The humiliating truth behind Harvard astronomer's alien spherules(bigthink.com)
bigthink.com
The humiliating truth behind Harvard astronomer's alien spherules
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/truth-harvard-astronomer-alien-spherules/
47 comments
Yeah, even if the hypothesis is refuted, why is this humiliating? This isn't kindergarten, its not like having your hypothesis refuted gives you cooties. No moral culpability accrues to you.
What's humiliating is what's happening in Psychology right now. Humiliating is having to retract your paper because you made up the results. Humiliating is losing your career because you are a big fat fraud.
What's humiliating is what's happening in Psychology right now. Humiliating is having to retract your paper because you made up the results. Humiliating is losing your career because you are a big fat fraud.
What is humiliating is to be seen failing to learn from elementary criticisms by longtime professionals.
In this, Loeb is different from promoters of the end-Pleistocene comet strike in North America, where all the criticisms were obviously specious and tendentious. In that case it was the critics who were humiliated. E.g., Boslough insisted, both circularly and speciously, that the historical rarity of comet strikes proves that no such recent strike could have occurred.
Loeb is different from promoters of the 130,000 year old mastodon butchery site in San Diego, where all the criticisms published after were already fully refuted in the original paper.
In this, Loeb is different from promoters of the end-Pleistocene comet strike in North America, where all the criticisms were obviously specious and tendentious. In that case it was the critics who were humiliated. E.g., Boslough insisted, both circularly and speciously, that the historical rarity of comet strikes proves that no such recent strike could have occurred.
Loeb is different from promoters of the 130,000 year old mastodon butchery site in San Diego, where all the criticisms published after were already fully refuted in the original paper.
> failing to learn from elementary criticisms
Well, the ability to conform to the conventional wisdom of the field isn't necessarily a skill which promotes scientific progress.
You know what skill does? The ability to ask the right question. And Dr. Loeb asked himself, "hmm....could I collect material from an interstellar meteorite if I trawl the seabed with a magnetic sled?"
Now I think that is a pretty good question. The answer may be "Yes" or the answer may be "No". But either way, it's a great question, which apparently nobody else asked, let alone put in the effort to raise money and try to answer. And it would be a shame if such questions weren't asked for fear of being bullied.
Alas, really, the only way we know of asking the right question is to ask a lot of questions, most of which will be the wrong question :-( We tend not to emphasize this fact, but everyone who ever made a breakthrough has asked an endless amount of stupid questions. But if you don't have the courage to look dumb, you'll never get anywhere.
Well, the ability to conform to the conventional wisdom of the field isn't necessarily a skill which promotes scientific progress.
You know what skill does? The ability to ask the right question. And Dr. Loeb asked himself, "hmm....could I collect material from an interstellar meteorite if I trawl the seabed with a magnetic sled?"
Now I think that is a pretty good question. The answer may be "Yes" or the answer may be "No". But either way, it's a great question, which apparently nobody else asked, let alone put in the effort to raise money and try to answer. And it would be a shame if such questions weren't asked for fear of being bullied.
Alas, really, the only way we know of asking the right question is to ask a lot of questions, most of which will be the wrong question :-( We tend not to emphasize this fact, but everyone who ever made a breakthrough has asked an endless amount of stupid questions. But if you don't have the courage to look dumb, you'll never get anywhere.
What’s happening in psychology?
If Sagan put out Cosmos tomorrow for the first time it would be branded trash and misinformation by a dangerous, idiot inquisitor style, media landscape doing everything it can to not go broke.
A hypothesis about aliens is just a slow pitch, right over the plate for the inquisitors to smash.
The inquisitors are hell bent on making sure young people understand that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
A hypothesis about aliens is just a slow pitch, right over the plate for the inquisitors to smash.
The inquisitors are hell bent on making sure young people understand that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
Speaking of hate campaigns, I'm at the same institute as one of the people referenced in the article and have received unsolicited unhinged email from some crazed Avi Loeb disciple urgently imploring me to "address" my colleague's "slander" and "character assassination" of Avi Loeb. How bizarre...
