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I did my PhD in astrophysics, and I can tell you that the author's name has become synonymous with, shall we say, fringe ideas. I won't say crack pot because he

I did my PhD in astrophysics, and I can tell you that the author's name has become synonymous with, shall we say, fringe ideas. I won't say crack pot because he is a legit tenured astronomer at Harvard, but I have seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count. (Eg, life could have evolved in interstellar space https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613 https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613 ) Its a bit outrageous to claim he's Galileo and the rest of the community is the Church when he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the weakness, and untestability, of his ideas.

xqcgrek 5y ago
Avi Loeb has become a punch line in my circles too
toomim 5y ago
Perhaps you're not aware that "fringe idea" is precisely the type of research that can turn out to usurp the mainstream and disrupt old paradigms. The idea that the earth travels around the sun was once a "fringe idea." > he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the ... untestability, of his ideas. The idea of the earth going around the sun was untestable until Tycho Brahe got enough data and Kepler put it together in a way that could more parsimoniously and accurate predict planetary motion. In other words, the experience that you describe perfectly fits into his argument. You might want to read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" to get the full picture.
- dekhn 5y ago
  The person you're criticizing got a PhD in astrophysics. They definitely would be familiar with all the situations you describe. They've probably also read the wikipedia page for Kuhn's book. The reality is that Loeb made a claim that is not inconsistent with evidence, but is very fanciful. And the alternative hypotheses are all simpler, and explain the observations well enough that I think either Occam's razor or common sense would say that unless Loeb can somehow conjure up some unquestionable data, it's unlikely his claim will ever be verified or falsified and the mainstream will continue to believe (rightly, I think) that we didn't just see an alien corvette. Hoofbeats mean horses, not zebras, unless you're on the African savannah, or something like that.
- Uehreka 5y ago
  I feel like I often see this line of argument on the internet: “Every scientific revolution was unforeseen by the mainstream of its time, you don’t want to miss the next one do you?” But until someone proposes a predictive metric for evaluating which of these “non-mainstream ideas” are good and which are bad, I don’t think this is a fruitful area of inquiry. And that’ll be a tall order, since many of the available methods for determining truth are the very things keeping these ideas out of mainstream scientific journals. And cultural metrics like “It pisses off the establishment, so it must be right!” apply equally to both correct and incorrect non-mainstream ideas.
stephc_int13 5y ago
It is part of our evolution to prioritize our safety within our social group over being right. It can be extremely risky to agree with someone who is labeled as a crack-pot.
chunky1994 5y ago
This is a rather ad hominem attack which does not really refute his point or lead to a good discussion. If we're going to critique someone it does not do them justice to criticize their scientific pedigree just because some of their ideas are fringe (as you rightly pointed out they have sufficient scientific rigor and have published real work that shows they understand the subject matter at an expert level). It would be much more fruitful to critique the ideas in question (as was done in response to his papers) which would be the correct way to go about it.
- dekhn 5y ago
  actually, having gotten a phd and attended many journal clubs, "seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count" is as strong a point as anybody can make. Journal clubs are vicious. Everybody's got their brains and knives out to find any and all flaws in a paper to demolish it (typically once you have found 2-3 major flaws, it's fine to just assume the paper is wrong, or got the right answer by chance). I remember the day we had a journal club on Bell's Theorem papers. We went through the EPR paper and the Bell papers. I argued and argued and argued for a deterministic universe and then somebody asked me if I had heard of the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser experiment (I hadn't; it was published in a Phys Rev Lett a year before, which the physics people read but the biologists didn't). Once I finished up reading that I realized that I had to let go every assumption I had about locality and entanglement and relearn how the universe works through the lens of QM. I am heartened to see that people are still trying out ideas like superdeterminism, but I have to admit, all the data supports the basic QM model of the universe.
  - _pius 5y ago
