The NPA's website tells us that the group is devoted "to broad-ranging, fully open-minded criticism, at the most fundamental levels, of the often irrational and unrealistic doctrines of modern physics and cosmology; and to the ultimate replacement of these doctrines by much sounder ideas".

Very little unites this disparate group of amateurs - there are as many theories as members - except for a common belief that "something is drastically wrong in contemporary physics and cosmology, and that a new spirit of open-mindedness is desperately needed". They are unanimous in the view that mainstream physics has been hijacked by a kind of priestly caste who speak a secret language - in other words, mathematics - that is incomprehensible to most human beings. They claim that the natural world speaks a language which all of us can, or should be able to, understand. Rather than having their dialogue with the world mediated by "experts", NPA members insist that they can commune with it directly and describe its patterns in accessible terms.

Regardless of the credibility of this claim, it is sociologically significant. In their militantly egalitarian opposition to what they see as a physics elite, NPA members mirror the stance of Martin Luther and other pioneers of the Protestant Reformation. Luther was rebelling against the abstractions of the Latin-writing Catholic priesthood, and one of his most revolutionary moves was to translate the Bible into vernacular German. Just as Luther declared that all people could read the book of God for themselves, so the NPA today asserts that all of us ought to be able to read the book of nature for ourselves.

Intriguingly more at: Outsider physicists and the oh-my-god particle - opinion - 24 December 2011 - New Scientist