I actually really admire Luis Alvarez. Never heard of him before this video. Love that he got hooked on conspiracy theories and then investigated them with the bona fides scientific method.
I know some people think it's a waste of time, but I am of the opinion it does wonders for communicating science to the public. Especially nowadays, as society becomes more low trust, it's refreshing to see people actually test and debunk a conspiracy that may stem from deeper societal issues. I am of the belief it helps keep people sane.
@@PariahPsypomp6775 The problem is that it didn't really change much. Ofc the experts agree, but most of the conspiracy theories he debunked are still very popular. Still a very admirable man.
Also they just found some new chambers in the pyramids using Muons or something similar. There is footage of one which is just an open space over the door. But the technique showed there are more large chambers in there. So he was right.
I just discovered that Luis Alvarez was one person. I'd heard all of these stories separately. Realising that it was one man who did all this stuff is insane. Especially coming up with the meteor impact theory with his son as a nice little bonus after an illustrious career in physics. True madlad.
I had the same surprise feeling. I never realized that it was all the same person... Wonder if there's a biography out there Edit: There is, after a search of less than a minute, an autbiography called "Adventures of a physicist"
The other obvious example where a scientist discovers a whole new field of study to solve a specific problem is Isaac Newton who invented calculus to solve elliptical orbits. Newton, Da Vinci, Alvarez. Same breed.
I'm a geology student. I was just chillin' until we got to the k-t extinction part. Then I was like "hold on. THAT luis alvarez? 🤯 " What a moment. Lol
heh i was at uni doing biology when this was just one of the theories, but by that time it was gaining traction due to the k-t iridium layer. it was pretty exciting for me when the crater was identified. like you i was 'alvarez - why do i know that name?' alvarez is such a good counter example to the "physicist use-by date" problem. Not just physists of course but it stands out more with physicists and other scientists
@@jloiben12THAT luis alvarez as in the one who figured out a comet caused the extinction of the dinosaurs lol. op is surprised (understandably) that that’s the same person
I can tell you, as a PhD linguist, that every linguist, professional and amateur, has thought about alien languages at some point. In addition to xenolinguistics being its own field. It's definitely an interesting problem that actually touches on rivalries between different linguistic theories (if Universal Grammar exists, then would aliens likely evolve a different UG? Would alien cognition be different enough to affect how language evolves?).
as a linguistics major who is in the process of applying to doctoral programs, the idea that we haven’t thought about how xenolanguages would work is a classic example of what another acollier video would call Gell-Mann recollection
Indeed, it's like one of the oldest thought-experiments in linguistics to (jokingly) consider a hypothetical "Martian" language or a hypothetical "Martian's" perspective on human languages.
Universal grammar isn’t real, Noam Chomsky is more towards the crackpot end of the scale. Look at the way he reacts when anyone questions his theories, he acts like it’s a personal attack.
@@ananas_anna you mean that there is human language that can communicate without subjects and verbs and so on? I'm a physicist so this is all news to me but I find it hard to believe that you communicate an action without a subject or an event without verb (except for a few exceptions). Are there no constraints to language?
The "homework problem" papers really make me sick, and you're right that only the really established scientists can get away with them. I had a biologist colleague who after making a name for himself, published 10+ papers per year in what I jokingly called "The Greater (local) Area Journal of Less Interesting Ants". When said colleague once bragged to our lab manager about his publication record, the lab manager replied, "yeah, but every time an ant takes a dump, you write a paper about it."
"Scientists" who publish papers to merely increase their paper count should be classified as Search Engine Optimization / Social Media Marketing professionals 😀 On a serious note, it's a sad place to be in, being a scientist desperately seeking fame, but not being in show business, where there is essentially enough fame and attention to satisfy anyone.
I'm really glad I 'found' this channel. Dr. Collier is so refreshing to listen to. My father was an 'applied' physicist: non-experimental, non-theoretical. I became a programmer and never got though the maths, but have always loved the history of physics. After semi retirement, I've tried to go back and learn some of the basics: enough to understand how to 'get' the how and why of quantum computing ...watching Susskin's great 'Theoretical Minimum' lectures, verifying proofs, etc...some of Feynman's lecture on physics, working through QM and linear algebra problem sets. It's magical to me in the sense that it inspires some awe at what is revealed and even more awe to know that it's not magic at all. I thought about physics more like a crackpot than not for 30 years. I'm filled with humility and an admiration for those who 'have the maths' and a lifetime ahead of themselves to use it and enjoy it.
Angela mentions cognitive decline as a possible reason one might become a crackpot. I think it also comes down to being full of one’s self as well, as if they come up with an idea, and rather than even admitting to themselves they could be wrong they just run with it .
@@yourlifeisagreatstory To me it looks like he takes criticisms of his work personally, and that just makes it near impossible to convince him he's wrong - to accept he's wrong is to agree with people who he perceives as attacking him, and nobody wants to agree with someone they view as an enemy that is attacking them.
If you think that he lost his chance to work in the scam circles, then you seriously underestimate those circles. They would be like "He was reluctant to admit it, but then he saw the TRUTH!" and it would go smoothly from there.
Yeah, like that's what happened with the guy who wrote the vaccine autism paper, he was relatively conservative with his claims at first, not outright saying people shouldn't get vaccines, but then he changed his tune so he could get more money
I wrote a back-of-the-envelope-type paper that crossed into a subfield adjacent to my normal one and I spent months fleshing it out and making sure I wasn't covering something someone had already done, and I spent 6 months afterwards terrified that someone would email me a list of all the previous work I'd missed or duplicated. I cannot conceive of being so self-assured to just dash something like that off half-done, never mind doing it every 2-3 months??? Thank you for laying out everything I've been frustrated about with Avi for the past ~5 years. Also I think the "blogger" Avi was talking about is Ethan Siegel, who is a good science writer (and former astrophysicist)
Oh, but it's not 6 papers a year, it's 6 papers a month. One per week, with a double-banger on good weeks. All while doing 1200 interviews a year, or more than 3 interviews a day.
I stumbled on this video after the latest round of Loeb press-whoring, expecting a quick and brutal takedown. Only a third of the way through and I've been entertained and educated in a far more positive fashion. Absolutely fascinating, thank you.
Thank you for doing careful work. One of the reasons I left academia was because I felt like my rate of publishing was lower than expected...but _exactly right_ for doing good work. The real-world incentives in academia are _wack_.
Your question of who is the intended audience for Loeb's book is a fascinating one. I think you're right that it's not for laypeople and it's not for other physicists. But I also think it's not for future people. I think his intended audience is himself, and he wrote the book because he has a huge ego and wants to express his thoughts on how great he is. Maybe I should write a 3-5 page paper about this idea!
Optics and fame is the most sought after currency of the day. Avi saw a fad (The UFO/Believer faith crowd) and how con artists are getting wealth and fame by making up UFO stories and decided to cash in. Pretty simple and nothing much wrong with doing that in my opinion.
nah, not just him. i have a mate who is up to his chin in all the ufo mythology. he loves avi loeb. he and i came pretty close to having a serious argument about it.
I think it is for future people, just not future scientists. He's doing a revisionist history as if he were writing it in the future, portraying himself as a seminal influence on all of science, the rebel so ahead of his time. Imagine if Einstein had done this and was now regarded as he is, but it wasn't true. Hm, maybe Avi Loeb should write a small paper about that theory: "Was Einstein Really Einstein?"
@@ThePainkiller9995he probably meant “sarcasm” (or should have), but it was really facetious. But I agree it is definitely not satire, which is not just “a subset of jokes”.
Avi Loeb: "Nobody thinks about aliens" I visited Cornell last week to meet with some collaborators, I work on Exoplanets. When I got there, the first two people I met in the exoplanet group were biologists that do lab work on weird microbes and measure the spectra of the gases they produce. Two postdocs in one astrophysics department whose jobs are to figure out what spectral signatures we could maybe attribute to alien life. Two people literally constantly thinking about aliens, and helping play a role in the much larger task of identifying potential signs of alien life in exoplanet atmospheres. They know their work results in a bunch of false positives and is ignorant of so many unknowns, but they're continually learning from past mistakes (e.g. the phosphine on Venus fiasco) and trying to make this aspect of the field more rigorous.
There are no planets. No one has actually been there and back to confirm scientists were right. A lot of false science is just a belief in what a few people high up on pedestals proclaim and cannot prove for themselves. Planets are just an idea pounded into our heads since our birth. Why ? To support a false idea that there are other worlds and other life out there. To make us seem insignificant. To support the false science theory of Big Bang. No planets, no aliens. If we are honest, all we see is light from a few chief stars that disobeyed their Creator and caused the inhabitants of the earth to err regarding the stars getting most of us offtrack ... to doubt the Word of God, to doubt who J.C. really is ... God in the flesh. When the so called aliens come, they will just be the fallen ones trying to fool the world into believing they came from another world when the truth comes from the Word of God, they have been with us all along... demons, fallen angels, and their offspring the giants.
I don't know for Avi Loeb (and I'm not a scientist), but what I would say is : there are scientists working on exoplanets and alien life, that's one thing. And also we are seing ufos in our sky and we don't know what they are, that's a second thing, totally different. We have to consider these two subjects.
@@UFOCyril Avo Loeb is playing with your mind. He does not associate himself with the studies of UFOs in our sky that some people claim to observe. He got millions of dollars in private funding. Instead of spending the money to go to places where many people saw strange phenomena in the sky and to investigate, he chose to look for pebbles in the ocean, which can be man-made after all.
@@UFOCyrilI will need some serious evidence to believe UFOs/UAPs are anything other than advanced military aircraft being tested. We already know that Roswell was an airforce spy balloon and many triangle formation UFOs were F117 and B2 stealth aircraft testing and training from before they were publicly acknowledged. Also notice that UFO news tends to come out around when geopolitical things happen or things the public may not like gave to be said publicly.
I'm not a scientist but for some reson my bullshit detector was ringing. I tried searching for "Avi Loeb" and "discussion", "criticism" etc, because I couldn't find a different opinion... and it turned out you're the only voice of reason on the Internet for the laymen. Subscribed.
A note, Avi Loeb is actually *widely* hated by many astrophysicists, it’s widely known he’s a quack. It just… doesn’t get passed around outside of physicist spaces
the algorithms social media platforms rely on only work to amplify sensational grifters like Loeb. Pushing back is risky because youll just be shouted down by "free speech absolutists" claiming ur censoring the crackpots. tho people like kyle hill do have some geniunely good and popular videos criticizing stuff like Gruschs uap testimony. you just wont see it top the nonstop feed of people claiming otherwise.
@@bluewilliams4911 one quantifiable number of what other physicist think of Avi is his citation and he seems to be doing pretty well with a lot of high impact publications. Is it something like he published well in most of his career and now looking for mainstream fame which makes him hated in the community? Or is it that he specialized in niche fields that are not part of mainstream anymore?
This is such a good breakdown of how power structures and fame in academia can pervert/subvert quality controls. I had similar sentiments about a couple of "rock star" professors at Berkeley (although they provided less dramatic exemplars than Loeb), who had many hundreds of publications (many of which would have been ruthlessly and righteously shunned if I had submitted them). Worst of all, I feel like it's a bit of a self-perpetuating cycle, with junior academics supporting the absurdity to get joint-publications with "the master" and receive reciprocal treatment.
Absolutely. The scientific method itself may be objective - human beings are not and the structures and institutions created around it are no different than any other human enterprise - bureaucracy and established authority figures and “conventional wisdom” are all very hard to overcome. And pride. Human pride is certainly something “scientists” aren’t somehow exempt from being blinded by, and I will say pride in academia is perhaps more arrogant than in other spheres of the human endeavour.
My favourite part of this whole video is honestly the stuff about Luis Alvarez. I only just heard of him recently thanks to the Oppenheimer movie. That's what a true curious and intellectually honest mind looks like. So inspiring.
My favourite line is "Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo, it is not enough to be persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right." -Robert L. Park It took a while to track it to the National Association of Science Writers Newsletter (Summer 1999), v48 n2 pg. 30 "What's New."
I have a theory that Oumuamua is actually piloted by unicorns. As the first and only astro-unicornologist, I fear the scientific community is too dogmatic and stodgy to take me seriously. But I have a plan! I'm going to flood the zone with papers containing all my unique insights. I just bought a family pack of party napkins from Costco to write them on.
I hate to break it to you, but I scribbled something on a napkin in the early 2000s that predicted that not only would there be a cylindrical shaped object, external to our solar system, would be piloted by unicorns, but the object they are piloting is really the fossilized remains of a giant space unicorn. In fact the ship is actually made from a fossilized unicorn horn. =}
Good Day, It is great to see a fellow Astrounicornologist. I would like to give you the opportunity to publish you findings in my unicorn specialised journal: „Science and Magic“. It has an impact factor of over 9000 and a novel review process that is based on reviewer parity.(50% human, 50% unicorn).
After your crack at 2FA I thought "the video has to be all downhill from here" because it was so funny, but when you called Avi's papers shitposts I knew how wrong I was. Thank you for this video and your channel in general.
Great video! Avi reminds me of some of an old full professor I encountered as an undergrad at MIT. He’d done something amazing in his earlier career, and was now just coasting… with random stuff that briefly caught his fancy.
He basically read Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, and put a modern spin on Rama for Oumuamua. My mind went straight back to that book as soon as the first reports hit the media - with a tingle down my spine.
@@andiralosh2173 Elon is a grifter who inherited a blood diamond fortune and screwed over the actual inventors of Tesla. So, your argument only suggests Avi Loeb is a grifter.
@@acollierastro some mathematicians lament Gauss’ approach. His unpublished notes contain great ideas and not sharing them with the mathematics community slowed the development of Maths in several decades, according to some.
@@senefelder sure, but there's a difference between having useful ideas that ended up not being published and doing something like what is shown at 35:40.
@@RubALamp Maybe there could be a middle way here. Releasing it not as scientific papers, but on a different page as notes. Like, look people, I got these ideas and don't know yet if they're a bunch of crap, you can gloss over them if you like, if not it's just fine. But on the other hand, I don't know enough about how the scientific community works and maybe this is a bunch of crap as well.
@@pipeline789 Yeah, I think Angela touches on this in a part of this video, where Avi could release what he's thinking about as letters or something of the like where his publishings are better placed. The issue is, because of how the publishing industry is currently structured, it is prone to incentivize over-publishing, as seen with Avi. As a consequence you'll have articles that, in my experience as a graduate physicist, are poorly written, feel very rushed, leave way too many details for the reader to figure out, are somehwat pointless, etc. That's not to say I've not read good articles, in fact many of them were crucial while I was writing my thesis, but I'm sure these articles would be better if scientists weren't overly pressured to publish.