    actually, having gotten a phd and attended many journal clubs, "seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count" is as strong a point as anybody can make. Journal clubs are vicious. Everybody's got their brains and knives out … actually, having read what you wrote, saying that “journal clubs are vicious … everybody’s got their … knives out” undermines your argument by implying that even good papers will be “roundly critiqued” in that setting, making this about as weak a point as anybody can make. — on further reflection, what I do find to be a strong point but in favor of Loeb’s argument is the fact that it triggered the scientists who wrote this comment and its grandparent to underscore the point of the article by more or less heaping scorn on the author, listing their own credentials, and proceeding to make — forgive me — non sequitur arguments from authority instead of substantively refuting the claims. if this is what happens to a former department chair at Harvard when they question orthodoxy, it indeed does not augur well for less-credentialed researchers, regardless of the merit of their work.
pdonis 5y ago
> life could have evolved in interstellar space This is not a "fringe" idea; it's been a fairly common speculation for decades. What's different about the paper you cite, AFAIK, is the idea that the CMBR during the epoch he describes was the heat source. But there's nothing "fringe" about the CMBR temperature he gives for that epoch; that's standard mainstream cosmology. > he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the weakness, and untestability, of his ideas That's actually what tenure is for--to give people the security to be able to explore all kinds of ideas, many of which appear weak and untestable, and most of which will never pan out, but a few of which will end up creating enormous value. Loeb's ideas may never pan out, but that doesn't make it wrong for him to explore them or publish them or use his tenured position as a secure base from which to do those things. What I find off-putting about the article is the fact that he appears to think that resistance to unconventional ideas is somehow wrong. It's not. It's a part of the same dynamic of scientific progress as his proposing of unconventional ideas. Even ideas that end up proving correct still get resisted at first, and that's the way it has to be; it's not some defect that we could somehow avoid if we were just smart or open-minded enough. If he wants to play the role of "explorer of unconventional ideas", he should be willing to take what comes with that territory.
- chunky1994 5y ago
  Precisely this, he is perfectly within his right to explore these ideas, that can and in fact should be done. His reaction to the reaction of the wider community is rather odd, and has probably caused him more harm than good in the long run.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > What's different about the paper you cite, AFAIK, is the idea that the CMBR during the epoch he describes was the heat source. If the CMBR was the heat source, what was the heat sink? You need a temperature difference to produce negentropy and allow for life. Did life evolve in the shadow of primordial black holes, or what?
  - pdonis 5y ago
    > If the CMBR was the heat source, what was the heat sink? Good question. I haven't read through the paper yet, so I don't know if the author addresses it.
bigbillheck 5y ago
If I'm reading the arxiv search results right, he put out 54 preprints last year in what looks like to me, a non-astronomer, to be a huge variety of different topics.
CodeWriter23 5y ago
> I did my PhD in astrophysics, and I can tell you that the author's name has become synonymous with, shall we say, fringe ideas. Beyond your appeal to authority, you have convincingly confirmed one of the theses of this article.
8bitsrule 5y ago
> Its a bit outrageous to claim he's Galileo and the rest of the community is the Church He's not just talking about physics... he's also talking about archeo and geo and anthro and paleo, etc. ... and there's FAR too much evidence - across the board, and going back 150 years (the list would take up this whole page) - to demonstrate that rocking the orthodox can be dangerous to your career. Say what you will about Oumama, Avi's very very right on this one. And of course it works to the detriment of science. Everytime evidence disappears, or is re-interpreted to defend the faith - and the pseudoscience sword is thrown - we all lose. How many babies died before Ignaz Semmelweis died in an insane asylum?
- canjobear 5y ago
  You are only considering the cases where deviations from orthodoxy turned out to be correct. My guess would be that the vast majority of deviations have turned out to be wrong, like cold fusion, and we don't think about those because they haven't been turned into parables.
hedora 5y ago
The article spends some time arguing against using the existing acceptance of untestable ideas to reject testable alternatives.
nobodyandproud 5y ago
You’re strengthening the point of the article.
- chillacy 5y ago
  Naturally the article (which is an opinion piece written by the author) makes a case in favor of the author.
spfzero 5y ago
So many discoveries were untestable at the time. Most, when it was possible to test for them, were disproven. Some were not. Who can say at the time what the future will prove? When you say "clearly" as to his motives, I might be tempted to ask you for solid evidence of his motives. I'm sure you don't have that. Yet, I believe it is possible you are right. Or not.

