Book So You Can Sell Direct

Most of the books are still sitting in the box in the hot water cupboard. A tiny number have been sold to a library supplier, so they might actually end up getting read by a few people. A sad truth is that achieving "bookshop quality" on short print runs is still much harder than some people would like you to think. Despite this, a few copies of the book are sitting in local bookshops. I haven't heard back from any of the bookshop owners yet (either to order more or to return unsold copies), and I'm a bit embarrassed to go back in and ask about it.

## Conclusion

So that's it: there are so many things you can do which might or might not help to promote your amateur scientific theory to the world.

The satisfaction is potentially enormous, because if you succeed in making your theory part of the scientific world view, while still young and alive enough to enjoy the benefits, you will probably be the first person ever to succeed in this way, and you won't just be promoting your own theory, you'll also be advancing the cause of amateur theoretical science more than it has ever been advanced before.

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