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To what degree are these Nautilus stories based off of the work of a single researcher or lab that does not have broader consensus amongst the research communit

To what degree are these Nautilus stories based off of the work of a single researcher or lab that does not have broader consensus amongst the research community? What's a good way for a layperson to tell if this is a new scientific consensus arrived at after hundreds of researchers come to the same conclusion or a breakthrough result that has shocked the entire research community?

flufluflufluffy 2y ago
> “In 1999, theoretical physicists Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum proposed a wild restructuring of the cosmos” > “The brane-bulk model is a speculative idea for sure, but a fun one.” I feel like it’s communicated pretty clearly that it isn’t some breakthrough finding that everybody agrees on. You could google the mentioned researchers/theories and find out more information if you still weren’t sure.
- patcon 2y ago
  Agreed. Yes, a bit roundabout, but it's pretty wild that we live in a spot in the universe where the distance we need to travel to "confirm plausibility" of a "deep truth of the universe we just heard about" is just to type a few glyphs into a magic box and decide if the person speaking the purported truth has a reputation in the relevant human thought-stuffs. The world we live in is crazy. To know such a thing so easily at an earlier time, would be unfathomable :)
superjan 2y ago
This is not consensus. There are lots of anomalies in what we observe in the cosmos. Here someone links two of those to a speculation about extra dimensions. It would get interesting if they have predictions that can be checked. A promising new theory should fit known observations, explain previously unexplained phenomenon, and predict something testable. That will be difficult to judge as a layperson.
20k 2y ago
Virtually all reasonable alternatives to GR have been strongly ruled out, including theories with large extra dimensions in them. In general, these theories have a some kind of parameter which measures their deviation from GR, which is being squashed to zero. There's also just generally no reason to think there are extra dimensions at all This article brings up neutron stars being slightly larger than expected, but the reality is there's no real expected maximum mass for a neutron star - because the equation of state and physics for neutron star interiors is unknown. The spin, and magnetic field of a neutron star can also serve to increase the maximum mass of a neutron star, which are very hard to model as there are no analytic solutions to a spinning body (nor an oblate body) There are too many approximations in the paper to even come close to saying that the brane model explains this better than standard physics, and there's no reason to think that this event isn't explainable by standard physics

flufluflufluffy 2y ago

> “In 1999, theoretical physicists Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum proposed a wild restructuring of the cosmos” > “The brane-bulk model is a speculative idea for sure, but a fun one.” I feel like it’s communicated pretty clearly that it isn’t some breakthrough finding that everybody agrees on. You could google the mentioned researchers/theories and find out more information if you still weren’t sure.

patcon 2y ago
Agreed. Yes, a bit roundabout, but it's pretty wild that we live in a spot in the universe where the distance we need to travel to "confirm plausibility" of a "deep truth of the universe we just heard about" is just to type a few glyphs into a magic box and decide if the person speaking the purported truth has a reputation in the relevant human thought-stuffs. The world we live in is crazy. To know such a thing so easily at an earlier time, would be unfathomable :)

superjan 2y ago

This is not consensus. There are lots of anomalies in what we observe in the cosmos. Here someone links two of those to a speculation about extra dimensions. It would get interesting if they have predictions that can be checked. A promising new theory should fit known observations, explain previously unexplained phenomenon, and predict something testable. That will be difficult to judge as a layperson.

20k 2y ago

Virtually all reasonable alternatives to GR have been strongly ruled out, including theories with large extra dimensions in them. In general, these theories have a some kind of parameter which measures their deviation from GR, which is being squashed to zero. There's also just generally no reason to think there are extra dimensions at all This article brings up neutron stars being slightly larger than expected, but the reality is there's no real expected maximum mass for a neutron star - because the equation of state and physics for neutron star interiors is unknown. The spin, and magnetic field of a neutron star can also serve to increase the maximum mass of a neutron star, which are very hard to model as there are no analytic solutions to a spinning body (nor an oblate body) There are too many approximations in the paper to even come close to saying that the brane model explains this better than standard physics, and there's no reason to think that this event isn't explainable by standard physics