Wow that quote from his book about his interactions with Harvard post-docs is such a perfect encapsulation of his approach to “science”. Excellent, excellent research and effort put into this video presentation. Thank you. Avi Loeb being the chair of the Astronomy dept at Harvard is actually one of the things that led me to look for alternative routes of education. Ultimately, he was failed by the system just as the system that lifted him up was in-turn failed by him. His very success is a huge red flag for aspiring astrophysicists - one can be the perfect astronomer on paper and become chairman at an Ivy League university, but this is only a reflection of one’s value to administrators and the media rather than a reflection of one’s value to the community of peers within the discipline. Not only was he uplifted to a position of academic leadership, Loeb was so failed by the academic system that he felt personally empowered to rudely attack the fmr Director of SETI. That is one of the most embarrassing clips I’ve ever seen of a public astronomy figure. Wow. I wonder if his public speculations about omuamua led to the end of him being chair of the Astronomy Dept, or if he made these statements after he was freed from that position. His chairmanship ending in 2020 is what makes me wonder. Thanks again! Still watching the rest 😎 Edit: ok i have to say , its very ironic for him to blame the astronomy community for “not looking through their telescopes” when he cant even write a real research paper. Does Avi Loeb even have enough time to pore over intensive telescope data with his paper production constantly chasing the next squirrel?? Lol
Why is this the first time I’m discovering your channel? I love how you distill crackpottery so clearly and concisely. I think my BA in physics (now working in a research facility as an engineer) helped me to suss out crank conspiracies (my family is all about conspiracies), but I love how you’ve articulated this.
My theory is "they need to humble themselves" really means "they are questioning my brilliance so they must be arrogant because I'm a super special smart boy!" Some of these guys need someone following them around with a giant squeeky hammer and get hit when they do something so ego-centric and stupid
I first heard of Avi Loeb when I heard him interviewed on Event Horizon here on UA-cam. He sounded so convincing, I was like, I’m going to immediately go out and get his book. Then, I did a little digging, and found out what he’s really about. He’s definitely the master of one-sided story telling. Also, if Jill Tarter is mad at him, that’s really saying something.
there's a video out there (sorry i dont have the link) where during a zoom based panel discussion he tells jill tarter that she is denying his brilliant idea because she wants the credit for the first alien life to fall on her and her seti team.
Event Horizon is how I know of Avi's multiple showings on there saying the same things over and over. He does come across as a con artist including his project funding imo, besides I never liked his whiny little uninteresting voice. I've also likened him to Graham Hancock in his techniques.
@@Humannondancer it really sucks that a formerly interesting UA-cam channel like event horizon would get stuck pandering to the con artist over and over and over again
@@personzorz EH/John Michael Godier has addressed peoples problem with Ari in his more recent vid where he showcases Ari's recent expedition to find intersteller remnants in the sea. Hint: he found a 'curious piece of metal wire' lol Also, when I see Ari on there, I now watch during the day as it's just fluff, and too annoying to go to sleep to. I still like JMG who's still skeptical about claims, but I guess Harvard gravity connections..
Your channel's only flaw is that I've already gone through all the videos :( i love the lightheartedness in which you make your videos, while also providing good substantial content; a little oasis in a desert full of overproduced stuff that doesn't even feel human anymore. Keep up the good work :)
I used to love being a crackpot in middle school! But as you grow up, you realise that a real science is much different and involves much less sensationalism than the popular media portray. Also, this channel is a blessing for beginners in physics study, like me.
i was just recounting that my first exposure to science fiction was torchy the battery boy (1959) and later in school, ray bradbury and an excerpt from the story "kaleidoscope" about two stranded spacemen trying to describe how to reach each other, when there is no "up". (i left school at 16 in 1970) but i've always enjoyed being down the pub solving life, political and particularly science problems. i was nominated for a think tank, but i was too drunk.
Crackpots come from some barely adjacent field that they actually an expert in. Hence the crack, in the pot of expertise. It would be like if Einstein suddenly realized that light had a consciousness and he started trying to measure it and prove it and then went all over talking about it until he becomes well known for that instead of his physics field. This is the brilliant observation of the videoer. Crackpots usually have expertise, in something. I think their unconscious motivation is fame which is why there would be no point in Einstein becoming a crackpot.
Importantly, science always involves whatever the pseudoskeptics decide is worth study, and no evidence is extraordinary enough to take seriously if it challenges your assumptions
I started this video sort of in the background and for a while was thinking: "so... just another failed academic inflating his publishing stats" then I heard "Chairman of the Harvard Physics department" and this is just staggering. How did a guy like Loeb ever get such a position?
*How did a guy like Loeb ever get such a position?* Because these positions are ultimately meaningless, and do not speak to how good a person's work is, nor does it speak to how smart or credible a person is. Many of us have been saying this for years: that academia is something of a scam, and is riddled with many fundamental problems, while not much effort has been done to solve those problems. Academic titles generally do not mean much. I say all of this as a person who actually is studying physics at a graduate-level with the intention of joining academia and publishing papers.
Thank you for this. I feel like I’ve been taking crazy pills bc even to a layman like me Loeb’s answers sound like bs or rather, when I compare how he presents his ideas to how O’Dowd does in SpaceTime my spideysense activates. And while I’m relieved to hear someone delineate this stuff I can’t help but ask: how is Harvard ok with this? Are they happy to bask in the reflected glow of Loeb’s stardom? It seems very risky to their reputation.
He is tenured with an endowed chair. Short of committing an outright fraud or crime, they won't touch him. Academic freedom, free speech and all that... His papers are also peer reviewed.
I think it's incredibly odd that all these credible people with access to data we don't have think there is a there, there from the head of NASA, DOD, Navy, prominent scientists, congressman on the intel committee... either it's a massive psy-op or somethings actually going on, and it's entirely within the realm of possibility to hypothesis what it could be until it's proven to not be that. But to out of hand dismiss all this as outside the purview of Harvard or serious consideration because it falls outside of your world view or expectation is ignorant. Seti putting all this effort and money into listening to signals hitting us as messages from an alien civilization has no basis, like Aliens even uses radio signals, even if Avi's theory is far fetched it has more merit based on observations of the object than their random hopeful assumption, yet it's accepted as a worth while endeavor. Let the guy explore, it's not like he makes claims that are fraudulent. But you stay in your academic bubble of what's proper to speculate on. String theory and so on are at this point one long series of shit posts. You just sound butt hurt that you're not Harvard material and don't have the clout he does. Keep chasing it though I guess.
Reminds me of Lehigh University having to deal with creationist Michael Behe. It's called tenure, which is ideally a great thing but occasionally goes awry.
What never ceases to amaze me is the amount of energy the crackpotists are able to summon in defense of their crackpotism. I am exhausted just looking at them.
when someone's finally found purpose late in life, they'll cling onto it because it means everything to them. Even if that purpose is completely devoid substance. In their mind it's too late for them to turn in a new direction again.
This presentation was really well done. Great storytelling. The structure, flow, all of it was a pleasure to watch. Thank you. I'm an old carpenter, not a scholar but I have had a lifelong interest in science. I'm glad the UA-cam algorithm put your work in my feed and I look forward to exploring the rest of your channel.
I am so happy to have found this channel. Your level-headed, professional, expert, easily digestable clarifications of popular topics is really an internet treasure. Thanks a lot for what you do here. I read some of the expedition reports from the pacific journey to retrieve metallic fragments from an airburst event. I soon got a little tired with what felt like, hm, actively lopsided ehr, let´s call it what it is: overinterpretation. A lot of commenters pointed out likely alternative origins for the finds, and there was no effort to exclude these possibilities, only more free-floating plausibility arguments, that weren´t even all that plausible.
For Perey, cognitive decline is certainly a theory.. but highly educated people constantly turn to fields (or sub fields) that they believe they are qualified to speak to, and end up sounding ridiculous. In his case, he was an experimental physicist trying to break into theory.. These are wildly different kinds of expertise, even though they’re both “physicists”.
Could also be that they get more desperate to make discoveries and for whatever they are working on to be a thing because it they are coming to their end. You don't have the time for whatever direction you are go through to not be a thing and then to move on to something else.
I'm a physicist, and one of my favourite moments of my life, was when I asked a friend of mine about epigenetics. Her exact statement to me was "Peter, I have a Ph.D. in genetics, and I have never heard of this."
mental health must be considered too, when I had my break down I wasted a lot of time trying to program something, in itself reasonable, but because I was sick I just couldn't do it, it would be easy for someone in that sort of state to fall into crackpotism. there can be times in our lives where we need to distrust ourselves, sadly not everyone has the insight into ourselves to check ourselves.
Hey, thanks for being real, sometimes our sanity/mental health takes a little excursion. Happens to most of us across a lifetime. We also get better and do the hard work to come back.
The UA-cam algorithm brought me to your channel today. Your videos on string theory, on adjuncts, on postdocs, on first generation graduate students, on crackpots (no timecube?), on hacking, etc. have been really nice to watch. One of the saddest experiences with physics I've ever had was driving through Waxahachie, TX in the late 2000s, parking on a county road and looking over at the campus of what would have been the SSC. In front of me were all of the empty parking lots and behind me was herd of cows staring at me while they ate at their feeding trough. The Ellis County Sheriff's Dept drove up and asked what I was doing: I told the deputy that I had just wanted to take some photos at the site. He said that due to break-ins and thefts (of copper wiring), no one was allowed onto the property, so I took a few photos from that county road and left. Anyway, you have some great videos and your enthusiastic support of fair work arrangements is fantastic to see. (Namely, it provides hope that there are people who believe what you have stated.) One of your other interesting points from a different video involved qualifying exams and whether people could know what to expect: related to that (but slightly to one side) in the late 1990s, I ran into a series of hardbound books originally collected on behalf of Chinese students studying in the US: the series contained a very large selection of qualifier problems from seemingly all of the major US universities. Those might still be being published or be being expanded as collections. I haven't looked recently, but they are probably still out there as it were. Lastly, I wish you much success with your channel. Cheers!
I've published a fair number of papers (in computer science). Getting a paper accepted in a journal in 3 days is unheard of! Every paper I've published in a journal was a nightmare (I mean I realize it is necessary I'm just saying as an author going through it is a pain) of feedback from editors, revisions, more feedback, more revisions, yet more feedback. Three days!! Three months would be faster than I or anyone I know has ever gotten anything published in a reputable journal.
hey should I try to retrain in computer science, or just blow my brains out? I'm kidding, sort of! but I just quit a real cushy job - pride; sort of regret it now, but also, *screw* giving _my_ promotion/raise/bonus to the boss' kid, while still doing _all the work myself_ - and in hunting for a new one it has become apparent that I should not have gotten a degree in chemistry. because it is a horrible low-paying field, on the whole and I had thought my only real alternative to be CS/software engineering; but now I'm hearing there's age discrimination (I'm 30) and the field is way over-saturated...? man I barely wanted to keep going even before this and now... I miss my wife and hate my life. haha. don't mind me what the fuck does any of it matter
@@Kveldred Don't recommend blowing out one's brains... although I've had the thought myself once in a while. I don't think CS is over saturated but you have to be good which means staying current which means working your butt off sometimes. LOL at age discrimination at 30. I didn't even start to get into software development until my late 20's. Although I remember saying something similar to my boss about feeling I was too old and hadn't done enough when I was in my early 30's once and he laughed at me thinking 30's was old (he was more or less the age I am now where 30 seems really young... and I mean laughed in a friendly way, he was a great boss). One thing I recommend is the big consulting firms: Accenture, Deloitte, PwC. If you know some programming you may also be able to leverage your chemical engineering background. In those firms most people have both an industry focus as well as technology. The industry is more important. So you could leverage your knowledge about chemical engineering for an industry like manufacturing. If you don't already know it, I suggest learning Python. It is the easiest language to learn and it is in great demand. They treat you really well at consulting firms. If you like travel you may end up doing a lot of it and as you do you get miles and get upgraded to first class which is one of the things I miss most about not working for a firm anymore. The other thing I like about consulting is it is seldom boring. Also, unlike most corporations, most of them really are serious about valuing collaboration and not being dog eat dog. Deloitte is especially good in that regard but all of them are to some extent because they have to be. It's controlled anarchy. You almost always work with different people because the teams are assembled based on skills and who currently isn't assigned. You are expected to work hard but if you do you get promoted and after a while can make really good money. Not as much as if you go to a startup that has an IPO but that is much riskier because (except for when we have booms like the dot.com boom) most startups fail and you may work for a long time at a startup for little money and end up with nothing to show. Established companies like Google and Linked In can be great places to work but they are super competitive. One more thought: there is more to developing software than writing code. In fact the hard part isn't the coding it is understanding the requirements. So in that regard I recommend learning Agile methods. Agile is so much better for understanding requirements and in my experience the best developers all use it. Hope that made sense and was somewhat useful. I can relate about how the world seems kind of hopeless sometimes. When that happens (like today actually) I remind myself that at least I have clean water and no one is dropping bombs on me.
@@michaeldebellis4202 Hey, thanks a ton for this, mi amigo! I was actually coming back to delete my comment - _"no one cares about your dumb problems, Hak, leave the guy alone"_ - so to see such a comprehensive and encouraging response means *a lot* to me. All three of: the laughing at my idea that 30 is too old to start, heh (much better than "oh yes that is true I'm afraid", certainly!); the specific suggestions (I've always heard great things about consulting but never even knew those three names; your suggestion and the companies together make a fantastic starting point!); and, finally, the reminder that _things could be _*_a hell of a lot worse_* - all three, as I say, are extremely useful. Thank you very much, again. 🙂 I can't offer much in return... except - I guess - if you ever need an in at an oil company, well, let me know, in that case... 😂👊
@@michaeldebellis4202 Oh. Somehow my response thanking you got eaten by UA-cam. I truly have not been able to figure out why it will dislike some comments; I think their system is broken and they either haven't noticed or don't care, heh. Let me try again, albeit at lesser length this time...: ★ Had actually been coming back to delete my comment - _"no one cares Hak leave the poor dude alone"_ - so seeing your detailed and helpful response made my day; I truly can't thank you enough! ★ All three of:- the laughing at my idea that 30's too old to try (better than "yep that's right and reasonable, might as well give up"! 😂) the advice, and the reminder that things could be much worse - are very useful indeed! ---------------------------------------------------- ★ Your last line reminded me of the "The Simpsons Test" I use (when I remember to). There was a time in my life I went through horrible physical anguish, so great that I literally could not pay attention long enough to make it through one gag in the Simpsons - I would involuntarily lose track and become lost in my own internal world of torment after only a few seconds. I still remember the gratitude and relief I felt when the morphine hit my mu opioid receptors, and I was well enough to do something as low-effort as _watch an episode of a dumb cartoon._ Hence and since, that's often been my metric for how bad something is: → if you can remember your own birthday for more than a couple seconds, or muster up a chuckle at a dumb five-second gag, _hey! chin up! it's not so bad!_ Heh. ---------------------------------------------------- Thanks again, mi amigo. 👊 I truly, truly appreciate it, more than I can express. I can't offer much in return, but if you ever need an in in the petroleum industry... THAT, I could maybe do! 😂
Yeah it really feels like Loeb is just trying to get his “colleagues” to call him out on shit and then be like “yeah well I work at Harvard what shithole do you work at?”