I don’t know if Loeb is right or wrong about any of this (and I would find it much more exciting if he was right) but the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” saying really applies to Loeb on this one. To track an interstellar asteroid to a precise location on the ocean floor and recover pieces of it requires an extraordinarily precise chain of evidence, and if even a fraction of this article is accurate, that doesn’t feel justified here.
Extraordinary claims require legitimate evidence. "Extraordinary" cannot describe evidence; all evidence is ordinary. What happened here is that the evidence was so bad as to be incapable of supporting any claim.
The phrase I used is “extraordinarily precise.” When you’re conducting a medical trial of 10,000 patients there’s always a high probability (virtually a certainty) that one measurement will be inaccurate. You can live with this minimal error rate because there’s so much data that a small amount of error doesn’t invalidate the results. If you’re conducting an experiment involving a single asteroid, then every link along the chain of evidence had better be airtight, and validated to a level that wouldn’t be cost-effective or practical in other circumstances. There can’t be a 0.1% or a 1% or a 10% or (god forbid) a 50+% chance that the substance you’re presenting is something other than what you claim it is.
I'm not disagreeing hard, and we're just discussing words at this stage. But I wouldnt object to calling less commonly ocurring data points extraordinary.
We probably are all familiar with the Fermi Paradox, but Issac Arther noticed it has a very interesting implication: Claiming that an alien probe has visited the earth is NOT an extraordinary claim.
Under very weak assumptions (basically that an intelligent race would have the desire and ability to explore the galaxy via self-reproducing probes) the galaxy should be crawling with such probes. Even at sublight speeds---and even if probes were only sent between stars when the stars naturally moved closer than a light year from each other just from their orbital movements around the galaxy--in a few million years the probes would be ubiquitous.
What is extraordinary is the negative evidence we get from not observing these probes. It means that there has never been even one intelligent species who had the technology and desire to explore the galaxy. Or even that there wasn't a small minority of them who wanted too--or even one Elon-Musk-esque individual who wanted to.
Given that we can almost do this ourselves (heck, if our own Elon Musk tried, I wouldn't bet against him succeeding) Avi Loeb's hypothesis that one of these probes might have hit the earth isn't an extraordinary hypothesis at all. We should expect to find these probes, and maybe we haven't found them yet because nobody has bothered to look for them.
Under very weak assumptions (basically that an intelligent race would have the desire and ability to explore the galaxy via self-reproducing probes) the galaxy should be crawling with such probes. Even at sublight speeds---and even if probes were only sent between stars when the stars naturally moved closer than a light year from each other just from their orbital movements around the galaxy--in a few million years the probes would be ubiquitous.
What is extraordinary is the negative evidence we get from not observing these probes. It means that there has never been even one intelligent species who had the technology and desire to explore the galaxy. Or even that there wasn't a small minority of them who wanted too--or even one Elon-Musk-esque individual who wanted to.
Given that we can almost do this ourselves (heck, if our own Elon Musk tried, I wouldn't bet against him succeeding) Avi Loeb's hypothesis that one of these probes might have hit the earth isn't an extraordinary hypothesis at all. We should expect to find these probes, and maybe we haven't found them yet because nobody has bothered to look for them.
The existence of Bracewell-Von Neumann probes is the one reason I don’t absolutely dismiss UFO believers out of hand. It’s actually a little bit surprising we don’t see intelligent machines in our neighborhood! But believing in this as a possibility is very different from renting a ship, sailing to a specific location, and saying “this is the residue of an alien probe.” Especially when the evidence you used to find the site is itself very shifty.
>The existence of Bracewell-Von Neumann probes is the one reason I don’t absolutely dismiss UFO believers out of hand
Bracewell-Von Neumann probes don't exist, as far as any can tell. You seem to be basing your credulity towards one unproven phenomenon on another unproven phenomenon. If anything, the fact that VN probes would in theory be easier than the sort of exotic physics breaking technology supposedly demonstrated by UFOs and yet the entire galaxy hasn't been consumed and assimilated as the math suggests should happen should cast even more doubt on UFOs.
