3 ms·
This guy completely lost it. Nobody in the field treats him seriously because he publishes like 1 first paper a month with all sorts of speculations and shoddy
by sega_sai 3y ago
This guy completely lost it. Nobody in the field treats him seriously because he publishes like 1 first paper a month with all sorts of speculations and shoddy science.
Sure when his first claims were distributed about Oumuamua, people were at least somewhat accepting that may be plausible, but then he continued pushing in that direction, as well as trying to be in the media all the time.
Realistically I think many scientists just don't care about Loeb. Maybe a small fraction are still interested in disproving his claims.
- dr_dshiv 3y agoI wish more scientists were like this—a little out there while being highly enthusiastic, technical and evidence driven. Evidence will eventually bear out the bad hypotheses. The worse crime is creating fearful career scientists.
- lo_zamoyski 3y agoFWIW his blog post struck me as narcissistic in tone. A martyr gazing at the stars, assaulted by the world. And the bit about grad students too terrified to pursue research because of some ostensibly bad criticism on the internet is comical. You cannot become a good academic if all it takes is a little criticism from somewhere to deflate you, if you need constant validation to function. If you do, you will become, like many academics and people in general, a conformist out of fear of losing approval. This is not to valorize contrarians (who still operate in terms of what others think), but to say that an academic must be honest and pursue the truth and be able to defend his arguments against or ignore bad criticism and concede valid criticism. If you cannot survive the meat grinder of criticism, if you lack the spine and the thick skin, you won’t flourish. It’s not for you, at least not until you mature.