I am reflecting about your video, and ethics in our physical community. Since I do have crackpoty tendencies, I am trying to draw lessons: I think the crucial thing is *humility*. If you have a fun pet theory and you cannot prove it; recognize it is not a physical theory, it is just a good idea for coffee break talk with friends and colleagues, not to write a paper. And specially not to throw a tantrum because your idea doesn't caught on. And if you are part of the Harvard establishment, you get to publish your crackpot theories and complain that the establishment doens't take you serious!! I am joking XD.
in my undergrad phonetics course, the final challenge assignment was astrolinguistics adjacent. We were given a description of the vocal tract of a hypothetical alien (I don't remember the details, it was similar but different to the human vocal tract) and use what we had learned about the human vocal tract to speculate about the acoustic and phonetic qualities of the alien's speech.
This reminds me of one of my favorite things ever written. I first encountered it at the Tech Museum in San Jose, but you can find it online. "They're Made out of Meat" Here's a snippet: "They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?" "Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat." "I thought you just told me they used radio." "They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat." "Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
Cool, I watched a video once about a guy who was from the conlang community and he was attempting to make an language for birds. It's really really cool all the stuff we can do with linguistics.
And he only keeps repeating the same stupid shtick over and over. Im not a scientist myself but My intuition told me not to listen to this guy pretty quick
I love the fact that I just wasted an afternoon on your channel due to the algorithm recommending it out of the blue. I think there would be some value in a journal or a pamphlet of "homework problem" papers that could be released every year to AP highschool students or for intro college students. It could be a fun thing and depending on how it is done it could get a bunch of people thinking in terms of creating an experiment or just a general interest in scientific projects in general. Call it The Journal of Quarterly Physics Shitposts or something like that. I hope you got your paper published, I especially liked the crayon drawing!
Questions: 1. If a person is interested in a topic and wishes to speculate on where these ideas may lead, how does one avoid crack-pottery? 2. How is it possible to maintain educational connections throughout one's intellectual life that might benefit a person with a curiosity for various pursuits outside of their primary field, but which could lead to effective cross-disciplinary work? 3. If trying to legitimately ask a question requiring expertise, how does a person avoid offending (or triggering) the expert with what may be innocently-posed specific questions that otherwise require redirection to further study?
1) The essence of science is disprovability. A scientist who comes up with a new idea will work hard to try to prove it false; if it stands up to rigorous experimentation, it may be true. A crackpot will present a new idea and say, "There's no way to prove it's wrong, so it must be right." 2) I'm afraid that I don't understand this question. 3) I can't imagine an expert in any field being offended by a question about their field, provided that the asker legitimately wants to learn, and is not just being a troll.
@@bobbuethe1477 #2 ... I was referencing situations where academic work has given a person the nose for rigorous and critical methodology, but the techniques of two fields differ dramatically in terms of subject matter. For example, an English professor changing their scholastic interests toward symbolic logic via linguistics. Can an educated person interact effectively without either carte blanche or crank status simply because of appeals to authority, e.g. Neil deGrasse Tyson?
@@weatherupstairs4814 1. Doing research in the field, not presenting an idea and rejecting any evidence that goes against it. For example, you could do research on the photos of the interstellar object to try and prove, using that evidence, that it had to be moving using alien technology. But you can't just speculate WITHOUT EVIDENCE that something is true and expect the scientific community to support your conclusion, especially if you call them 'not progressive' and 'closed-minded' for it. 2. I don't really know what you mean. If someone wants to pursue something outside their primary field of work, that's fine. There's no issue with studying different disciplines, you nobody expects you to be Neil deGrasse Tyson about every subject, just don't act like Neil deGrasse Tyson about every subject. Avi acts like he knows better than people who devote their lives to the discipline he's written 5 pages about. 3. Scientists love to talk about their studies, nobody normal is gonna get mad at you for asking about one.
I wish I would have met someone like you so many years ago when I decided on biology instead of physics. I LOVED physics, but decided on medicine and environmental research instead. I love your topics, your expression, and your exceptional progression of ideas and clarity…..all well said.
@@nathanborak2172 If I had to guess...the results have actual real world use and monetary value, so funding is probably better and it is done more outside of universities for a higher salary. Imagine you could pursue science and have a nice life without having to put up with the academic circus.
The podcasters are like the american medias, all they want are clicks. Doesnt matter if the guy is a crackpot or a traitor, they want ad money. If interviewing terrorists was legal, they would do it.
In a recent interview (on another YT channel) Avi Loeb tried to refute the maxim "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." At that point, a red flag went up in my head. And I started listening more critically to his claims. Now, I get the impression he's becoming another Michio Kaku.
Kaku is annoying AF thats for sure but Loeb is worse. All thanks to the american medias controlled by like 5 billionaires, they keep pushing these assholes on every network. I wished Kaku and Loeb would be banned for life on all american medias. That would be great.
I personally think there's a place for people like that in the scientific community. Sometimes, something does come completely out of left field, and if everyone is worried about being a crackpot, we'll never explore those ideas. I think we should have a small minority of scientists working to prove zany ideas, because occasionally, they're right.
@@michaelblacktree Yeah, I don't think they're going to make many real contributions, but some of the greatest scientific discoveries were made by people exploring ideas that the rest of the community thought were ridiculous. That combined with the fact that any incorrect ideas they have are unlikely to sway the greater scientific community makes me think they're relatively harmless, but sometimes valuable. I wouldn't want a lot of them, but I think having a few is worthwhile.
@@derp195 I actually kinda agree with this. I just don't think Avi Loeb is one of those people. He's not exploring his unorthodox idea, he's engagement baiting. I'd love a version of Avi Loeb who gets an unusual idea in his head and actually goes and does research to try and find something that would contradict his ideas. Instead is shotgun blasts outrageous, shallow ideas knowing they'll get press attention and digs his heals in and condescends to anyone who dares contradict him, with a light bit of conspiracy narratives thrown in for flavor. Avi Loeb _would_ be good if he was actually explored his ideas, but he never will. It's not hard for me to imagine him going full grifter in a couple of years, he's already four fifths of the way there.
Your grad student joke about the single sentence conjecture reminds me of Hook's claim to priority on gravity being inverse square (which was, if anything, less substantial). What made Newton more significant was that he came along with the right mathematics to actually work out what shape of orbit that relation would imply - and, equally, to work out from the observed orbits of planets that gravity is indeed an inverse square law.
I really like the format/structure of all your video. Intro, Gradual explanations with real evidences (examples and conter examples) in words that can be understand by a non physician, the actual subject, your toughs based on what have been built in the video. Really refreshing! We can feel that it really matter to you, your passion! I can even learn about some historical fact! I'm subscribing for sure!
You are a treasure, Dr. Collier. A 'disambiguation' is exactly what this is - a meticulous (and generous and charitable) parsing of the matter. Here's wishing you treat us to videos like this for years to come.
Courageous! You've elevated my hope for the advancement of science. My B.S. detector started screeching when Oumuamua blew up in the media for all the wrong reasons.
One of my favorite things about these videos is that you'll mention something really interesting in passing and then I'll go looking into it. Gotta read all about Planet 9 stuff now.
All of your videos are so great. I don't have a lot of experience with people who "think with the scientific method" like you do so seeing it laid out so well in an entertaining manner is teaching me so much
No matter how smart and educated someone is, they are not automatically insulated from narcissism. Actually the opposite seems to be the case alarmingly often. "Wrong? No, I would certainly KNOW if I was WRONG, now wouldn't I??" Love your exasperated sighs BTW, so delightfully expressive.
I commented on one or two of your videos today already, and here I am again and not realizing how you kept my attention for an hour. You're good at this!
For a week I've had one of the videos in a playlist and kept skipping it because while the subject looked interesting, I was wary of spending an hour with someone unfamiliar to me. Well today I didn't skip it. Halfway through, I checked what else is in the channel and was disappointed that they're not all this long, because I was enjoying it so much!
Amazing how very intelligent people are certain that the degree in whatever field they hold it in makes them undeniable experts in (usually politics) others. The fact that they interject such opinion in completely unrelated discussions and without the same strict scrutiny as they would hold themselves to in their own field is, unfortunate.
Electricians are brilliant people, but if I have a leaky pipe, I’m calling a plumber. Expertise in one topic does not qualify you as an expert in something completely different.
I noticed a comment below that referred to "Dr. Collier", and I realized that, even though I knew you had a PhD, I had not thought of you as "Dr. Collier". My error. I intend to always think of you as Dr. Collier as a way of giving you the respect you deserve. Excellent videos, by the way, Dr. Collier, and I hope to see many, many, more of them. I watched your space elevator video three times. It inspired me to try harder to understand calculus, a goal that is still a way off, but hey, one never knows until one tries. Thank you for the effort you put into these presentations.
There was a podcast a couple of months back where Brian Keating had Avi Loeb and Eric Weinstein (of all people) as guests and going by the general tone of that episode, I would guess that all it needs for Avi Loeb is to not receive the Nobel Prize at any point and he'd be way down the IDW pipeline. Also, that SETI Zoom talk was intense. Awesome video!
glad I saw this reply cuz the last couple months I've been kind of binging various cosmology vids that yt has brought my way, like this channel, and I took a lot of math/science in school, so i'd like to hear from actual physicists, etc, rather than fabulists selling books or w/e so anyway, I saw keating as a guest on some other guy's show, and they seemed like legit science guys so I went to check out more keating vids when I saw he had eric weinstein on as a guest it was kind of a gut punch cuz it makes me wonder how often I take ppl seriously when I prob shouldn't, and how much vetting do I have to do on everything I consume? was very disappointing as someone who kind of considers science as their religion -- it's such a desecration to pass these ppl off as actual science
@@spellkowski6996 That is actually a rather difficult problem and I've been thinking about that a lot. In academia, mechanisms like peer review can give you access to data that is reliable and vetted with the goal that you yourself can produce data that will be a reliable source for other academics down the line. But even then, you wouldn't (or better, shouldn't) blindly trust a paper or author just because they've been peer reviewed and published. In fact, you wouldn't rely on single sources at all and always try to find other sources to corroborate data/interpretations/etc (depending on the discipline you're looking at, ymmv). Ideally though, others have already done the vetting for you. But when it comes online spaces that falls away. There's no peer review, there's no way to know whether some explanation is a good representation or coloured by biases (there's usually always bias, but some forms are more important than others)... do we actually know that @acollierastro is an actual PhD physicist? I think that even having expertise in a field isn't a good foundation to judge whether a person is a reliable science communicator or not. [Insert joke about engineers], but I can totally see PhD physicists finding Eric Weinstein's "work" groundbreaking, Keating does, Avi Loeb at least doesn't disagree, heck, Weinstein even was on the GUT debate hurricane special episode by PBS Space Time. For me personally, I have a degree in the socials (even though I also have a medium level university science education, which is useful to separate out the total bunk), so I tend to focus on who hangs out with whom, what do they say besides the science, why do they say it, hidden assumptions, connections into other online spheres etc. That takes time, but I'm also terminally online, so that approach might not be useful for everyone. In the end I think that there actually is no way around vetting the people you're watching, at least to some degree. Not total scepticism, but also not full open mindedness. Yeah, so, rambling over
This is very valuable work you're doing. A lot of this type of subjective and contextual information (e.g. discussions of how a public figure is actually perceived within their own field of expertise) only exists in the form of tribal knowledge and in conversations over coffee at conferences or after work beers with lab mates, or maybe I'm Twitter threads. I really believe that documenting this stuff in detail is crucial to scientific history! As Dan Olsen points out in his "How Geocentrists Tricked a Bunch of Physicists" video, when journalists ask a scientist to respond to something a colleague said, they are much more likely to be measured and diplomatic rather than outright saying they think someone's work has no scientific merit. But these official journalistic interviews are much more likely to be taken as reliable sources than random Twitter threads. I think this we absolutely need more of the type of documentary work. Looking forward to more of your work!
Since he's still at it (latest being the assertion that little melted balls of metal he found at an impact crater were 'alien technology') and as I read that I was confused that Harvard was ok with this guy just dragging their reputation down like that, I watched this to try to just understand what the heck was even going on; thanks for filling in the context!
Thanks for this video. I just started reading the book mentioned here and I'm only on chapter three and I'm tired of how impressed he is with himself. You saved me from finishing it.
Just got recommended your channel for the post doc exodus video. I also saw the initial crackpot video and thought it was hilarious. I’m curious about the emails that one would get as a mathematician - it’s what I’m aspiring towards as a final year undergrad student. Cool videos!
I'm so happy to see Luis Alvarez get some love as he was one of the best scientists of the last century that very few people know about. I was a firm believer in the shot from the Grassy Knoll theory mostly due to the motion of JFK's head from the fatal shot -- intuitively you presume that shot had to come from the front right of the limousine and it was for me the single piece of data that supported the Grassy Knoll shooter and refuted the Warren Report. But, I learned of Luis's work on the Zapruder film and his analysis of the fatal shot and while I was initially skeptical I ran the numbers and sure enough it is mathematically possible for a target to move towards the shot. In essence, the bullet, as it entered JFK's head, had a kinetic energy equal to one half the mass times the velocity squared and knowing what that mass was and a reasonable calculation for the velocity you can calculate what the kinetic energy was at the moment of impact. Then, if you figure that the shockwave travelling through JFK's brain would result in an over pressurization of the skull opposite the entry location, and that once the skull was ruptured, brain matter and other material would be ejected at significant velocity owing to the shockwave. Then if you say that, perhaps a third of the incoming kinetic energy, say 600J, was transferred to the ejecta and the mass of the ejecta was, say, 100g the resultant momentum of the ejecta would be about 11 kg*m/s. So, if JFK's head weighed, say, 6kg, the resultant reaction velocity of his head would be just under 2m/s which is pretty fast. Add to that his work in identifying the probable cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs as well as his work on the Manhattan Project and Radar -- he was one of the greats!
