I once spent a week in utter mania believing I had shown the speed of light wasn’t constant. It was a living hell and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I will try to set out my experience below in a reflective way so hopefully you and those interested can better understand how this can occur from someone that has lived it.

Firstly I want to say that the cognitive dissonance required to maintain such a delusion in the face of contrary reason is a monumental process in sheer brain power and very painful. You have to overcome every logical hurdle with numerous more crackpot theories, which in turn require more crackpot theories to justify, leading to exponential growth in craziness or at least this occurred in my case I think. The best way I can describe it is that while your holding onto your belief in these ideas it is like you’ve been shot and are bleeding out, but the blood is your sanity. I say this in the hope that you understand these people are in a lot of pain and that if you work in the sciences and are approached by a crackpot try to get them into the hands of a mental health professional, you will be doing them a lot more good than if you disprove them as they aren’t going to accept or understand the mathematics you show them. Just like if you were to show a creationist evidence of the earths age.

I say recovering crackpot as I still have moments of mania where I start obsessing over certain topics/ideas and think non stop about them, normally about a day before I come back to normality. Fortunately I am now in the position whereby my logical mental faculties are able overcome this and point out, you’ve been here before, and your almost certainly wrong, and if you are right it is probably something simple figured out first in the 1600s etc without a computer.