[ahwvd37js]

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 ) 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.

[chunky1994]

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.

[antognini]

(Chiming in as someone else with a PhD in astronomy.)

Eh... It's true that strictly following the rules of logic you can't disprove these ideas with an ad hominem. But as a researcher you only have so much time, and oftentimes the errors can be subtle. If a researcher has gotten a reputation for publishing a string of outlandish papers that fall apart under scrutiny, it's just not worth the time to go into them and figure out why exactly they're wrong.

One of the reasons this guy has gotten a reputation for himself is because he keeps publishing sensational results, uses his credentials to gin up media interest, the press picks it up, and then the rest of the community is forced to engage with the ideas to the outside world. The way it would ordinarily work is that he would submit his ideas to a journal, a few reviewers would spend the time finding all the holes in the ideas and either the paper would be published with the sensational claims toned down, or it would be rejected. In my view, the main point of peer review is to make sure that all the obvious problems in a paper have been fixed before it gets published so that most researchers don't waste their time trying to understand garbage. But he engages in a sort of end-run around the peer review process.

[dekhn]

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]

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.

[dekhn]

the only good papers are the ones that survive multiple rounds of critiquing from a wide range of experts. Even great papers have problems, the point of journal clubs is to argue out all the varying reasonable lines (not the fringe ones) of ways the paper could be making a false conclusion (typically due to bad experimental technique or mistaken data analysis).

[mannykannot]

How would that have worked out in the example you have given, prior to a successful delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment? Would Bell's theorem have been consigned to the scrap heap? Would delayed-choice quantum eraser experiments then have been performed when they were?

By these standards, Darwin should have been rejected on the grounds of his faulty model of biological inheritance.

There needs to be some slack, because sometimes critics are more convincing than they are right.

[dekhn]

No, the point of delayed choice quantum eraser is that it's the first really simple experimental setup that non-physicists can understand, and see how it violates the simple assumption of classical physics. It's sort of the Hershey Chase experiment, but for QM. If DCQE hadn't been done, Bell would have been fine, as the last of the no-loophole experiments are being run now.

[mcint]

To compress further, journal clubs [war game a paper's methods, results, and conclusions], so to speak.

[chunky1994]

Again, there is nothing wrong in critiquing his scientific ideas.

Being generous even if he's flat out wrong about Oumuamua, stating that "he has fringe ideas" as a response to an article about the reaction to fringe/fanciful ideas in science is doing him a disservice and not really discussing the article at hand or the points contained therein.

Let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[jacquesm]

What if there is no baby?

[chunky1994]

Then indeed there would be nothing to take issue with. However to make the analogy extremely tenuous (at best), one needs to show that there is no baby, rather than just claiming there isn't.

[jacquesm]

I think in most cases the onus to prove that there is a baby is on the one making the claim that this is so. Besides the impossibility of proving a negative.

[ironmagma]

Social acceptance is not validity. Social rejection is not invalidity. Do we need to repeat it? Social acceptance is not validity. Social rejection is not invalidity.

> Everybody's got their brains and knives out to find any and all flaws in a paper to demolish it

Okay, what are the flaws then? Enough hand-waving, let's talk actual issues.

[somewhereoutth]

Oh it's all a bit more nuanced than that. The right kind of social acceptance (i.e. within a sub-society structured to seek validity) is a very good indication of that validity. That is why papers, journals, etc even exist.

[ironmagma]

It's a good proxy, but like all metrics, it's only accurate to a degree. There have been perfectly valid statements that were socially rejected, but that did not make them invalid, unless we are using a fun definition of "valid."

[geofft]

> Social acceptance is not validity. Social rejection is not invalidity.

Yes it is, otherwise the whole scientific method falls flat on its face. If you cannot expect that a person will identify valid and invalid ideas, what's the point of doing experiments and having people write up their research? If you cannot expect that a group of people will identify valid and invalid ideas, what's the point of peer review? If you cannot expect that the community of scientists will identify valid and invalid ideas, what's the point of doing science?

On what basis do you, personally, believe that the earth moves around the sun? For me, I believe it because the scientific community accepts it. Do you believe that it is at least possible that the sun really does move around the earth and the scientific community happens to be wrong?