Hey new sub, amazing content so far, the few vids that youtube has algorithmed me. I half ignored that asteroid, as was half hoping it would hit, but I never heard it had changed speed. When a physicist, an educated person, jumps to controlled technology, and a highschool dropout who spends too much time on youtube physics channels goes to all the reactions I watch on here, I laugh and yell crackpot now. Seriously, ever seen sodium thrown in water, thermite burn, phosphorus oxidize? How do you actually say there's no explanation but ship. Mind boggling.
The funnest thing about this is watching the close caption auto generate the words and finding all the funny ways that they spell Avi Loeb. My favorite so far is Javilope.
I recently discovered your channel through your recent string theory video and have been watching you videos at a pretty good clip. It's all very good content. Seriously. I am curious to know what your opinion is about Sabine Hossenfelder. While I definitely don't think she's a crackpot, I guess I'm starting to become more skeptical of her perspective than I initially was. You seem like a pretty savvy person who is in the overall physics field so I thought your perspective might provide some insight. Thanks!
I've clicked "don't recommend channel" when her videos come up, hopefully the YT algorithm gets the message. I really dislike the clickbaity thumbnails & titles.
If nothing else she seems to be pretty rash since she has clearly gotten on the nerves of people in very different fields, from quantum physics to fusion technology.
i used to watch her a bit, but started getting put off after i noticed how unusually broad her range of topics was. she seems excessively prone to anti establishment views, and will assert those views with the utmost confidence regardless of her level of expertise. a lot of her reasoning and arguments are quite sound but she seems a little too sure that she’s right, even when she is not at all an expert. i stopped watching her when she started putting out videos covering current issues like trans people in sports. ma’am you are a theoretical physicist, this is out of your depth, you’re no more educated on this than i am. i’m not a science person (as far from it as you get- i’m a law student!) so i could be completely misreading the red flags here, but that’s how it looks from my layman’s perspective.
I've watched a number of her earlier videos on QM and I think they were quite decent - speaking from the perspective of a simple cat who knows little about physics but understands the scientific method. Then, when she hit 100K subscribers, she started going all over the place, from climate change to making a video that 2+2 is not necessarily 4. At that point, I unsubscribed.
I'm really glad the algorithm has decided to keep serving up your videos to me over the last couple of weeks; as an academic mathematician of a approximately similar age, I really appreciate your perspective, and your amazing ability to explain it and educate a wider audience about the "inside" of academia.
Al's got rhythm, finally. I've gotten sick of Al constantly trying to get me to watch a video that is days old, three hours long and has seven views. Then there's the endless number of "shorts" being shoved down my throat, so I agree with you completely, this is refreshing. Especially as I am part of the unwashed masses who prefer their scientific information presented in red crayon - they are the yummiest. As the nephew of a PhD Chemical Engineer - Professor of Fluid Dynamics and the son of a Mechanical Engineer, I've always been around discussions around the workings of academia, I am always happy to find someone else to explain the latest discoveries and developments revolving around the sciences. Especially this one because I've been dubious about Avi Loeb after I heard him on Event Horizon.
More crackpot videos please. I’m developing a theory about theses people. I don’t have any background in psychology, but does anyone know any professors I could send my theories to?
Apropos of publishing short inspirational ideas, in my (former) field we had the exact opposite of what you spoke about in this video. A leading scholar in Comparative Semitic Linguistics, mainly Ancient Oriental languages, was famous for publishing the most profound and well researched material imaginable. He had a HUGE library because everybody in the field, and related fields, sent him their papers and books for review, prior to and after publication. If he hadn't been very much on the wrong side of history in Germany during WWII, he would have been more famous outside of his field. I knew him personally and had the very distinct pleasure of visiting seminars of his after his retirement. Anyway, during his main days as a professor, he was known for voicing "I think so" theories, ideas, and observations orally, but never in publications, simply because he couldn't prove them. Countless papers have been published since then with the famous "I got this idea from ...", referencing him. BUT, near the end of his life, when he was over 80, he started adding his ideas and observations to review articles, based not so much on tangible proofs, but on his reputation. They were soaked up by the field, because everybody knew how valuable they were. Today we find many references such as "as mentioned by ... in ..." in publications. This is the way it should be.
This guy reminds me of an architype often identified with gamers/gaming: The min-maxer. Somebody who seeks to maximize the result for the minimal amount of effort required. Put another way, it would seem to me he has identified the systems surrounding academia and determined the best way to advance himself legitimately within the confines of those systems, for the least amount of effort/work/research required to do so. I commend him for not slipping into the territory of the grifter/scammer, but to be clear, what he is doing is approaching the border between legitimate and illegitimate science. The least ethical part of his method is the leveraging of his position to inflate number of papers he can publish in a given time, which is an efficient albeit dubious approach. Comparing his papers to scientific shitposting was both comedic gold, and accurate. Overall, this was an interesting and fun little journey into your world for this layman, thanks for sharing it.
Your E(naught)=MC2 video got recommended to me by the algorithm. I learned something from it and I must say that after watching a few more of your videos, including this one, I had to subscribe. Entertaining and I'm learning things. My naivete about science journal publishing is being made more clear to me now (I'm no scientist and didn't think about it much, but I was surprised to learn about the nature and quantity of Loeb's published work). Thanks for the good videos!
Michael Atiyah is the Francis Perey of math, but it’s maybe even worse in his case. Atiyah was a legendary mathematician for decades. He won several of math’s top awards, founded a field of math, solved some incredibly hard problems, et cetera et cetera. Then, in his late 80s in 2018, he gave a talk at a fairly notable conference where he claimed to have proven the Riemann hypothesis (one of the most famous and difficult problems in the pure math field of analytic number theory) by means of, among other things, the fine-structure constant. A physical concept. That is not relevant to pure math. It definitely wasn’t nearly a proof, but people were really gentle about it because Atiyah was clearly in severe decline. He died like one year later, and it was really sad.
Great video - I learned a lot. I'm surprised you didn't mention Carl Sagan! Cosmos came out in 1980 and discussed "astro-archeology" or whatever in a very popular public medium and inspired a generation of scientists. Avi is like some egomanic evil twin of Sagan.
Sagan didn't just discuss astro-archeology. He led the committee that assembled the contents of the "Golden Record" that flew on both Voyager spacecraft. It was intended as an astro-archeological spacetime capsule with instructions on how to interpret it in the liner notes (the protective metal cover). It also included the whale sounds that caused the aliens in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" who found the record to build a giant ship (that Oumuamua vaguely resembles) to come rescue them. So not only is Loeb a bit of a hack, he stole the idea for this one from Star Trek with minimal modification. I guess he left out that it was sent by aliens who got the Voyager record because we're still getting signals from the Voyagers and they haven't really been gone long enough for aliens to have constructed a ship to come save the whales.
Sadly, for the lay person, the more podcasts Loeb appears on, the more credible he seems - if you have a mind so open your brain's fallen out. He sounds ridiculous, and his ideas are nonsensical and don't stand up to any scrutiny. But the podcasters want clicks and in certain circles his is a name that generates clicks where real science doesn't necessarily. Ultimately, regardless of his motivation (whether delibarate or misguided) he shouldn't be given the space he has currently been afforded. Brilliant video.
@@vaakdemandante8772 Oumuamua was an intergalactic spaceship. That's the most obvious one. He's so fixated on the idea that aliens are coming to visit us it's not funny - why would they come here? We're not in an interesting part of the galaxy, and it's be hard to even know we were here unless you looked at the right time.
@@Jablicek he never claims Oumuamua is an "intergalactic spaceship," and I am certain he would say it is certainly not an "intergalactic spaceship." Intergalactic refers to between galaxies and the nearest one from ours is 2.5 million lys away. If it was coming from there, at 38 km/s that would take 20 billion years, a longer time than the universe is old. I think you mean to say interstellar.
@@nathanlillie5262 I haven't seen all his interviews, but I've seen enough of them to know that while he *may not* have used the words "it's an intergalactic space ship", he certainly implied it heavily.
@@Jablicek you are missing my point. You don't understand the different between intergalactic and interstellar. This difference is important, and you should look it up and get it clear in your head. I am certain he never claimed that it is intergalactic because that is utter nonsense. It IS an interstellar object and no one is disputing that. He thinks might be a light sail, which some people might think is kooky, but it is more that he is being a bit full of himself and misrepresenting the academic debate in public forums that is the problem. .
I would not call people like Avi Loeb crackpot, they are more like faker or impostor (the real ones, ie they are not good enough for their position or job title). I have met them in every institute and organisation, the top universities not excluded.
I attended a crackpot talk once. The guy was an actual astronaut, he did go to space, and the first half of his talk was about his experience in microgravity and his sensations when he came back to Earth. Great stuff. But the second half was his theory of time, and that was absolute nonsense.
It is recommended, as a stimulating idea to the science community, to consider that Loeb might be an unintelligent terrestrial life form, but not as we know it.
Well done video about crackpots in the field. It’s great that you highlighted a non-crackpot yet versatile physicist. As a lapsed physicist I’m looking forward to the rest of your vids, now that The Algorithm has shown me your channel.
I can't believe that I hadn't put together all the stories of Alvarez's pursuits. I knew about most, but not all, of these things (the watermelon JFK photography work is incredible), but I had not put together that these were all done by _one man_ (although, of course, not alone). I still have books from my parents' time that I devoured during my kid dinosaur phase that mentioned the many-causes theory, only giving the giant impact passing mention. Love the video. Glad I subscribed and am now watching through the backlog.
I actually really admire Luis Alvarez. Never heard of him before this video. Love that he got hooked on conspiracy theories and then investigated them with the bona fides scientific method.
I know some people think it's a waste of time, but I am of the opinion it does wonders for communicating science to the public. Especially nowadays, as society becomes more low trust, it's refreshing to see people actually test and debunk a conspiracy that may stem from deeper societal issues. I am of the belief it helps keep people sane.
@@PariahPsypomp6775 The problem is that it didn't really change much. Ofc the experts agree, but most of the conspiracy theories he debunked are still very popular.
Still a very admirable man.
Also they just found some new chambers in the pyramids using Muons or something similar. There is footage of one which is just an open space over the door. But the technique showed there are more large chambers in there. So he was right.
Yeah he is amazing, he was in my dinosaur books I read as a kid when they called the KT boundary the "Alvarez layer".
oh you actually really admire the guy who you've never heard of who was presented as being courageous and brilliant and right about everything?
I just discovered that Luis Alvarez was one person. I'd heard all of these stories separately. Realising that it was one man who did all this stuff is insane. Especially coming up with the meteor impact theory with his son as a nice little bonus after an illustrious career in physics. True madlad.
Manhattan project, one of the few people to view the nukes getting dropped from the plane, found the KT boundary, so many more things. What a life.
I had the same surprise feeling. I never realized that it was all the same person... Wonder if there's a biography out there
Edit: There is, after a search of less than a minute, an autbiography called "Adventures of a physicist"
@@JustToaster Definitely reading this at some point. Thanks for the suggestion.
Wait til you hear about nicolas bourbaki
The other obvious example where a scientist discovers a whole new field of study to solve a specific problem is Isaac Newton who invented calculus to solve elliptical orbits. Newton, Da Vinci, Alvarez. Same breed.
I'm a geology student. I was just chillin' until we got to the k-t extinction part. Then I was like "hold on. THAT luis alvarez? 🤯 " What a moment. Lol
heh i was at uni doing biology when this was just one of the theories, but by that time it was gaining traction due to the k-t iridium layer. it was pretty exciting for me when the crater was identified. like you i was 'alvarez - why do i know that name?' alvarez is such a good counter example to the "physicist use-by date" problem. Not just physists of course but it stands out more with physicists and other scientists
I immediately recognized the name "Alvarez" and thought "dude, no way"
As a non-geologist, what is the THAT in THAT Luis Alvarez?
@@jloiben12dog, it's in the OP of this thread haha
@@jloiben12THAT luis alvarez as in the one who figured out a comet caused the extinction of the dinosaurs lol. op is surprised (understandably) that that’s the same person
I can tell you, as a PhD linguist, that every linguist, professional and amateur, has thought about alien languages at some point. In addition to xenolinguistics being its own field. It's definitely an interesting problem that actually touches on rivalries between different linguistic theories (if Universal Grammar exists, then would aliens likely evolve a different UG? Would alien cognition be different enough to affect how language evolves?).
as a linguistics major who is in the process of applying to doctoral programs, the idea that we haven’t thought about how xenolanguages would work is a classic example of what another acollier video would call Gell-Mann recollection
Indeed, it's like one of the oldest thought-experiments in linguistics to (jokingly) consider a hypothetical "Martian" language or a hypothetical "Martian's" perspective on human languages.
Universal grammar isn’t real, Noam Chomsky is more towards the crackpot end of the scale. Look at the way he reacts when anyone questions his theories, he acts like it’s a personal attack.
Would you have any book recommendations for non-linguist regarding this (or any other) topic(s)?
@@ananas_anna you mean that there is human language that can communicate without subjects and verbs and so on? I'm a physicist so this is all news to me but I find it hard to believe that you communicate an action without a subject or an event without verb (except for a few exceptions). Are there no constraints to language?
I think you're underselling Avi. His most recent paper "Universe made of pudding, wouldn't that be fucked up" is really insightful.
😂😂😂😂
lol
This is one of my favorite comments in the history of UA-cam comments.
I thought "No, No, Shut Up: Giant Fucking Crabs" was pretty decent.
I sense a lot of sexual tension, or Avi gave her an F. Sorry - I know this is a shitpost, I could not help myself.
The irony of him demanding humility in the community is great
Classic gaslighting
@@sophiekrichardson I think projection would be a more apt term to use here
@@sophiekrichardson Yeah this isn’t true gaslighting
Say you’ve been in an abusive relationship without saying you’ve been in an abusive relationship haha jk
@@sophiekrichardson Classic narcissism.
UA-cam randomly suggested your channel and I'm so glad it did. Your videos are absolutely fascinating!
Thank you so much! That’s so nice.
Same here! Something unexpected, something sharp, something new... all the reasons I'm new here and a fan. Come for the science stay for the magic.
