5 ms·

I've seen a couple of articles about this guy recently and they both struck me as weirdly credulous given the apparently complete lack of evidence supporting hi

• ChrisSD 8y ago
  After all the big discoveries (and personalities) of the 20th century, physics has seemed to be relatively quiet lately. So people are eager for the next big and dramatic change to our understanding. And that's what George Chapline is offering the pop sci press.
  • diegoperini 8y ago
    If what LIGO achieved is not loud enough for the 21st century, then we are probably doomed. It is a NEW kind of telescope that has not even been utilized for 1% of its potential. PS: I'm not arguing with your statement, you have all the right to think that way. Maybe even people who lived during Einstein's earlier times thought the same for their previous century.
    • HalcyonicStorm 8y ago
      I would argue that one of the reasons why physics news has been quiet is because the state of the field has moved beyond a lay person's understanding at more than a high level.
      • doombolt 8y ago
        If you can't explain your idead to your janitor, you don't really grasp them yourself.
        • HalcyonicStorm 8y ago
          I agree with your statement, but we're discussing physics reporting in the news. They are aiming for eyeballs and ad clicks, not for emanating understanding of the topic.
          • doombolt 8y ago
            One can read Wikipedia as well
        • JackFr 8y ago
          OTOH... "Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize." -- Richard Feynman
        • admax88q 8y ago
          The thing I hate about this statement is it gives people an excuse to ignore things they don't understand at first glace by claiming the presenter doesn't fully understand it so it's probably not true. Its a good standard to hold yourself to when explaining things to others. But not one to hold others to when explaining to you.
          • whatshisface 8y ago
            "Be liberal in what you accept but conservative in what you generate."
            • diegoperini 8y ago
              Even that is up to debate. https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/8/114933-the-robustness-principle-reconsidered/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/8/114933-the-robustness-...
        • vnorilo 8y ago
          If you can successfully eli5, that indicates thorough mastery of a subject. Stuff on the bleeding edge of physics can be grasped by a limited group of experts, but nobody might have developed the 10th dan sensei level understanding yet. Maybe in 50 years we'll have great explanations of black holes and quantum mech that laypeople can grok.
      • danarmak 8y ago
        Few non-physicists understand quantum mechanics even at a high level, but that certainly hasn't stopped journalists over the last hundred years. Whatever the new frontier is, I'm sure the popular media could cover it in technobabble just fine if they wanted to.
    • maze-le 8y ago
      Yes, and there are also neutrino telescopes. I wait for the detection of an high energy neutrino event from beyond the CMBR. I think the opportunity, our understanding of physics and technology give us right now are immense. The fact that general relativity and quantum mechanics havent been reconciled by now only means that this is probably a very hard thing to do. But it doesn't mean that 'phyics is dead'. [0]: https://icecube.wisc.edu/ https://icecube.wisc.edu/
      • bacon_waffle 8y ago
        > I wait for the detection of an high energy neutrino event from beyond the CMBR My (non-physicist) understanding of this, is that neutrinos from then will be quite low energy now, due to the expansion of the universe(?), and so not detectable by the method IceCube uses. There is a minimum energy required, in part because the charged particles generated by the neutrino interaction need to be moving faster than the speed of light in water (or whatever the detection medium is) for there to be Cherenkov radiation generated and then detected. That said, I would love to see a response from a more knowledgeable person!
        • whatshisface 8y ago
          The neutrinos may start out with any energy, whatever produced them will determine that. To cross the great expanse of time and redshifting due to expansion and still have a lot of energy left, they would simply have to start out with a whole lot more. Any neutrino event that we could detect from that far away would probably be massive anyways, so maybe we'll see something.
    • rsynnott 8y ago
      I think people have been predicting gravity wave telescopes for so long that when one finally showed up, it wasn’t that exciting to the press.
    • bsder 8y ago
      > If what LIGO achieved is not loud enough for the 21st century, then we are probably doomed. The problem is that it is REALLY hard to describe to the layman just how excruciatingly difficult it is to do what LIGO does. I like to think that I know a thing or two about electrical engineering and quantum mechanics, and even I probably don't get just exactly how amazing LIGO is.