What do you believe the speed of light to be? Did you just read it in a textbook? Who published the textbook? How did they know?

That said, yes, the process of human evaluation is very slow and very much prone to errors. But it fundamentally works.

[ironmagma]

This is why science is not the same as truth. It's a method of obtaining truth, but it has major flaws. That said, it's the best method that exists. That does not mean it is perfect however. There exists, barring relativistic notions of state, a true state of the universe, much of which will never be measured or known by science. This should not be surprising.

> For me, I believe it because the scientific community accepts it.

There should be a much stronger reason: that the evidence is available, and not only has it been analyzed by other people, but it should have been analyzed by you as well. If we just accept that others have done the analysis, this is how major mistakes stay undiscovered for decades. (See the problem of the phantom reference.)

> Who published the textbook? How did they know?

Yes, we have to trust that most people are acting competently and with good intentions, because it's physically and emotionally impossible to investigate everything, but for no other reason. We should do our best to look in to every claim, especially ones that seem suspicious, because that diligence is what keeps science moving forward.

> the process of human evaluation is very slow and very much prone to errors. But it fundamentally works.

I agree, but that only holds true if people are actually doing the work of performing those evaluations.

[throwamon]

> it should have been analyzed by you as well

This is nonsense. I'd love to, but I haven't literally dedicated my entire life to this specific topic as so many have, I don't believe I am smarter than the average scientist, I don't believe I can find flaws that the average scientist would have found, and I don't have enough time to test every single hypothesis that's accepted by the scientific community and makes its way into my life. I'm just going to do what most scientists do and focus on what I enjoy doing, and if that doesn't result in me completely revolutionizing physics so be it.

This "epistemological DIY" really only works for you if 1) you want to limit yourself to "proving" that apples and feathers fall at the same speed using highschool mechanics or 2) you're extremely arrogant and/or delusional.

[fatsdomino001]

Are you suggesting that the scientific method is actually a popularity contest? Seems dubious.

[geofft]

Yes. Who else besides the community of scientists is supposed to interpret the evidence and decide whether the earth really goes around the sun? The Pope?

[jfengel]

No worries: superdeterminism is perfectly valid QM. You can have that cake and eat it too.

What you lose out is the ability to know what that determinism is. You do the experiment and the universe really does know if the electron is destined to go left or right, and has ever since the Big Bang.

But you cannot possibly. Superdeterminism forbids you from knowing beyond a certain amount. There will always be a minimum uncertainty to you. (That's distinct from Heisenberg uncertainty, but it's related.) The only way to know which direction the electron goes is to do it. And having done it, you can't meaningfully talk about the alternative, which would be like trying to talk about what would happen if 3 were equal to 5.

So, if that's a thing you can live with, then you can have superdeterminism and be happy about it. QM will back you, and so will every QM experiment.

[skissane]

> 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.

Here's what I don't get about "superdeterminism" – what it is "super-" about it? I read an explanation of "superdeterminism", and it just reads like plain old determinism to me. Any convinced determinist is going to say that of course determinism includes the human will among the things that are determined. Philosophers such as Spinoza or the Baron d'Holbach were already saying exactly that long before any physicist had thought up the term "superdeterminism".

[jfengel]

"Determinism" covers a wide range of possibilities. Superdeterminism is more specific: every single piddling bit of apparent quantum randomness is actually already stored in some vast lookup table somewhere.

And everything else in the universe leading up to it, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, is constructed to lead up to that. To get that exact measurement from the device, you needed to set it up in that exact way at that exact time. The amount of time it took the clerk to count your change when you bought ice cream thus is a crucial part of that experiment. It was coded up at the beginning of time precisely so that the experiment could occur to give you that result.

Ordinary determinism can be a bit more lax about the specifics. It doesn't have to be, but it could be. It could focus on some other time scale: "It doesn't matter whether you pick chocolate or vanilla, you're still getting hit by a truck on the way out of the ice cream shop, so you get to choose what flavor you're enjoying when you get flattened". Superdeterminism denies that, right back to the beginning.

So it really is plain old determinism, but with a specific focus on, well, specificities.