The same has just happened to me.
Same here. Thank you random algorithm. My favorite new channel in a long time.
Same here. YT algorithm gets stuck on the same old for months sometimes. Than out of the blue it does good with something I really come to like.
The "homework problem" papers really make me sick, and you're right that only the really established scientists can get away with them. I had a biologist colleague who after making a name for himself, published 10+ papers per year in what I jokingly called "The Greater (local) Area Journal of Less Interesting Ants". When said colleague once bragged to our lab manager about his publication record, the lab manager replied, "yeah, but every time an ant takes a dump, you write a paper about it."
"Scientists" who publish papers to merely increase their paper count should be classified as Search Engine Optimization / Social Media Marketing professionals 😀
On a serious note, it's a sad place to be in, being a scientist desperately seeking fame, but not being in show business, where there is essentially enough fame and attention to satisfy anyone.
word prcessors and ChatGTP take all the hard work out of it.
anglophones try not to blame systemic issues on individuals challenge.
Difficulty: Impossible
Maybe stop rewarding these people? Idk wild idea
@@RobinTheBot why do you say that as if this commenter is personally applauding this guy every time he takes a shit
I'm really glad I 'found' this channel. Dr. Collier is so refreshing to listen to. My father was an 'applied' physicist: non-experimental, non-theoretical. I became a programmer and never got though the maths, but have always loved the history of physics. After semi retirement, I've tried to go back and learn some of the basics: enough to understand how to 'get' the how and why of quantum computing ...watching Susskin's great 'Theoretical Minimum' lectures, verifying proofs, etc...some of Feynman's lecture on physics, working through QM and linear algebra problem sets. It's magical to me in the sense that it inspires some awe at what is revealed and even more awe to know that it's not magic at all. I thought about physics more like a crackpot than not for 30 years. I'm filled with humility and an admiration for those who 'have the maths' and a lifetime ahead of themselves to use it and enjoy it.
Hearing Avi Loeb just randomly also mention String Theory in his rant in the Zoom call was wild
Angela mentions cognitive decline as a possible reason one might become a crackpot. I think it also comes down to being full of one’s self as well, as if they come up with an idea, and rather than even admitting to themselves they could be wrong they just run with it .
@@yourlifeisagreatstory To me it looks like he takes criticisms of his work personally, and that just makes it near impossible to convince him he's wrong - to accept he's wrong is to agree with people who he perceives as attacking him, and nobody wants to agree with someone they view as an enemy that is attacking them.
If you think that he lost his chance to work in the scam circles, then you seriously underestimate those circles. They would be like "He was reluctant to admit it, but then he saw the TRUTH!" and it would go smoothly from there.
Yeah, like that's what happened with the guy who wrote the vaccine autism paper, he was relatively conservative with his claims at first, not outright saying people shouldn't get vaccines, but then he changed his tune so he could get more money
I wrote a back-of-the-envelope-type paper that crossed into a subfield adjacent to my normal one and I spent months fleshing it out and making sure I wasn't covering something someone had already done, and I spent 6 months afterwards terrified that someone would email me a list of all the previous work I'd missed or duplicated. I cannot conceive of being so self-assured to just dash something like that off half-done, never mind doing it every 2-3 months??? Thank you for laying out everything I've been frustrated about with Avi for the past ~5 years.
Also I think the "blogger" Avi was talking about is Ethan Siegel, who is a good science writer (and former astrophysicist)
Oh, but it's not 6 papers a year, it's 6 papers a month. One per week, with a double-banger on good weeks. All while doing 1200 interviews a year, or more than 3 interviews a day.
@@riccardoorlando2262and don't forget the books. It's absolutely ridiculous
I stumbled on this video after the latest round of Loeb press-whoring, expecting a quick and brutal takedown. Only a third of the way through and I've been entertained and educated in a far more positive fashion. Absolutely fascinating, thank you.
Thank you for doing careful work. One of the reasons I left academia was because I felt like my rate of publishing was lower than expected...but _exactly right_ for doing good work.
The real-world incentives in academia are _wack_.
Your question of who is the intended audience for Loeb's book is a fascinating one. I think you're right that it's not for laypeople and it's not for other physicists. But I also think it's not for future people. I think his intended audience is himself, and he wrote the book because he has a huge ego and wants to express his thoughts on how great he is. Maybe I should write a 3-5 page paper about this idea!
Agreed.SeeMick West metabunk.
Optics and fame is the most sought after currency of the day. Avi saw a fad (The UFO/Believer faith crowd) and how con artists are getting wealth and fame by making up UFO stories and decided to cash in. Pretty simple and nothing much wrong with doing that in my opinion.
nah, not just him. i have a mate who is up to his chin in all the ufo mythology. he loves avi loeb. he and i came pretty close to having a serious argument about it.
YEC is who
I think it is for future people, just not future scientists. He's doing a revisionist history as if he were writing it in the future, portraying himself as a seminal influence on all of science, the rebel so ahead of his time. Imagine if Einstein had done this and was now regarded as he is, but it wasn't true. Hm, maybe Avi Loeb should write a small paper about that theory: "Was Einstein Really Einstein?"
"2 factor just slows us down" 😂
That *was* really funny, but... since this video was made, didn't a bunch of computers at observatories get hacked?
I honestly couldn’t tell if it was meant to be satirical
@michaelmocan it's called a joke. not "satire", whatever you think that is. a joke
@@ThePainkiller9995 Por que no Los dos? Satire is a subset of joke.
@@ThePainkiller9995he probably meant “sarcasm” (or should have), but it was really facetious. But I agree it is definitely not satire, which is not just “a subset of jokes”.
That videocall with Avi is a masterclass in poker face
Avi Loeb: "Nobody thinks about aliens"
I visited Cornell last week to meet with some collaborators, I work on Exoplanets.
When I got there, the first two people I met in the exoplanet group were biologists that do lab work on weird microbes and measure the spectra of the gases they produce.
Two postdocs in one astrophysics department whose jobs are to figure out what spectral signatures we could maybe attribute to alien life. Two people literally constantly thinking about aliens, and helping play a role in the much larger task of identifying potential signs of alien life in exoplanet atmospheres.
They know their work results in a bunch of false positives and is ignorant of so many unknowns, but they're continually learning from past mistakes (e.g. the phosphine on Venus fiasco) and trying to make this aspect of the field more rigorous.
I would guess that Avi is setting the ground to build a competitor to Scientology. Much more profitable enterprise than science.
There are no planets. No one has actually been there and back to confirm scientists were right. A lot of false science is just a belief in what a few people high up on pedestals proclaim and cannot prove for themselves. Planets are just an idea pounded into our heads since our birth. Why ? To support a false idea that there are other worlds and other life out there. To make us seem insignificant. To support the false science theory of Big Bang. No planets, no aliens. If we are honest, all we see is light from a few chief stars that disobeyed their Creator and caused the inhabitants of the earth to err regarding the stars getting most of us offtrack ... to doubt the Word of God, to doubt who J.C. really is ... God in the flesh. When the so called aliens come, they will just be the fallen ones trying to fool the world into believing they came from another world when the truth comes from the Word of God, they have been with us all along... demons, fallen angels, and their offspring the giants.
I don't know for Avi Loeb (and I'm not a scientist), but what I would say is : there are scientists working on exoplanets and alien life, that's one thing. And also we are seing ufos in our sky and we don't know what they are, that's a second thing, totally different. We have to consider these two subjects.
@@UFOCyril Avo Loeb is playing with your mind. He does not associate himself with the studies of UFOs in our sky that some people claim to observe. He got millions of dollars in private funding. Instead of spending the money to go to places where many people saw strange phenomena in the sky and to investigate, he chose to look for pebbles in the ocean, which can be man-made after all.
@@UFOCyrilI will need some serious evidence to believe UFOs/UAPs are anything other than advanced military aircraft being tested. We already know that Roswell was an airforce spy balloon and many triangle formation UFOs were F117 and B2 stealth aircraft testing and training from before they were publicly acknowledged. Also notice that UFO news tends to come out around when geopolitical things happen or things the public may not like gave to be said publicly.
I'm not a scientist but for some reson my bullshit detector was ringing. I tried searching for "Avi Loeb" and "discussion", "criticism" etc, because I couldn't find a different opinion... and it turned out you're the only voice of reason on the Internet for the laymen. Subscribed.
A note, Avi Loeb is actually *widely* hated by many astrophysicists, it’s widely known he’s a quack. It just… doesn’t get passed around outside of physicist spaces
Y’all ignorant dogmatists
the algorithms social media platforms rely on only work to amplify sensational grifters like Loeb. Pushing back is risky because youll just be shouted down by "free speech absolutists" claiming ur censoring the crackpots.
tho people like kyle hill do have some geniunely good and popular videos criticizing stuff like Gruschs uap testimony. you just wont see it top the nonstop feed of people claiming otherwise.
@@bluewilliams4911 one quantifiable number of what other physicist think of Avi is his citation and he seems to be doing pretty well with a lot of high impact publications. Is it something like he published well in most of his career and now looking for mainstream fame which makes him hated in the community? Or is it that he specialized in niche fields that are not part of mainstream anymore?
There's a name for what you're doing "confirmation bias" lol.
This is such a good breakdown of how power structures and fame in academia can pervert/subvert quality controls. I had similar sentiments about a couple of "rock star" professors at Berkeley (although they provided less dramatic exemplars than Loeb), who had many hundreds of publications (many of which would have been ruthlessly and righteously shunned if I had submitted them). Worst of all, I feel like it's a bit of a self-perpetuating cycle, with junior academics supporting the absurdity to get joint-publications with "the master" and receive reciprocal treatment.
Loeb should have been fired from harvard a long time ago. I bet he has corrupt friends running harvard or else he would have been gone a long time ago
Absolutely. The scientific method itself may be objective - human beings are not and the structures and institutions created around it are no different than any other human enterprise - bureaucracy and established authority figures and “conventional wisdom” are all very hard to overcome. And pride. Human pride is certainly something “scientists” aren’t somehow exempt from being blinded by, and I will say pride in academia is perhaps more arrogant than in other spheres of the human endeavour.
My favourite part of this whole video is honestly the stuff about Luis Alvarez. I only just heard of him recently thanks to the Oppenheimer movie. That's what a true curious and intellectually honest mind looks like. So inspiring.
My favourite line is "Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo, it is not enough to be persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right." -Robert L. Park
It took a while to track it to the National Association of Science Writers Newsletter (Summer 1999), v48 n2 pg. 30 "What's New."
Brutal 😂
Avi Loeb is like if Tommy Tallarico went into astronomy instead of video game sound design.
His mom is very proud
I'll bet Avi Loeb has seven framed Guinness Records in his office.
He's like Penelope (Kristen Wiig) in SNL TV Show: first in every field :)
Oh god, this is painfully accurate.
I don't think Avi Loeb has ever been featured in the prestigious MTV Show "Cribs". Don't compare these two people.
I have a theory that Oumuamua is actually piloted by unicorns. As the first and only astro-unicornologist, I fear the scientific community is too dogmatic and stodgy to take me seriously. But I have a plan! I'm going to flood the zone with papers containing all my unique insights. I just bought a family pack of party napkins from Costco to write them on.
I hate to break it to you, but I scribbled something on a napkin in the early 2000s that predicted that not only would there be a cylindrical shaped object, external to our solar system, would be piloted by unicorns, but the object they are piloting is really the fossilized remains of a giant space unicorn. In fact the ship is actually made from a fossilized unicorn horn. =}
@@syyneater Well look at that, our field is already advancing. We have our first theoretical split. This is bigger than dark matter v. MOND.
@@syyneater that’s metal as hell. Like ‘let’s make our spaceship out of bones’
@@uncertaintytoworldpeace3650 Sorry, I already wrote a paper in the 70s about how unicorn bones are made of iridium.
Good Day,
It is great to see a fellow Astrounicornologist. I would like to give you the opportunity to publish you findings in my unicorn specialised journal: „Science and Magic“. It has an impact factor of over 9000 and a novel review process that is based on reviewer parity.(50% human, 50% unicorn).
After your crack at 2FA I thought "the video has to be all downhill from here" because it was so funny, but when you called Avi's papers shitposts I knew how wrong I was. Thank you for this video and your channel in general.
Great video! Avi reminds me of some of an old full professor I encountered as an undergrad at MIT. He’d done something amazing in his earlier career, and was now just coasting… with random stuff that briefly caught his fancy.
He basically read Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, and put a modern spin on Rama for Oumuamua. My mind went straight back to that book as soon as the first reports hit the media - with a tingle down my spine.
He did not even do that by himself. The pretext of the modern releases of the book directly refer to Oumuamua.
That's right! A great book, but alas and alack, it WAS science fiction....
I remember some of the scientists involved in it early on wanted to call it Rama.
Avi Loeb is using the scientific community to document his lore 😂
Tell us again about how you battled the conservative physics establishment and won!
@@andiralosh2173 make an argument
Avi Loeb is the Elon of physics?
@@andiralosh2173 Elon is a grifter who inherited a blood diamond fortune and screwed over the actual inventors of Tesla. So, your argument only suggests Avi Loeb is a grifter.
@@andiralosh2173 Avi Loeb had money from the family emerald mine?
When it comes to physics papers, I like Gauss' outlook on math theorems and proofs: "Few, but ripe"
I've never heard this but I like it!
@@acollierastro some mathematicians lament Gauss’ approach. His unpublished notes contain great ideas and not sharing them with the mathematics community slowed the development of Maths in several decades, according to some.
@@senefelder sure, but there's a difference between having useful ideas that ended up not being published and doing something like what is shown at 35:40.
@@RubALamp Maybe there could be a middle way here. Releasing it not as scientific papers, but on a different page as notes. Like, look people, I got these ideas and don't know yet if they're a bunch of crap, you can gloss over them if you like, if not it's just fine. But on the other hand, I don't know enough about how the scientific community works and maybe this is a bunch of crap as well.
@@pipeline789 Yeah, I think Angela touches on this in a part of this video, where Avi could release what he's thinking about as letters or something of the like where his publishings are better placed. The issue is, because of how the publishing industry is currently structured, it is prone to incentivize over-publishing, as seen with Avi.
As a consequence you'll have articles that, in my experience as a graduate physicist, are poorly written, feel very rushed, leave way too many details for the reader to figure out, are somehwat pointless, etc. That's not to say I've not read good articles, in fact many of them were crucial while I was writing my thesis, but I'm sure these articles would be better if scientists weren't overly pressured to publish.