Bracewell-Von Neumann probes don't exist, as far as any can tell. You seem to be basing your credulity towards one unproven phenomenon on another unproven phenomenon. If anything, the fact that VN probes would in theory be easier than the sort of exotic physics breaking technology supposedly demonstrated by UFOs and yet the entire galaxy hasn't been consumed and assimilated as the math suggests should happen should cast even more doubt on UFOs.
That’s a weird statement coning from a self-replicating automaton that that meets many of the criteria required of a B-vN machine.
Except for the criteria that would let you could launch me into space and let me survive drifting through the radioactive vacuum for thousands or millions of years without harm, then allow me to self-replicate using any arbitrary matter I happen to encounter (as opposed to sexually with another member of my species, which is how humans normally replicate) then allow my progeny to repeat the process without significant failure over countless generations.
You know.. all of the actually difficult (thus far impossible) criteria and complexity that would required for Von Neumann machines to work in practice.
You know.. all of the actually difficult (thus far impossible) criteria and complexity that would required for Von Neumann machines to work in practice.
You think building self-replicating machines that can build themselves from a handful of common chemicals is the easy part? I think you’re very badly estimating the difficulty of that problem.
The isotope evidence strongly implies he's wrong.
That Loeb failed to collect material outside the area he designated, as controls, demonstrates he was not even attempting actual science.
But he did
I think we should just do the science. He got the materials and we can look at them to see if it's interstellar or not. There's nothing wrong with doing the expedition, that's what science is.
Why does it have to be called humiliating and basically attacking Dr. Loeb the whole time?
Why does it have to be called humiliating and basically attacking Dr. Loeb the whole time?
Because he repeatedly ignored fellow researchers pointing out that the seismic activity he attributed to interstellar impact did not differ from seismic activity recorded at that location whenever a heavy truck drove on the main road near the detector.
Although I agree with you that "humiliating" might be too loaded a word (but it drives clicks, so here we are).
Although I agree with you that "humiliating" might be too loaded a word (but it drives clicks, so here we are).
If you read his rebuttal (which is linked in the article) he explains that he was relying on DOD satellites, not the seismic stations. The article doesn't even mention that....
I think the DOD satellites are the data the article refers to do not release information on measurement accuracy. So every measurement is + or - [REDACTED]
He's saying they've already done the science. It's only humiliating if you've staked your ego on a particular theory. If your interest is only in getting to the truth, it's a reasonable point of view.
It is humiliating because he violated all principles of legitimate science. He was not just wrong, his claims were not even possibly scientifically right, or meaningful.
Tangentially related, on the topic of micrometeorites found this rather cool "Cosmic cleaners: the scientists scouring English cathedral roofs for space dust":
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/17/cosmic-cathe...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/17/cosmic-cathe...
I am not surprised.
https://twitter.com/PaulFDietz/status/1679809546104057856
https://twitter.com/PaulFDietz/status/1679809546104057856
I liked the time when Avi yelled at the director of SETI, Jill Tarter (inspiration for the fictional Ellie Arroway from the movie Contact), whose life's work has been searching for ETs for not searching for ETs in the right way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI&t=1879s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI&t=1879s
Highly recommended to watch the entire video and also check out the other stuff by Angela Collier (formerly acollierastro).
Also funny that Avi takes string theory as an example of mainstream science. Some scientists are not sure it's science at all because it was never based on anything but assumptions.
Also funny that Avi takes string theory as an example of mainstream science. Some scientists are not sure it's science at all because it was never based on anything but assumptions.
Has string theory ever led to important testable predictions? I’m very out of the loop on theoretical physics.
Collier has a video on the history of string theory as a narrative and how it kinda tainted the public perception of high energy/particle physics: "String theory lied to us and now science communication is hard" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E
There was a big HN thread 19 hours ago on "20 years of Not Even Wrong* that's worth a gander:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39753115
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39753115
String theory predicts special relativity.