[skissane]

I'm still wondering, if we look at the classical determinists in the history of philosophy, such as Spinoza, d'Holbach, Laplace, etc – were they superdeterminists or "subdeterminists"?

If the mainstream of historical determinism is in fact superdeterminism, then the term is a bit misleading, because it makes it sound like physicists are coming up with some new idea rather than just restating one that has been around for centuries (maybe even millennia).

[nobodyandproud]

There were at least two HN posts recently that posits that determinism is far from dead.

In fact, a central position point was that intuition, preference, and science’s unreasonable bias towards elegance has held back physics for a century.

Edit: Found the most recent one https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2020.00139...

[jiggawatts]

> Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser experiment

That paper is often misinterpreted. Its breathless conclusions don't look so special once you consider the experiment from the MWI perspective. Notably, they don't talk about the detection intensity much, even though it is quite important to the interpretation. Coincidence counters aren't white cards, and don't work the same! Yet, people interpret the paper as if the experiment would behave identically with an ordinary projector screen as the detector. It wouldn't, and that's the rub...

You too have been indoctrinated into the QM orthodoxy, and you've failed to realise that memorising catechisms might win you accolades with your peers, but doesn't necessarily help you understand the physical universe.

If you peel back modern QM, you'll find it is a very tall Jenga tower wobbling around in the wind, held up by more magical thinking that real science. The experiments it is based on have a very narrow scope, and those caveats and limitations are brushed aside by adherents.

People stating things like instant action at a distance despite special relativity being a thing for a century are just the same as a Christian priest ignoring geology and stating that God created the Earth in seven days. Self-contradictory notions such as the wave-particle duality are no different to the catholic concept of the holy trinity being one god. Giving up your devotion to rational thought is how you prove your devotion to the faith. The greater the nonsense, the stronger the proof of your willingness to be a team member.

[vimacs2]

Can you elaborate on the "detection intensity"? Genuinely curious as I haven't heard a modern critique of QM before and would like to learn the other side of the argument.

[jiggawatts]

So the issue with coincidence counters in general is that they count... coincidences. Only. Nothing else.

White cards measure total photons.

You can fool yourself very easily by ignoring the total intensity of the photons per second measured with coincidence counters. E.g.: going from some distribution at intensity of "1 unit" to some other distribution at intensities of 1/2, 1/4, etc... might all mean different things. Essentially the detector is acting as a filter, "picking out" subsets of the signal. The drop in intensity is due to the filtering being highly selective.

However, if you read through many of these papers, including the quantum eraser paper, you'll note that they normalise the measurements so that they all look like they have unit intensity. This is misleading, because it looks like something is being changed ("erased"), but in reality its just that the experiment is being set up to increasingly filter to smaller and smaller subsets of the photon stream.

Looking at this through the lens of the many worlds interpretation (MWI) completely removes the mystery, making this a very boring and ordinary experiment that reveals nothing new.

Yet, "classical" QM theorists insist on breathlessly promulgating it as clear evidence of "quantum weirdness". It isn't weird. It's just purposefully misinterpreted to increase the mysticism.

This is directly comparable to the behaviour of priests and holy men. Religions wouldn't have as many ardent adherents if there was no mystery. You gotta have the mystery! The magic! The miracles!

Would Christianity be as popular if Jesus hadn't healed the sick and came back from the dead himself?

Would QM get as much funding if it was just some boring maths?

[geofft]

An ad hominem attack is when you criticize the person making the argument instead of criticizing the argument.

The comment above is criticizing the argument: the argument is "My ideas are being unfairly dismissed by the scientific community," and a valid counterargument is "No, your ideas are being fairly dismissed by the scientific community."

Yes, an obvious implication of that counterargument is "The person making the argument is the sort of person who publishes ideas that are regularly dismissed by the scientific community," but the strength of the counterargument does not rest on discrediting the speaker as a person - it rests on directly refuting the claim being made.

Or, in other words, if I were making the argument "Prof. Loeb's ideas are being unfairly dismissed by the scientific community," the exact same counterargument could be made against my argument. The fundamental reason an ad hominem is fallacious is that an argument's validity doesn't depend on who's making it. In this case, the argument is equally prone to refutation regardless of who's making it.