Wow that quote from his book about his interactions with Harvard post-docs is such a perfect encapsulation of his approach to “science”.
Excellent, excellent research and effort put into this video presentation. Thank you.
Avi Loeb being the chair of the Astronomy dept at Harvard is actually one of the things that led me to look for alternative routes of education. Ultimately, he was failed by the system just as the system that lifted him up was in-turn failed by him.
His very success is a huge red flag for aspiring astrophysicists - one can be the perfect astronomer on paper and become chairman at an Ivy League university, but this is only a reflection of one’s value to administrators and the media rather than a reflection of one’s value to the community of peers within the discipline.
Not only was he uplifted to a position of academic leadership, Loeb was so failed by the academic system that he felt personally empowered to rudely attack the fmr Director of SETI. That is one of the most embarrassing clips I’ve ever seen of a public astronomy figure. Wow.
I wonder if his public speculations about omuamua led to the end of him being chair of the Astronomy Dept, or if he made these statements after he was freed from that position. His chairmanship ending in 2020 is what makes me wonder.
Thanks again! Still watching the rest 😎
Edit: ok i have to say , its very ironic for him to blame the astronomy community for “not looking through their telescopes” when he cant even write a real research paper. Does Avi Loeb even have enough time to pore over intensive telescope data with his paper production constantly chasing the next squirrel?? Lol
Your edit is a grave insult, both to squirrels and to the dogs that chase them.
Why is this the first time I’m discovering your channel? I love how you distill crackpottery so clearly and concisely. I think my BA in physics (now working in a research facility as an engineer) helped me to suss out crank conspiracies (my family is all about conspiracies), but I love how you’ve articulated this.
My theory is "they need to humble themselves" really means "they are questioning my brilliance so they must be arrogant because I'm a super special smart boy!"
Some of these guys need someone following them around with a giant squeeky hammer and get hit when they do something so ego-centric and stupid
The guy is the trump of american science.
Oh for fucks sake. Avi is not like trump holy shit.
Just like George Lucas.
I first heard of Avi Loeb when I heard him interviewed on Event Horizon here on UA-cam. He sounded so convincing, I was like, I’m going to immediately go out and get his book. Then, I did a little digging, and found out what he’s really about. He’s definitely the master of one-sided story telling. Also, if Jill Tarter is mad at him, that’s really saying something.
there's a video out there (sorry i dont have the link) where during a zoom based panel discussion he tells jill tarter that she is denying his brilliant idea because she wants the credit for the first alien life to fall on her and her seti team.
lol should have kept watching - there's a clip of the video around 32 mins where he's yelling at jill.
Event Horizon is how I know of Avi's multiple showings on there saying the same things over and over. He does come across as a con artist including his project funding imo, besides I never liked his whiny little uninteresting voice.
I've also likened him to Graham Hancock in his techniques.
@@Humannondancer it really sucks that a formerly interesting UA-cam channel like event horizon would get stuck pandering to the con artist over and over and over again
@@personzorz EH/John Michael Godier has addressed peoples problem with Ari in his more recent vid where he showcases Ari's recent expedition to find intersteller remnants in the sea. Hint: he found a 'curious piece of metal wire' lol
Also, when I see Ari on there, I now watch during the day as it's just fluff, and too annoying to go to sleep to.
I still like JMG who's still skeptical about claims, but I guess Harvard gravity connections..
Your channel's only flaw is that I've already gone through all the videos :(
i love the lightheartedness in which you make your videos, while also providing good substantial content; a little oasis in a desert full of overproduced stuff that doesn't even feel human anymore. Keep up the good work :)
i say she's like the daughter i never had, i tuck her in at night and she tells me the story.
Sincerely agree!
Totally agree ✔️
I used to love being a crackpot in middle school! But as you grow up, you realise that a real science is much different and involves much less sensationalism than the popular media portray. Also, this channel is a blessing for beginners in physics study, like me.
i was just recounting that my first exposure to science fiction was torchy the battery boy (1959) and later in school, ray bradbury and an excerpt from the story "kaleidoscope" about two stranded spacemen trying to describe how to reach each other, when there is no "up". (i left school at 16 in 1970) but i've always enjoyed being down the pub solving life, political and particularly science problems. i was nominated for a think tank, but i was too drunk.
Crackpots come from some barely adjacent field that they actually an expert in. Hence the crack, in the pot of expertise. It would be like if Einstein suddenly realized that light had a consciousness and he started trying to measure it and prove it and then went all over talking about it until he becomes well known for that instead of his physics field. This is the brilliant observation of the videoer. Crackpots usually have expertise, in something. I think their unconscious motivation is fame which is why there would be no point in Einstein becoming a crackpot.
Importantly, science always involves whatever the pseudoskeptics decide is worth study, and no evidence is extraordinary enough to take seriously if it challenges your assumptions
I started this video sort of in the background and for a while was thinking: "so... just another failed academic inflating his publishing stats" then I heard "Chairman of the Harvard Physics department" and this is just staggering. How did a guy like Loeb ever get such a position?
Astronomy department.
@@Frisbieinstein Thanks for the correction.
*How did a guy like Loeb ever get such a position?*
Because these positions are ultimately meaningless, and do not speak to how good a person's work is, nor does it speak to how smart or credible a person is. Many of us have been saying this for years: that academia is something of a scam, and is riddled with many fundamental problems, while not much effort has been done to solve those problems. Academic titles generally do not mean much.
I say all of this as a person who actually is studying physics at a graduate-level with the intention of joining academia and publishing papers.
that zoom conference with seti was incredibly uncomfortable to watch
I love how some people in that zoom call were having a real hard time not laughing
They should all laugh at him then boot his ass off the stream
@@lolmao500 It would feed his Galileo's complex
@@thear1sNow THAT is an underated comment :-)
Thank you for this. I feel like I’ve been taking crazy pills bc even to a layman like me Loeb’s answers sound like bs or rather, when I compare how he presents his ideas to how O’Dowd does in SpaceTime my spideysense activates. And while I’m relieved to hear someone delineate this stuff I can’t help but ask: how is Harvard ok with this? Are they happy to bask in the reflected glow of Loeb’s stardom? It seems very risky to their reputation.
I do wonder when/if Harvard will get fed up and make a statement...but so far it seems they are happy for the free press.
He is tenured with an endowed chair. Short of committing an outright fraud or crime, they won't touch him. Academic freedom, free speech and all that... His papers are also peer reviewed.
I think it's incredibly odd that all these credible people with access to data we don't have think there is a there, there from the head of NASA, DOD, Navy, prominent scientists, congressman on the intel committee... either it's a massive psy-op or somethings actually going on, and it's entirely within the realm of possibility to hypothesis what it could be until it's proven to not be that. But to out of hand dismiss all this as outside the purview of Harvard or serious consideration because it falls outside of your world view or expectation is ignorant. Seti putting all this effort and money into listening to signals hitting us as messages from an alien civilization has no basis, like Aliens even uses radio signals, even if Avi's theory is far fetched it has more merit based on observations of the object than their random hopeful assumption, yet it's accepted as a worth while endeavor. Let the guy explore, it's not like he makes claims that are fraudulent. But you stay in your academic bubble of what's proper to speculate on. String theory and so on are at this point one long series of shit posts. You just sound butt hurt that you're not Harvard material and don't have the clout he does. Keep chasing it though I guess.
Reminds me of Lehigh University having to deal with creationist Michael Behe. It's called tenure, which is ideally a great thing but occasionally goes awry.
@@edwardroberts7712 Or Brian Wansink at Cornell.
What never ceases to amaze me is the amount of energy the crackpotists are able to summon in defense of their crackpotism. I am exhausted just looking at them.
It's never a good sign when they show up on Joe Rogan carrying a cross
when someone's finally found purpose late in life, they'll cling onto it because it means everything to them. Even if that purpose is completely devoid substance. In their mind it's too late for them to turn in a new direction again.
This presentation was really well done. Great storytelling. The structure, flow, all of it was a pleasure to watch. Thank you. I'm an old carpenter, not a scholar but I have had a lifelong interest in science. I'm glad the UA-cam algorithm put your work in my feed and I look forward to exploring the rest of your channel.
I am so happy to have found this channel. Your level-headed, professional, expert, easily digestable clarifications of popular topics is really an internet treasure. Thanks a lot for what you do here.
I read some of the expedition reports from the pacific journey to retrieve metallic fragments from an airburst event. I soon got a little tired with what felt like, hm, actively lopsided ehr, let´s call it what it is: overinterpretation.
A lot of commenters pointed out likely alternative origins for the finds, and there was no effort to exclude these possibilities, only more free-floating plausibility arguments, that weren´t even all that plausible.
For Perey, cognitive decline is certainly a theory.. but highly educated people constantly turn to fields (or sub fields) that they believe they are qualified to speak to, and end up sounding ridiculous. In his case, he was an experimental physicist trying to break into theory.. These are wildly different kinds of expertise, even though they’re both “physicists”.
Could also be that they get more desperate to make discoveries and for whatever they are working on to be a thing because it they are coming to their end. You don't have the time for whatever direction you are go through to not be a thing and then to move on to something else.
I'm a physicist, and one of my favourite moments of my life, was when I asked a friend of mine about epigenetics. Her exact statement to me was "Peter, I have a Ph.D. in genetics, and I have never heard of this."
mental health must be considered too, when I had my break down I wasted a lot of time trying to program something, in itself reasonable, but because I was sick I just couldn't do it, it would be easy for someone in that sort of state to fall into crackpotism. there can be times in our lives where we need to distrust ourselves, sadly not everyone has the insight into ourselves to check ourselves.
However, Loeb's "fall into crackpotism" is very lucrative in terms of selling his books and getting funds for private jets and oceanic voyages.
Hey, thanks for being real, sometimes our sanity/mental health takes a little excursion. Happens to most of us across a lifetime. We also get better and do the hard work to come back.
The UA-cam algorithm brought me to your channel today. Your videos on string theory, on adjuncts, on postdocs, on first generation graduate students, on crackpots (no timecube?), on hacking, etc. have been really nice to watch. One of the saddest experiences with physics I've ever had was driving through Waxahachie, TX in the late 2000s, parking on a county road and looking over at the campus of what would have been the SSC. In front of me were all of the empty parking lots and behind me was herd of cows staring at me while they ate at their feeding trough. The Ellis County Sheriff's Dept drove up and asked what I was doing: I told the deputy that I had just wanted to take some photos at the site. He said that due to break-ins and thefts (of copper wiring), no one was allowed onto the property, so I took a few photos from that county road and left. Anyway, you have some great videos and your enthusiastic support of fair work arrangements is fantastic to see. (Namely, it provides hope that there are people who believe what you have stated.) One of your other interesting points from a different video involved qualifying exams and whether people could know what to expect: related to that (but slightly to one side) in the late 1990s, I ran into a series of hardbound books originally collected on behalf of Chinese students studying in the US: the series contained a very large selection of qualifier problems from seemingly all of the major US universities. Those might still be being published or be being expanded as collections. I haven't looked recently, but they are probably still out there as it were. Lastly, I wish you much success with your channel. Cheers!
timecube guy was clearly extremely mentally ill and I guess is the 3rd category of crackpot? the 4th is "antiauthority bro".
I've published a fair number of papers (in computer science). Getting a paper accepted in a journal in 3 days is unheard of! Every paper I've published in a journal was a nightmare (I mean I realize it is necessary I'm just saying as an author going through it is a pain) of feedback from editors, revisions, more feedback, more revisions, yet more feedback. Three days!! Three months would be faster than I or anyone I know has ever gotten anything published in a reputable journal.
hey should I try to retrain in computer science, or just blow my brains out?
I'm kidding, sort of! but I just quit a real cushy job - pride; sort of regret it now, but also, *screw* giving _my_ promotion/raise/bonus to the boss' kid, while still doing _all the work myself_ - and in hunting for a new one it has become apparent that I should not have gotten a degree in chemistry. because it is a horrible low-paying field, on the whole
and I had thought my only real alternative to be CS/software engineering; but now I'm hearing there's age discrimination (I'm 30) and the field is way over-saturated...?
man I barely wanted to keep going even before this and now...
I miss my wife and hate my life. haha.
don't mind me what the fuck does any of it matter
@@Kveldred Don't recommend blowing out one's brains... although I've had the thought myself once in a while. I don't think CS is over saturated but you have to be good which means staying current which means working your butt off sometimes. LOL at age discrimination at 30. I didn't even start to get into software development until my late 20's. Although I remember saying something similar to my boss about feeling I was too old and hadn't done enough when I was in my early 30's once and he laughed at me thinking 30's was old (he was more or less the age I am now where 30 seems really young... and I mean laughed in a friendly way, he was a great boss). One thing I recommend is the big consulting firms: Accenture, Deloitte, PwC. If you know some programming you may also be able to leverage your chemical engineering background. In those firms most people have both an industry focus as well as technology. The industry is more important. So you could leverage your knowledge about chemical engineering for an industry like manufacturing. If you don't already know it, I suggest learning Python. It is the easiest language to learn and it is in great demand. They treat you really well at consulting firms. If you like travel you may end up doing a lot of it and as you do you get miles and get upgraded to first class which is one of the things I miss most about not working for a firm anymore. The other thing I like about consulting is it is seldom boring. Also, unlike most corporations, most of them really are serious about valuing collaboration and not being dog eat dog. Deloitte is especially good in that regard but all of them are to some extent because they have to be. It's controlled anarchy. You almost always work with different people because the teams are assembled based on skills and who currently isn't assigned. You are expected to work hard but if you do you get promoted and after a while can make really good money. Not as much as if you go to a startup that has an IPO but that is much riskier because (except for when we have booms like the dot.com boom) most startups fail and you may work for a long time at a startup for little money and end up with nothing to show. Established companies like Google and Linked In can be great places to work but they are super competitive. One more thought: there is more to developing software than writing code. In fact the hard part isn't the coding it is understanding the requirements. So in that regard I recommend learning Agile methods. Agile is so much better for understanding requirements and in my experience the best developers all use it. Hope that made sense and was somewhat useful. I can relate about how the world seems kind of hopeless sometimes. When that happens (like today actually) I remind myself that at least I have clean water and no one is dropping bombs on me.
@@michaeldebellis4202 Hey, thanks a ton for this, mi amigo! I was actually coming back to delete my comment - _"no one cares about your dumb problems, Hak, leave the guy alone"_ - so to see such a comprehensive and encouraging response means *a lot* to me.
