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That blog is worth a deep dive, it goes into deep and fascinating detail about how this stuff is measured, as well as the sociology of the field, which has cont
by idlewords 3y ago
That blog is worth a deep dive, it goes into deep and fascinating detail about how this stuff is measured, as well as the sociology of the field, which has continued to add epicycles to dark matter theory to an extent that is starting to make even true believers uncomfortable.
- sebzim4500 3y ago>which has continued to add epicycles to dark matter theory to an extent that is starting to make even true believers uncomfortable. You certainly get this impression from pop-sci, but are there prominent people in the field actually saying this? Obviously sometimes the scientific consensus can be wrong (see the planetary nebula 'debate' for example) but normally contrarians turn out to be incorrect.
- nostrebored 3y agoIn peer review academia, ideas progress when a generation dies. Let’s see what the next twenty years show us.
- sebzim4500 3y agoFrom my layman perspective, either cosmologists enjoy lying down in front of buses or the field advances way faster than they could possibly be dying off.
- nostrebored 3y agoIn areas where prevailing theory lines up with reality. Where it doesn’t, you get situations like dark matter: theoretically consistent extensions with the framework where it intersects with reality or the additions of free variables to make it just so.
- ajkjk 3y agoWell. It is hard to tell from the perspective of a person who is a consistent contrarian what exactly the consensus / mainstream viewpoint is, or how much it is perceived to have cracks in it. You would have to survey people who aren't writing from a point of extreme skepticism to get a better sense of it.