Heribert Illig's Theory of Invented Time

This almost five-year-old post has gotten a lot of clicks too. Might as well re-blog it to make it easier for people to find. For what it's worth, I actually regret my flippant tone (as I admit in one of the comments). I might not agree with Illig if I did know his work better, but the fact is I hardly know it at all. As for the word "crank," I used it in the sense that Charles Pierce did in his book Idiot America, as a kind of backhanded honorific: "A pioneer gazing at the frontier of his own mind the way the actual pioneers looked out over the prairie....Very often, it was [the American crank] that provided the conflicts by which the consensus changed."