All three of: the laughing at my idea that 30 is too old to start, heh (much better than "oh yes that is true I'm afraid", certainly!); the specific suggestions (I've always heard great things about consulting but never even knew those three names; your suggestion and the companies together make a fantastic starting point!); and, finally, the reminder that _things could be _*_a hell of a lot worse_* - all three, as I say, are extremely useful.
Thank you very much, again. 🙂 I can't offer much in return... except - I guess - if you ever need an in at an oil company, well, let me know, in that case... 😂👊
@@michaeldebellis4202 Oh. Somehow my response thanking you got eaten by UA-cam. I truly have not been able to figure out why it will dislike some comments; I think their system is broken and they either haven't noticed or don't care, heh.
Let me try again, albeit at lesser length this time...:
★ Had actually been coming back to delete my comment - _"no one cares Hak leave the poor dude alone"_ - so seeing your detailed and helpful response made my day; I truly can't thank you enough!
★ All three of:- the laughing at my idea that 30's too old to try (better than "yep that's right and reasonable, might as well give up"! 😂) the advice, and the reminder that things could be much worse - are very useful indeed!
----------------------------------------------------
★ Your last line reminded me of the "The Simpsons Test" I use (when I remember to). There was a time in my life I went through horrible physical anguish, so great that I literally could not pay attention long enough to make it through one gag in the Simpsons - I would involuntarily lose track and become lost in my own internal world of torment after only a few seconds.
I still remember the gratitude and relief I felt when the morphine hit my mu opioid receptors, and I was well enough to do something as low-effort as _watch an episode of a dumb cartoon._
Hence and since, that's often been my metric for how bad something is:
→ if you can remember your own birthday for more than a couple seconds, or muster up a chuckle at a dumb five-second gag, _hey! chin up! it's not so bad!_ Heh.
----------------------------------------------------
Thanks again, mi amigo. 👊 I truly, truly appreciate it, more than I can express.
I can't offer much in return, but if you ever need an in in the petroleum industry... THAT, I could maybe do! 😂
@@Kveldred Thanks I appreciate that! Glad it was somewhat helpful.
Yeah it really feels like Loeb is just trying to get his “colleagues” to call him out on shit and then be like “yeah well I work at Harvard what shithole do you work at?”
I am reflecting about your video, and ethics in our physical community. Since I do have crackpoty tendencies, I am trying to draw lessons: I think the crucial thing is *humility*. If you have a fun pet theory and you cannot prove it; recognize it is not a physical theory, it is just a good idea for coffee break talk with friends and colleagues, not to write a paper. And specially not to throw a tantrum because your idea doesn't caught on.
And if you are part of the Harvard establishment, you get to publish your crackpot theories and complain that the establishment doens't take you serious!! I am joking XD.
Yes. Being a crackpot can be fun, so long as you aren't an entitled and delusional crackpot.
in my undergrad phonetics course, the final challenge assignment was astrolinguistics adjacent. We were given a description of the vocal tract of a hypothetical alien (I don't remember the details, it was similar but different to the human vocal tract) and use what we had learned about the human vocal tract to speculate about the acoustic and phonetic qualities of the alien's speech.
haha so cool =D
This reminds me of one of my favorite things ever written. I first encountered it at the Tech Museum in San Jose, but you can find it online. "They're Made out of Meat"
Here's a snippet: "They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
@@CineSoar oh my gosh, I went to that same exhibit, and I was also really taken in by that story!
@@internetfox It's such a fun idea, and then that last line just grabs you by the throat.
Cool, I watched a video once about a guy who was from the conlang community and he was attempting to make an language for birds. It's really really cool all the stuff we can do with linguistics.
Avi is literally everywhere. If there's a podcast going, there's a decent chance he'll be there.
Sometimes five times. It's awful.
Classic grifter behaviour
@bilbo_gamers6417 lol are you joking? He literally followed a stranger while discussing aliens? How does such a conversation start?
And he only keeps repeating the same stupid shtick over and over. Im not a scientist myself but My intuition told me not to listen to this guy pretty quick
let me guess... Joe Rogan
I love the fact that I just wasted an afternoon on your channel due to the algorithm recommending it out of the blue. I think there would be some value in a journal or a pamphlet of "homework problem" papers that could be released every year to AP highschool students or for intro college students. It could be a fun thing and depending on how it is done it could get a bunch of people thinking in terms of creating an experiment or just a general interest in scientific projects in general. Call it The Journal of Quarterly Physics Shitposts or something like that.
I hope you got your paper published, I especially liked the crayon drawing!
Questions:
1. If a person is interested in a topic and wishes to speculate on where these ideas may lead, how does one avoid crack-pottery?
2. How is it possible to maintain educational connections throughout one's intellectual life that might benefit a person with a curiosity for various pursuits outside of their primary field, but which could lead to effective cross-disciplinary work?
3. If trying to legitimately ask a question requiring expertise, how does a person avoid offending (or triggering) the expert with what may be innocently-posed specific questions that otherwise require redirection to further study?
Great questions. I like how you're thinking.
1) The essence of science is disprovability. A scientist who comes up with a new idea will work hard to try to prove it false; if it stands up to rigorous experimentation, it may be true. A crackpot will present a new idea and say, "There's no way to prove it's wrong, so it must be right."
2) I'm afraid that I don't understand this question.
3) I can't imagine an expert in any field being offended by a question about their field, provided that the asker legitimately wants to learn, and is not just being a troll.
@@bobbuethe1477 #2 ... I was referencing situations where academic work has given a person the nose for rigorous and critical methodology, but the techniques of two fields differ dramatically in terms of subject matter. For example, an English professor changing their scholastic interests toward symbolic logic via linguistics. Can an educated person interact effectively without either carte blanche or crank status simply because of appeals to authority, e.g. Neil deGrasse Tyson?
@@weatherupstairs4814
1. Doing research in the field, not presenting an idea and rejecting any evidence that goes against it. For example, you could do research on the photos of the interstellar object to try and prove, using that evidence, that it had to be moving using alien technology. But you can't just speculate WITHOUT EVIDENCE that something is true and expect the scientific community to support your conclusion, especially if you call them 'not progressive' and 'closed-minded' for it.
2. I don't really know what you mean. If someone wants to pursue something outside their primary field of work, that's fine. There's no issue with studying different disciplines, you nobody expects you to be Neil deGrasse Tyson about every subject, just don't act like Neil deGrasse Tyson about every subject. Avi acts like he knows better than people who devote their lives to the discipline he's written 5 pages about.
3. Scientists love to talk about their studies, nobody normal is gonna get mad at you for asking about one.
I wish I would have met someone like you so many years ago when I decided on biology instead of physics. I LOVED physics, but decided on medicine and environmental research instead.
I love your topics, your expression, and your exceptional progression of ideas and clarity…..all well said.
I’m in a similar boat I wish I had done materials science.
@@acollierastro why?
@@nathanborak2172 If I had to guess...the results have actual real world use and monetary value, so funding is probably better and it is done more outside of universities for a higher salary. Imagine you could pursue science and have a nice life without having to put up with the academic circus.
@@acollierastro I assume you know about the AlphaPhoenix UA-cam channel? They're a material scientist who makes great science videos.
Thank you for addressing this, I had seen Avi Loeb a Harvard professor on all the podcasts talking about this and was puzzled and disheartened.
The podcasters are like the american medias, all they want are clicks. Doesnt matter if the guy is a crackpot or a traitor, they want ad money. If interviewing terrorists was legal, they would do it.
In a recent interview (on another YT channel) Avi Loeb tried to refute the maxim "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." At that point, a red flag went up in my head. And I started listening more critically to his claims. Now, I get the impression he's becoming another Michio Kaku.
Kaku is annoying AF thats for sure but Loeb is worse. All thanks to the american medias controlled by like 5 billionaires, they keep pushing these assholes on every network. I wished Kaku and Loeb would be banned for life on all american medias. That would be great.
I personally think there's a place for people like that in the scientific community.
Sometimes, something does come completely out of left field, and if everyone is worried about being a crackpot, we'll never explore those ideas.
I think we should have a small minority of scientists working to prove zany ideas, because occasionally, they're right.
Maybe occasionally. But for the most part, they serve as an example of what not to do. Although that could also have some value...
@@michaelblacktree Yeah, I don't think they're going to make many real contributions, but some of the greatest scientific discoveries were made by people exploring ideas that the rest of the community thought were ridiculous.
That combined with the fact that any incorrect ideas they have are unlikely to sway the greater scientific community makes me think they're relatively harmless, but sometimes valuable. I wouldn't want a lot of them, but I think having a few is worthwhile.
@@derp195 I actually kinda agree with this. I just don't think Avi Loeb is one of those people. He's not exploring his unorthodox idea, he's engagement baiting. I'd love a version of Avi Loeb who gets an unusual idea in his head and actually goes and does research to try and find something that would contradict his ideas. Instead is shotgun blasts outrageous, shallow ideas knowing they'll get press attention and digs his heals in and condescends to anyone who dares contradict him, with a light bit of conspiracy narratives thrown in for flavor. Avi Loeb _would_ be good if he was actually explored his ideas, but he never will. It's not hard for me to imagine him going full grifter in a couple of years, he's already four fifths of the way there.
Your grad student joke about the single sentence conjecture reminds me of Hook's claim to priority on gravity being inverse square (which was, if anything, less substantial). What made Newton more significant was that he came along with the right mathematics to actually work out what shape of orbit that relation would imply - and, equally, to work out from the observed orbits of planets that gravity is indeed an inverse square law.
I really like the format/structure of all your video.
Intro,
Gradual explanations with real evidences (examples and conter examples) in words that can be understand by a non physician,
the actual subject,
your toughs based on what have been built in the video.
Really refreshing!
We can feel that it really matter to you, your passion!
I can even learn about some historical fact!
I'm subscribing for sure!
You are a treasure, Dr. Collier. A 'disambiguation' is exactly what this is - a meticulous (and generous and charitable) parsing of the matter. Here's wishing you treat us to videos like this for years to come.
As someone once said- “It’s not aliens… until it’s aliens.” But it has to be _proved_. Avi Loeb should realize that.
He does.
Which is why he's advocating for more research
So you cant talk about or research it unless its proven? That makes no sense. No papers would be written.
Courageous! You've elevated my hope for the advancement of science. My B.S. detector started screeching when Oumuamua blew up in the media for all the wrong reasons.
One of my favorite things about these videos is that you'll mention something really interesting in passing and then I'll go looking into it. Gotta read all about Planet 9 stuff now.
All of your videos are so great. I don't have a lot of experience with people who "think with the scientific method" like you do so seeing it laid out so well in an entertaining manner is teaching me so much
No matter how smart and educated someone is, they are not automatically insulated from narcissism. Actually the opposite seems to be the case alarmingly often. "Wrong? No, I would certainly KNOW if I was WRONG, now wouldn't I??"
Love your exasperated sighs BTW, so delightfully expressive.
I commented on one or two of your videos today already, and here I am again and not realizing how you kept my attention for an hour. You're good at this!
That’s really nice! Thanks for watching
Seriously, I had no plan of watching an hour long video, but somehow, here I am, at the end, having a "sensible chuckle."
For a week I've had one of the videos in a playlist and kept skipping it because while the subject looked interesting, I was wary of spending an hour with someone unfamiliar to me.
Well today I didn't skip it. Halfway through, I checked what else is in the channel and was disappointed that they're not all this long, because I was enjoying it so much!
Amazing how very intelligent people are certain that the degree in whatever field they hold it in makes them undeniable experts in (usually politics) others. The fact that they interject such opinion in completely unrelated discussions and without the same strict scrutiny as they would hold themselves to in their own field is, unfortunate.
Jordan Peterson on climate change!
Noam Chomsky on Serbia, and 9/11 - and Islam.
Electricians are brilliant people, but if I have a leaky pipe, I’m calling a plumber. Expertise in one topic does not qualify you as an expert in something completely different.
I noticed a comment below that referred to "Dr. Collier", and I realized that, even though I knew you had a PhD, I had not thought of you as "Dr. Collier". My error. I intend to always think of you as Dr. Collier as a way of giving you the respect you deserve. Excellent videos, by the way, Dr. Collier, and I hope to see many, many, more of them. I watched your space elevator video three times. It inspired me to try harder to understand calculus, a goal that is still a way off, but hey, one never knows until one tries. Thank you for the effort you put into these presentations.
Your channel is one of the best things that happened to me in this decade.
There was a podcast a couple of months back where Brian Keating had Avi Loeb and Eric Weinstein (of all people) as guests and going by the general tone of that episode, I would guess that all it needs for Avi Loeb is to not receive the Nobel Prize at any point and he'd be way down the IDW pipeline.
Also, that SETI Zoom talk was intense.
Awesome video!
glad I saw this reply cuz the last couple months I've been kind of binging various cosmology vids that yt has brought my way, like this channel, and I took a lot of math/science in school, so i'd like to hear from actual physicists, etc, rather than fabulists selling books or w/e
so anyway, I saw keating as a guest on some other guy's show, and they seemed like legit science guys so I went to check out more keating vids when I saw he had eric weinstein on as a guest
it was kind of a gut punch cuz it makes me wonder how often I take ppl seriously when I prob shouldn't, and how much vetting do I have to do on everything I consume?
was very disappointing as someone who kind of considers science as their religion -- it's such a desecration to pass these ppl off as actual science
@@spellkowski6996 That is actually a rather difficult problem and I've been thinking about that a lot. In academia, mechanisms like peer review can give you access to data that is reliable and vetted with the goal that you yourself can produce data that will be a reliable source for other academics down the line. But even then, you wouldn't (or better, shouldn't) blindly trust a paper or author just because they've been peer reviewed and published. In fact, you wouldn't rely on single sources at all and always try to find other sources to corroborate data/interpretations/etc (depending on the discipline you're looking at, ymmv). Ideally though, others have already done the vetting for you.
But when it comes online spaces that falls away. There's no peer review, there's no way to know whether some explanation is a good representation or coloured by biases (there's usually always bias, but some forms are more important than others)... do we actually know that @acollierastro is an actual PhD physicist?
I think that even having expertise in a field isn't a good foundation to judge whether a person is a reliable science communicator or not. [Insert joke about engineers], but I can totally see PhD physicists finding Eric Weinstein's "work" groundbreaking, Keating does, Avi Loeb at least doesn't disagree, heck, Weinstein even was on the GUT debate hurricane special episode by PBS Space Time.