[chunky1994]

> I can tell you that the author's name has become synonymous with, shall we say, fringe ideas.

This person has bad ideas (going further, this person is synonymous with bad ideas and therefore only has bad 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

Some of his ideas have been proven to be bad although he has an expert understanding of the subject.

> Its a bit outrageous to claim he's Galileo ... against the weakness, and untestability, of his ideas.

This person is making a spurious analogy because Galileo's idea was a good idea and his ideas are bad ideas (some of which have been proven to be bad ideas).

It is ad-hominem in nature because GP is disposing of the content of the article by claiming the above analogy is spurious by pre-supposing that Loeb only has bad ideas.

There is nothing to be read here about the reaction of the scientific community to unconventional ideas which is the content of the article, especially if you pre-suppose that Avi Leob only has bad ideas and therefore was rightfully dismissed by the scientific community (which is what the GP is doing).

If the argument was in fact about whether or not Loeb's ideas are being unfairly dismissed (or in the weaker case, rightfully receiving pushback), that would directly be talking about the content of the article and generate a good discussion. (In fact I disagree with what Loeb is saying in the article and have posted a comment as such below)

[geofft]

The content of the article is specifically using the alleged unfair dismissal of Loeb's ideas to argue the broader point that the scientific community unfairly dismisses unconventional ideas in general. I agree with you that the counterargument above is not validly refuting the article as a whole, but it is definitely making a non-fallacious refutation of that specific sub-argument.

Put another way: the sense of the counterargument is not that this opinion piece itself is a fringe/crackpot idea, which is what you'd expect if the counterargument was simply "This is from a crackpot." In fact, it's not dismissing the content of the article at all. The counterargument is admitting the logical coherence of this opinion piece - that if, among other things, Prof. Loeb's works are unfairly dismissed, then it demonstrates a closed-mindedness in the scientific community - and attacking the premise by saying that the works in question were in fact fairly dismissed.

[chunky1994]

We are in agreement that the article is broader than that specific point. I disagree that GP was making the argument you are making in your second paragraph (or if he was, it was needlessly circuitous and somewhat mean).

To demonstrate that, supposing that the author of the article was Einstein and he had written the exact same content but instead substituting relativity for Oumamama and reaction to such by Abraham etc. the GP's comment would have no substance, but the content and argument of the article at hand would be little changed.

[pdonis]

> 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.

[zozbot234]

> 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?

[est31]

Life doesn't need a temperature difference. It only needs some material in one energy state whose transition to a lower energy state it can catalyze. Say converting visible light to infrared radiation using photosynthesis, or rusting iron [1], etc. The CMBR with 0-100 C provides for the environment that allows for the molecules to be stable without life needing to take any precautions.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron-oxidizing_bacteria

[antognini]

No, the temperature differential is necessary. If life is consuming some food in a high energy state, converting it to a low energy state, and then using the difference for itself, it needs to put that waste energy somewhere once it's done with it. It can do this if the bath is at a lower temperature. But if the bath is at the higher temperature (i.e., if there's no differential) then the organism will be unable to convert the food into the lower energy state.

Strictly speaking, the important thing is to have a differential in entropy. The processes of life produce entropy, and that entropy has to go somewhere else if the organism is to live. But a differential in entropy implies a differential in temperature (though you may have to be careful about how you define temperature since there are different kinds of temperature).

[est31]

Consider everything in the universe being 40 deg C, including all matter, the CMB, etc. Consider now an organism that eats some food and releases the energy inside that food. It converts this energy into heat and i now 42 deg C. Suddenly there is a differential again. Sure, it can get rid of the heat easier if the differential were larger, but it can get rid of it at all, due to the existence of a differential.

[pdonis]

> 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.

[pdonis]

It looks like he talks about "thermal gradients" in section 3 of the paper.

[chunky1994]

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.

[8bitsrule]

> 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]

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.

[CodeWriter23]

> 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.

[stephc_int13]

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.

[toomim]

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]

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]

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.

[bigbillheck]

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.

[spfzero]

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.

[hedora]

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

[nobodyandproud]

You’re strengthening the point of the article.

[chillacy]

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