Microsoft Copilot seems to agree with me that the answer is No, it has not
For whatever it's worth, my cousin's baby agrees with your copilot; my pinky toenail is refusing to answer. That's a pretty good signal, 2/3 non-experts can't be wrong.
Edit: my apologies, the baby changed their answer when they realized the question wasn't an offer of string cheese. Results are inconclusive.
Edit: my apologies, the baby changed their answer when they realized the question wasn't an offer of string cheese. Results are inconclusive.
The conclusion I draw when I watch the evidence presented in this video is that Avi Loeb is a narcissist who's made his way into the big leagues and is finding out that tooting your own horn doesn't work on people like Jill Tarter.
The second-hand embarrassment I had watching that video was unbearable.
Social media did a number on those scientists with "big personalities". It is one thing that influencers and grifters get a platform on social media. But it is another thing, and more harmful, when people with credentials and power abuse those platforms. Look at Avi Loeb, Jordan Peterson, all the science/physics gurus going crazy with an ever-increasing desperation to stay in the limelight...
Social media did a number on those scientists with "big personalities". It is one thing that influencers and grifters get a platform on social media. But it is another thing, and more harmful, when people with credentials and power abuse those platforms. Look at Avi Loeb, Jordan Peterson, all the science/physics gurus going crazy with an ever-increasing desperation to stay in the limelight...
I for one think it is important to make sure that young scientists not learn to dream too big.
I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not.
Surely we should encourage young scientists to "dream big", as long as we also teach them to actually "do science" effectively right?
Maybe it's the vagueness of what "dream" means here. Imagination, creativity, and the like can be valuable insofar as they steer us to look in new useful directions and ask new useful questions. As long as the "looking" and "asking" are done with an honest aim toward finding the truth and an understanding of the tools scientists have developed to do that effectively I don't see the problem.
I don't see the takeaway message from this article being "this scientist's dreams were too lofty", but something more like "this scientist ignored good scientific practice in pursuit of his lofty dreams".
Surely we should encourage young scientists to "dream big", as long as we also teach them to actually "do science" effectively right?
Maybe it's the vagueness of what "dream" means here. Imagination, creativity, and the like can be valuable insofar as they steer us to look in new useful directions and ask new useful questions. As long as the "looking" and "asking" are done with an honest aim toward finding the truth and an understanding of the tools scientists have developed to do that effectively I don't see the problem.
I don't see the takeaway message from this article being "this scientist's dreams were too lofty", but something more like "this scientist ignored good scientific practice in pursuit of his lofty dreams".
Well, if publish or perish is hard in your own discipline, why not branch out and publish nonsense for fun and profit /s
Reality is that we likely incentivize that behavior amongst scientists. If tenure comittee just cares about paper count, and the average 2-4 citation paper is never replicated. Then there is a viable strategy for publishing crap work faster than others can publish good work.
If you do this in a way that you can be forgiven for being wrong… then the risk is even lower.
We should be surprised that more leading scientists are not in fact frauds.
If you do this in a way that you can be forgiven for being wrong… then the risk is even lower.
We should be surprised that more leading scientists are not in fact frauds.
Anybody that thinks he's made hard claims are mostly just suckered in by trash pop sci articles that spins what he says into ridiculous headlines/articles like "Loeb says there's UFOs on the ocean floor!" to get clicks.
Ironically, the very article that was linked here makes unscientific hard claims: "The seismology data used to locate this meteorite wasn’t due to an impact, but merely a truck passing near the seismic station". That's a hard claim. There's no "we think the most likely explanation is X" or "the data is better explained by X theory". The paper the article links to as "proof" also makes no hard claims but merely says that they think the data "suggests" a traffic based origin better explains the data. The article itself is the definition of unscientific and everything they're trying to pin on Loeb.
[Edit] The paper which claims the traffic-based origin also has a grammar mistake in the very first paragraph, so I'm not very enthused about reading further and seeing how methodical their methods were, when they couldn't even manage to write a one paragraph summary without error.