xqcgrek 5y ago

Avi Loeb has become a punch line in my circles too

toomim 5y ago

Perhaps you're not aware that "fringe idea" is precisely the type of research that can turn out to usurp the mainstream and disrupt old paradigms. The idea that the earth travels around the sun was once a "fringe idea." > he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the ... untestability, of his ideas. The idea of the earth going around the sun was untestable until Tycho Brahe got enough data and Kepler put it together in a way that could more parsimoniously and accurate predict planetary motion. In other words, the experience that you describe perfectly fits into his argument. You might want to read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" to get the full picture.

dekhn 5y ago
The person you're criticizing got a PhD in astrophysics. They definitely would be familiar with all the situations you describe. They've probably also read the wikipedia page for Kuhn's book. The reality is that Loeb made a claim that is not inconsistent with evidence, but is very fanciful. And the alternative hypotheses are all simpler, and explain the observations well enough that I think either Occam's razor or common sense would say that unless Loeb can somehow conjure up some unquestionable data, it's unlikely his claim will ever be verified or falsified and the mainstream will continue to believe (rightly, I think) that we didn't just see an alien corvette. Hoofbeats mean horses, not zebras, unless you're on the African savannah, or something like that.
Uehreka 5y ago
I feel like I often see this line of argument on the internet: “Every scientific revolution was unforeseen by the mainstream of its time, you don’t want to miss the next one do you?” But until someone proposes a predictive metric for evaluating which of these “non-mainstream ideas” are good and which are bad, I don’t think this is a fruitful area of inquiry. And that’ll be a tall order, since many of the available methods for determining truth are the very things keeping these ideas out of mainstream scientific journals. And cultural metrics like “It pisses off the establishment, so it must be right!” apply equally to both correct and incorrect non-mainstream ideas.

stephc_int13 5y ago

It is part of our evolution to prioritize our safety within our social group over being right. It can be extremely risky to agree with someone who is labeled as a crack-pot.

chunky1994 5y ago

This is a rather ad hominem attack which does not really refute his point or lead to a good discussion. If we're going to critique someone it does not do them justice to criticize their scientific pedigree just because some of their ideas are fringe (as you rightly pointed out they have sufficient scientific rigor and have published real work that shows they understand the subject matter at an expert level). It would be much more fruitful to critique the ideas in question (as was done in response to his papers) which would be the correct way to go about it.

dekhn 5y ago
actually, having gotten a phd and attended many journal clubs, "seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count" is as strong a point as anybody can make. Journal clubs are vicious. Everybody's got their brains and knives out to find any and all flaws in a paper to demolish it (typically once you have found 2-3 major flaws, it's fine to just assume the paper is wrong, or got the right answer by chance). I remember the day we had a journal club on Bell's Theorem papers. We went through the EPR paper and the Bell papers. I argued and argued and argued for a deterministic universe and then somebody asked me if I had heard of the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser experiment (I hadn't; it was published in a Phys Rev Lett a year before, which the physics people read but the biologists didn't). Once I finished up reading that I realized that I had to let go every assumption I had about locality and entanglement and relearn how the universe works through the lens of QM. I am heartened to see that people are still trying out ideas like superdeterminism, but I have to admit, all the data supports the basic QM model of the universe.
- _pius 5y ago
  actually, having gotten a phd and attended many journal clubs, "seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count" is as strong a point as anybody can make. Journal clubs are vicious. Everybody's got their brains and knives out … actually, having read what you wrote, saying that “journal clubs are vicious … everybody’s got their … knives out” undermines your argument by implying that even good papers will be “roundly critiqued” in that setting, making this about as weak a point as anybody can make. — on further reflection, what I do find to be a strong point but in favor of Loeb’s argument is the fact that it triggered the scientists who wrote this comment and its grandparent to underscore the point of the article by more or less heaping scorn on the author, listing their own credentials, and proceeding to make — forgive me — non sequitur arguments from authority instead of substantively refuting the claims. if this is what happens to a former department chair at Harvard when they question orthodoxy, it indeed does not augur well for less-credentialed researchers, regardless of the merit of their work.