For me personally, I have a degree in the socials (even though I also have a medium level university science education, which is useful to separate out the total bunk), so I tend to focus on who hangs out with whom, what do they say besides the science, why do they say it, hidden assumptions, connections into other online spheres etc. That takes time, but I'm also terminally online, so that approach might not be useful for everyone.
In the end I think that there actually is no way around vetting the people you're watching, at least to some degree. Not total scepticism, but also not full open mindedness.
Yeah, so, rambling over
I had to Google IDW! I'm kinda sick of endless podcasts where questionable theories are mixed in.
This is very valuable work you're doing. A lot of this type of subjective and contextual information (e.g. discussions of how a public figure is actually perceived within their own field of expertise) only exists in the form of tribal knowledge and in conversations over coffee at conferences or after work beers with lab mates, or maybe I'm Twitter threads. I really believe that documenting this stuff in detail is crucial to scientific history!
As Dan Olsen points out in his "How Geocentrists Tricked a Bunch of Physicists" video, when journalists ask a scientist to respond to something a colleague said, they are much more likely to be measured and diplomatic rather than outright saying they think someone's work has no scientific merit. But these official journalistic interviews are much more likely to be taken as reliable sources than random Twitter threads. I think this we absolutely need more of the type of documentary work. Looking forward to more of your work!
Since he's still at it (latest being the assertion that little melted balls of metal he found at an impact crater were 'alien technology') and as I read that I was confused that Harvard was ok with this guy just dragging their reputation down like that, I watched this to try to just understand what the heck was even going on; thanks for filling in the context!
As someone who goes to the school down the road, I’m not at all surprised Harvard is fine with him doing this
Thanks for this video. I just started reading the book mentioned here and I'm only on chapter three and I'm tired of how impressed he is with himself. You saved me from finishing it.
I'm rewatching all these videos because they're just so good. Please make more videos.🙏
Just got recommended your channel for the post doc exodus video. I also saw the initial crackpot video and thought it was hilarious. I’m curious about the emails that one would get as a mathematician - it’s what I’m aspiring towards as a final year undergrad student. Cool videos!
Thanks for watching!
Between this fantastic breakdown and BobbyBroccoli’s documentaries I have learned the spectrum of crackpots is actually super interesting
Great channel.
This is wonderfully done, thank you! And I love the levels of compassion and respect you clearly express along the way. Subscribing for more.
I'm so happy to see Luis Alvarez get some love as he was one of the best scientists of the last century that very few people know about. I was a firm believer in the shot from the Grassy Knoll theory mostly due to the motion of JFK's head from the fatal shot -- intuitively you presume that shot had to come from the front right of the limousine and it was for me the single piece of data that supported the Grassy Knoll shooter and refuted the Warren Report. But, I learned of Luis's work on the Zapruder film and his analysis of the fatal shot and while I was initially skeptical I ran the numbers and sure enough it is mathematically possible for a target to move towards the shot. In essence, the bullet, as it entered JFK's head, had a kinetic energy equal to one half the mass times the velocity squared and knowing what that mass was and a reasonable calculation for the velocity you can calculate what the kinetic energy was at the moment of impact. Then, if you figure that the shockwave travelling through JFK's brain would result in an over pressurization of the skull opposite the entry location, and that once the skull was ruptured, brain matter and other material would be ejected at significant velocity owing to the shockwave. Then if you say that, perhaps a third of the incoming kinetic energy, say 600J, was transferred to the ejecta and the mass of the ejecta was, say, 100g the resultant momentum of the ejecta would be about 11 kg*m/s. So, if JFK's head weighed, say, 6kg, the resultant reaction velocity of his head would be just under 2m/s which is pretty fast.
Add to that his work in identifying the probable cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs as well as his work on the Manhattan Project and Radar -- he was one of the greats!
Hey new sub, amazing content so far, the few vids that youtube has algorithmed me. I half ignored that asteroid, as was half hoping it would hit, but I never heard it had changed speed. When a physicist, an educated person, jumps to controlled technology, and a highschool dropout who spends too much time on youtube physics channels goes to all the reactions I watch on here, I laugh and yell crackpot now. Seriously, ever seen sodium thrown in water, thermite burn, phosphorus oxidize? How do you actually say there's no explanation but ship. Mind boggling.
The funnest thing about this is watching the close caption auto generate the words and finding all the funny ways that they spell Avi Loeb. My favorite so far is Javilope.
I recently discovered your channel through your recent string theory video and have been watching you videos at a pretty good clip. It's all very good content. Seriously. I am curious to know what your opinion is about Sabine Hossenfelder. While I definitely don't think she's a crackpot, I guess I'm starting to become more skeptical of her perspective than I initially was. You seem like a pretty savvy person who is in the overall physics field so I thought your perspective might provide some insight. Thanks!
Someone in my group did a colab with her and a lot of people in the group are very hmm about it...
I've clicked "don't recommend channel" when her videos come up, hopefully the YT algorithm gets the message. I really dislike the clickbaity thumbnails & titles.
If nothing else she seems to be pretty rash since she has clearly gotten on the nerves of people in very different fields, from quantum physics to fusion technology.
i used to watch her a bit, but started getting put off after i noticed how unusually broad her range of topics was. she seems excessively prone to anti establishment views, and will assert those views with the utmost confidence regardless of her level of expertise. a lot of her reasoning and arguments are quite sound but she seems a little too sure that she’s right, even when she is not at all an expert. i stopped watching her when she started putting out videos covering current issues like trans people in sports. ma’am you are a theoretical physicist, this is out of your depth, you’re no more educated on this than i am. i’m not a science person (as far from it as you get- i’m a law student!) so i could be completely misreading the red flags here, but that’s how it looks from my layman’s perspective.
I've watched a number of her earlier videos on QM and I think they were quite decent - speaking from the perspective of a simple cat who knows little about physics but understands the scientific method. Then, when she hit 100K subscribers, she started going all over the place, from climate change to making a video that 2+2 is not necessarily 4. At that point, I unsubscribed.
"No one would look through Galileo's telescope."
"Ok, where's your telescope?"
"I am so disappointed that this community is criticizing me!"
When a scientist writes over 10 papers per year on average, that’s where scientist becomes “scientist” until a detailed review is done
This video came out before I knew about your channel, and I'm just watching it now. Thank you, you helped set some of my own thinking straight.
I'm really glad the algorithm has decided to keep serving up your videos to me over the last couple of weeks; as an academic mathematician of a approximately similar age, I really appreciate your perspective, and your amazing ability to explain it and educate a wider audience about the "inside" of academia.
Al's got rhythm, finally. I've gotten sick of Al constantly trying to get me to watch a video that is days old, three hours long and has seven views. Then there's the endless number of "shorts" being shoved down my throat, so I agree with you completely, this is refreshing. Especially as I am part of the unwashed masses who prefer their scientific information presented in red crayon - they are the yummiest.
As the nephew of a PhD Chemical Engineer - Professor of Fluid Dynamics and the son of a Mechanical Engineer, I've always been around discussions around the workings of academia, I am always happy to find someone else to explain the latest discoveries and developments revolving around the sciences. Especially this one because I've been dubious about Avi Loeb after I heard him on Event Horizon.
Hah, same happened to me! And now it is enougfh, I will just subscribe.
@@Bob-Jenkins if you keep saying "not interested" to all the shorts that are suggested to you, YT does seem to get it after a while.
More crackpot videos please.
I’m developing a theory about theses people. I don’t have any background in psychology, but does anyone know any professors I could send my theories to?
this comment is hilarious, it's got to be intentional. well done
Apropos of publishing short inspirational ideas, in my (former) field we had the exact opposite of what you spoke about in this video. A leading scholar in Comparative Semitic Linguistics, mainly Ancient Oriental languages, was famous for publishing the most profound and well researched material imaginable. He had a HUGE library because everybody in the field, and related fields, sent him their papers and books for review, prior to and after publication. If he hadn't been very much on the wrong side of history in Germany during WWII, he would have been more famous outside of his field. I knew him personally and had the very distinct pleasure of visiting seminars of his after his retirement. Anyway, during his main days as a professor, he was known for voicing "I think so" theories, ideas, and observations orally, but never in publications, simply because he couldn't prove them. Countless papers have been published since then with the famous "I got this idea from ...", referencing him. BUT, near the end of his life, when he was over 80, he started adding his ideas and observations to review articles, based not so much on tangible proofs, but on his reputation. They were soaked up by the field, because everybody knew how valuable they were. Today we find many references such as "as mentioned by ... in ..." in publications. This is the way it should be.
The topics are fascinating, and you are indeed a great storyteller. The back to back memes at 45:00 are why I love this channel, absolute gold
Thank you for explaining and clarifying the whole Avi Loeb situation. Great video, I learned so much! Love your content!
This guy reminds me of an architype often identified with gamers/gaming: The min-maxer. Somebody who seeks to maximize the result for the minimal amount of effort required. Put another way, it would seem to me he has identified the systems surrounding academia and determined the best way to advance himself legitimately within the confines of those systems, for the least amount of effort/work/research required to do so.
I commend him for not slipping into the territory of the grifter/scammer, but to be clear, what he is doing is approaching the border between legitimate and illegitimate science. The least ethical part of his method is the leveraging of his position to inflate number of papers he can publish in a given time, which is an efficient albeit dubious approach.
Comparing his papers to scientific shitposting was both comedic gold, and accurate. Overall, this was an interesting and fun little journey into your world for this layman, thanks for sharing it.
"I have written over 800 love letters, and nobody wants to date me!"
Don't worry, you're probably being a great inspiration to the receivers.
Your E(naught)=MC2 video got recommended to me by the algorithm. I learned something from it and I must say that after watching a few more of your videos, including this one, I had to subscribe. Entertaining and I'm learning things. My naivete about science journal publishing is being made more clear to me now (I'm no scientist and didn't think about it much, but I was surprised to learn about the nature and quantity of Loeb's published work). Thanks for the good videos!
And I learned the proton is made up of 99% of balled up energy and 1% of mass...incredible...
can't wait to read "A response to : 'harvard & aliens & crackpots: a disambiguation of Avi Loeb'" by Avi Loeb on the arxiv
Michael Atiyah is the Francis Perey of math, but it’s maybe even worse in his case. Atiyah was a legendary mathematician for decades. He won several of math’s top awards, founded a field of math, solved some incredibly hard problems, et cetera et cetera. Then, in his late 80s in 2018, he gave a talk at a fairly notable conference where he claimed to have proven the Riemann hypothesis (one of the most famous and difficult problems in the pure math field of analytic number theory) by means of, among other things, the fine-structure constant. A physical concept. That is not relevant to pure math. It definitely wasn’t nearly a proof, but people were really gentle about it because Atiyah was clearly in severe decline. He died like one year later, and it was really sad.
Great video - I learned a lot. I'm surprised you didn't mention Carl Sagan! Cosmos came out in 1980 and discussed "astro-archeology" or whatever in a very popular public medium and inspired a generation of scientists. Avi is like some egomanic evil twin of Sagan.
not an identical twin for sure.
Sagan didn't just discuss astro-archeology. He led the committee that assembled the contents of the "Golden Record" that flew on both Voyager spacecraft. It was intended as an astro-archeological spacetime capsule with instructions on how to interpret it in the liner notes (the protective metal cover). It also included the whale sounds that caused the aliens in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" who found the record to build a giant ship (that Oumuamua vaguely resembles) to come rescue them.
So not only is Loeb a bit of a hack, he stole the idea for this one from Star Trek with minimal modification. I guess he left out that it was sent by aliens who got the Voyager record because we're still getting signals from the Voyagers and they haven't really been gone long enough for aliens to have constructed a ship to come save the whales.
Sadly, for the lay person, the more podcasts Loeb appears on, the more credible he seems - if you have a mind so open your brain's fallen out. He sounds ridiculous, and his ideas are nonsensical and don't stand up to any scrutiny. But the podcasters want clicks and in certain circles his is a name that generates clicks where real science doesn't necessarily.
Ultimately, regardless of his motivation (whether delibarate or misguided) he shouldn't be given the space he has currently been afforded.
Brilliant video.
Out of curiosity, what exact idea of his does not stand up to any scrutiny? I am genuinely interested in your answer.
@@vaakdemandante8772 Oumuamua was an intergalactic spaceship. That's the most obvious one. He's so fixated on the idea that aliens are coming to visit us it's not funny - why would they come here? We're not in an interesting part of the galaxy, and it's be hard to even know we were here unless you looked at the right time.
@@Jablicek he never claims Oumuamua is an "intergalactic spaceship," and I am certain he would say it is certainly not an "intergalactic spaceship." Intergalactic refers to between galaxies and the nearest one from ours is 2.5 million lys away. If it was coming from there, at 38 km/s that would take 20 billion years, a longer time than the universe is old. I think you mean to say interstellar.
@@nathanlillie5262 I haven't seen all his interviews, but I've seen enough of them to know that while he *may not* have used the words "it's an intergalactic space ship", he certainly implied it heavily.
@@Jablicek you are missing my point. You don't understand the different between intergalactic and interstellar. This difference is important, and you should look it up and get it clear in your head. I am certain he never claimed that it is intergalactic because that is utter nonsense. It IS an interstellar object and no one is disputing that. He thinks might be a light sail, which some people might think is kooky, but it is more that he is being a bit full of himself and misrepresenting the academic debate in public forums that is the problem. .
I would not call people like Avi Loeb crackpot, they are more like faker or impostor (the real ones, ie they are not good enough for their position or job title). I have met them in every institute and organisation, the top universities not excluded.
I attended a crackpot talk once. The guy was an actual astronaut, he did go to space, and the first half of his talk was about his experience in microgravity and his sensations when he came back to Earth. Great stuff. But the second half was his theory of time, and that was absolute nonsense.
It is recommended, as a stimulating idea to the science community, to consider that Loeb might be an unintelligent terrestrial life form, but not as we know it.
Well done video about crackpots in the field. It’s great that you highlighted a non-crackpot yet versatile physicist. As a lapsed physicist I’m looking forward to the rest of your vids, now that The Algorithm has shown me your channel.
This is an awesome critique. Thank you for your fair handed approach. A great disambiguation. Loved it!!!!
You're like a physicist version of Jenny Nicholson, and I am here for it.
I can't believe that I hadn't put together all the stories of Alvarez's pursuits. I knew about most, but not all, of these things (the watermelon JFK photography work is incredible), but I had not put together that these were all done by _one man_ (although, of course, not alone). I still have books from my parents' time that I devoured during my kid dinosaur phase that mentioned the many-causes theory, only giving the giant impact passing mention. Love the video. Glad I subscribed and am now watching through the backlog.