      • njarboe 8y ago
        The original paper on the first detection of a black hole merger by LIGO is really great[1]. It's even open access. Much of the paper is accessible to someone at the freshman physics level. Download the pdf as it is in a much nicer format than the online version. [1]https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102 https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11...
      • nikofeyn 8y ago
        kip thorne's talks are really good about explaining ligo's importance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhp4GBr1Zg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhp4GBr1Zg
• joe-collins 8y ago
  At least at the pop-science level, his ideas connect a lot of dots. He'd neatly resolve the weirdness and mystery of black holes, their jets, their information paradox, and dark energy. It feels good. Whether or not any of it makes a lick of sense once you start actually crunching numbers is another question. The lack of interest from other scientists leaves me skeptical (even if I'm silently enamored of the neatness myself).
  • Semiapies 8y ago
    Yep. I've been hearing mentions of this guy's theories from pop science publications for years even though, as the article says, "The idea has found no support in the astrophysical community—over the last decade, Chapline’s papers on this topic have garnered only single-digit citations." The pop science press is depressingly bad.
    • philipov 8y ago
      "Dark Energy Star" is pure marketing speak, and the pop science press loves sexy terms like that, whereas to serious physicists a hyphy phrase like that is going to throw all sorts of red flags, the same way an engineer would be appalled by someone boasting about Chaos Engineering. It's usually referred to as the Cosmological Constant instead.
    • walru 8y ago
      I would much rather live in a world where this person may be heard than likewise. "Don't take refugee in the false security of consensus." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY
  • czbond 8y ago
    Never trust credentials for "leaps and bounds thinking". Trust credentials for incremental, linear thinking....
  • econnor 8y ago
    There's a certain nominative-deterministic inevitability to all this. There are these things called black holes that apparently are a full of a lot of stuff and aren't completely understood. And there's this mysterious stuff called dark matter that has to exist but seems to be hiding. My mom would be yelling "'Come on guys, join the dots". And who would blame her.
• empath75 8y ago
  > The idea has found no support in the astrophysical community They put it pretty bluntly in the article.
  • chc 8y ago
    That's true, but the article as a whole still felt weirdly credulous to me. The reminders that this is a complete flight of fancy work out to like one or two clauses in a 1400-word article that devotes a lot of room to detailing his theory and repeatedly pointing out that it could theoretically be proven true someday. To this article's credit, though, it is more measured than others. Just as a whole it seems weird to me how much attention such a seemingly insignificant hypothesis is getting.
    • franciscrick1 8y ago
      Did you want them to say "This guy is a crank!" several hundred times to fill up space? How are we ever supposed to learn anything new if everything is run through your hypothetical credibility filter first?
  • Semiapies 8y ago
    It's just an aside they throw out before going into how This One Maverick's ideas are so exciting. And ultimately, they're still writing yet another article on the idea because it sells.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• gcbw2 8y ago
  theoretic physics stoped being the 'weird-what-if-from-academia' to be the 'weird-what-if' in general
• jboggan 8y ago
  It's interesting, original, and most importantly falsifiable. There will be real differences between the jets predicted by his theory and the commonly accepted model, I'm excited to see it tested. There's a moment at which every scientific theory is only thought credulous by a single person.
  • everdev 8y ago
    > There's a moment at which every scientific theory is only thought credulous by a single person. Agreed, but the same is also true of any conspiracy theory or half-baked idea. The theory should be evaluated on it's merits, not the number of supporters. And theories that can be tested are always better than ones that can't IMO.
    • mrpgraae 8y ago
      The thing about conspiracy theories is that they are usually not falsifiable, at least not to their proponents. As jboggan mentions, this theory is both falsifiable and testable in practice. I think it's important that there are always a few people in science who go against the mainstream, as long as they do actual science, so falsifiable and testable theories.
• nabla9 8y ago
  Robert B. Laughlin (Nobel physicist mentioned in the article) has really unique viewpoint towards emergence vs reductionism. His book "A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down" is layman explanation of his ideas. Here is one of his recent papers: Emergent Relativity https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0302028.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0302028.pdf