pdonis 5y ago

> life could have evolved in interstellar space This is not a "fringe" idea; it's been a fairly common speculation for decades. What's different about the paper you cite, AFAIK, is the idea that the CMBR during the epoch he describes was the heat source. But there's nothing "fringe" about the CMBR temperature he gives for that epoch; that's standard mainstream cosmology. > he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the weakness, and untestability, of his ideas That's actually what tenure is for--to give people the security to be able to explore all kinds of ideas, many of which appear weak and untestable, and most of which will never pan out, but a few of which will end up creating enormous value. Loeb's ideas may never pan out, but that doesn't make it wrong for him to explore them or publish them or use his tenured position as a secure base from which to do those things. What I find off-putting about the article is the fact that he appears to think that resistance to unconventional ideas is somehow wrong. It's not. It's a part of the same dynamic of scientific progress as his proposing of unconventional ideas. Even ideas that end up proving correct still get resisted at first, and that's the way it has to be; it's not some defect that we could somehow avoid if we were just smart or open-minded enough. If he wants to play the role of "explorer of unconventional ideas", he should be willing to take what comes with that territory.

chunky1994 5y ago
Precisely this, he is perfectly within his right to explore these ideas, that can and in fact should be done. His reaction to the reaction of the wider community is rather odd, and has probably caused him more harm than good in the long run.
zozbot234 5y ago
> What's different about the paper you cite, AFAIK, is the idea that the CMBR during the epoch he describes was the heat source. If the CMBR was the heat source, what was the heat sink? You need a temperature difference to produce negentropy and allow for life. Did life evolve in the shadow of primordial black holes, or what?
- pdonis 5y ago
  > If the CMBR was the heat source, what was the heat sink? Good question. I haven't read through the paper yet, so I don't know if the author addresses it.

bigbillheck 5y ago

If I'm reading the arxiv search results right, he put out 54 preprints last year in what looks like to me, a non-astronomer, to be a huge variety of different topics.

CodeWriter23 5y ago

> I did my PhD in astrophysics, and I can tell you that the author's name has become synonymous with, shall we say, fringe ideas. Beyond your appeal to authority, you have convincingly confirmed one of the theses of this article.

8bitsrule 5y ago

> Its a bit outrageous to claim he's Galileo and the rest of the community is the Church He's not just talking about physics... he's also talking about archeo and geo and anthro and paleo, etc. ... and there's FAR too much evidence - across the board, and going back 150 years (the list would take up this whole page) - to demonstrate that rocking the orthodox can be dangerous to your career. Say what you will about Oumama, Avi's very very right on this one. And of course it works to the detriment of science. Everytime evidence disappears, or is re-interpreted to defend the faith - and the pseudoscience sword is thrown - we all lose. How many babies died before Ignaz Semmelweis died in an insane asylum?

canjobear 5y ago
You are only considering the cases where deviations from orthodoxy turned out to be correct. My guess would be that the vast majority of deviations have turned out to be wrong, like cold fusion, and we don't think about those because they haven't been turned into parables.

hedora 5y ago

The article spends some time arguing against using the existing acceptance of untestable ideas to reject testable alternatives.

nobodyandproud 5y ago

You’re strengthening the point of the article.

chillacy 5y ago
Naturally the article (which is an opinion piece written by the author) makes a case in favor of the author.

spfzero 5y ago

So many discoveries were untestable at the time. Most, when it was possible to test for them, were disproven. Some were not. Who can say at the time what the future will prove? When you say "clearly" as to his motives, I might be tempted to ask you for solid evidence of his motives. I'm sure you don't have that. Yet, I believe it is possible you are right. Or not.