You cannot do the experiments without math. We both know this. We must have a predicted value for an experiment. We must use math to create the experimental apparatus. We must use math to examine our results and to look for acceptable error bars.

Education is absolutely a finite resource. We have finite universities and finite educators. The lifetime required to attain an education is also a finite resource, as you simply cannot have a workable society while also requiring that everyone get a PhD in anything they have an "idea" about.

Limitations about. We must make choices against them. We could do quite a lot of particle research should we decide to disassemble the solar system and re-purpose it into an accelerator, yet I will gently suggest that this proposal will not achieve much traction.

However, knock yourself out. You can manage to join IRC and fight against classism by spending your time working to support the ideas of people whom you will not call cranks. Prove me wrong by doing it for the next ten years. Time isn't a finite resource, right?

You still will not engage with the most basic thrust of this: we cannot entertain everyone's ideas simultaneously and decisions must be made as to which are examined first. Anything but that is some form of -ism because you have a selection criteria that might ignore an idea.

So we are left having to come up with some kind of heuristic to examine some ideas and not others. This is the scientific method. Is your idea testable? And if you claim it is, what values will we measure that are different from what currently exists?

Propose your alternate method. Then, tell me how you are going to exclude the people who, say, want to glue crystals to engine exteriors to improve the combustion efficiency, without anything seeming even a trifle discriminatory.

Is there perhaps a way to separate the behavior of someone from your term for them in general? There could be "cranky behavior", but perhaps these are otherwise normal people who are just amateurs in the field of physics (or other subject) who don't yet know their hand from their foot.

Might there be a constructive way to benefit from the comments provided by cranky behavior? I'm not suggesting taking direction from folks with no experience, but perhaps cataloging the comments on this IRC channel to see what the distribution is.

Perhaps don't think too hard about the solutions proposed in these comments, but instead what problem areas do they fall into. And then from that perhaps there's an opportunity, if not for new research, for creating some better synthesized educational resource that might help people get up to speed faster.

That will not help. I am talking about people who refused to draw even the most basic diagrams or perform high school algebra. Also, any result or experiment leading to their pet idea not working was immediately rejected. It's little more than "someone else needs to do the heavy lifting to prove me right." They aren't going to do anything more than restate their idea, again and again, and then be angry that nobody is rushing to have large universities working on prototypes.

John Baez has a lovely "Crackpot Index" that is an excellent jumping off point for a description of your average crank contact. It would be different for IRC but not dissimilar.

I know you're trying to give people the benefit of the doubt, but experience hasn't shown that it is worth it or even feasible.

As I said before, even the patent office has given up on perpetual motion machines.