3 ms·
> What is Loeb's reputation among astrophysicists? Not an astrophysicist but several friends are. The consensus seems to be that he was a good scientist at on
by consilient 3y ago
> What is Loeb's reputation among astrophysicists?
Not an astrophysicist but several friends are. The consensus seems to be that he was a good scientist at one point but has turned into a sensationalist attention monger.
> He's written "over 800 scientific papers". Is that... a good thing in his field?
He's been an author on over 800 scientific papers: that includes his work, work he's been a significant collaborator on, and student work he's supervised. 800 is a lot for someone his age but not unheard of. People care much more about paper quality (or less charitably, citation count) than quantity.
- Pompidou 3y agoIn France we have Didier Raoult : he was a very good scientist until he became mad. And he has also published a gigantic amount of papers (with a lot of crap...). Theses two people look very similar according to me...
- dguest 3y agoAuthorship can be weird. A physicist on a big LHC project will be the author on over 1000 papers after a decade or so (they average around 100 papers a year). In all likelihood they haven't read the vast majority of them, and have contributed directly to around 1% of them. High energy physicists got sick of bickering over who was on the list and added everyone who had contributed to the experiment infrastructure. There are pros and cons: it's nice to be on all the papers but it's confusing to figure out who did what.
- consilient 3y agoYes, high energy physics probably has the highest author counts of any field. Astro papers average ~5-10, iirc.