The humiliating truth behind Harvard astronomer's alien spherules

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/truth-harvard-astronomer-alien-spherules/

by PaulHoule • 2 years ago

28 46 2 years ago

nick2382• 2 years ago

I liked the time when Avi yelled at the director of SETI, Jill Tarter (inspiration for the fictional Ellie Arroway from the movie Contact), whose life's work has been searching for ETs for not searching for ETs in the right way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI&t=1879s

DemocracyFTW22• 2 years ago

Highly recommended to watch the entire video and also check out the other stuff by Angela Collier (formerly acollierastro).

Also funny that Avi takes string theory as an example of mainstream science. Some scientists are not sure it's science at all because it was never based on anything but assumptions.

reaperman• 2 years ago

Has string theory ever led to important testable predictions? I’m very out of the loop on theoretical physics.

throwway1203852• 2 years ago

The conclusion I draw when I watch the evidence presented in this video is that Avi Loeb is a narcissist who's made his way into the big leagues and is finding out that tooting your own horn doesn't work on people like Jill Tarter.

bsoles• 2 years ago

The second-hand embarrassment I had watching that video was unbearable.

Social media did a number on those scientists with "big personalities". It is one thing that influencers and grifters get a platform on social media. But it is another thing, and more harmful, when people with credentials and power abuse those platforms. Look at Avi Loeb, Jordan Peterson, all the science/physics gurus going crazy with an ever-increasing desperation to stay in the limelight...

GenerocUsername• 2 years ago

I for one think it is important to make sure that young scientists not learn to dream too big.

jrussino• 2 years ago

I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not.

Surely we should encourage young scientists to "dream big", as long as we also teach them to actually "do science" effectively right?

Maybe it's the vagueness of what "dream" means here. Imagination, creativity, and the like can be valuable insofar as they steer us to look in new useful directions and ask new useful questions. As long as the "looking" and "asking" are done with an honest aim toward finding the truth and an understanding of the tools scientists have developed to do that effectively I don't see the problem.

I don't see the takeaway message from this article being "this scientist's dreams were too lofty", but something more like "this scientist ignored good scientific practice in pursuit of his lofty dreams".

PaulHoule• 2 years ago

The job market is tough enough that Avi Loeb getting tenure means somebody else didn’t. The young scientist seeing what Loeb can get away with because he is powerful might conclude they want to leave the field.

ametrau• 2 years ago

It’s sarcasm

wdh505• 2 years ago

Well, if publish or perish is hard in your own discipline, why not branch out and publish nonsense for fun and profit /s

lumost• 2 years ago

Reality is that we likely incentivize that behavior amongst scientists. If tenure comittee just cares about paper count, and the average 2-4 citation paper is never replicated. Then there is a viable strategy for publishing crap work faster than others can publish good work.

If you do this in a way that you can be forgiven for being wrong… then the risk is even lower.

We should be surprised that more leading scientists are not in fact frauds.

anfractuosity• 2 years ago

Tangentially related, on the topic of micrometeorites found this rather cool "Cosmic cleaners: the scientists scouring English cathedral roofs for space dust":

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/17/cosmic-cathe...

fsmv• 2 years ago

I think we should just do the science. He got the materials and we can look at them to see if it's interstellar or not. There's nothing wrong with doing the expedition, that's what science is.

Why does it have to be called humiliating and basically attacking Dr. Loeb the whole time?

throwway1203852• 2 years ago

He's saying they've already done the science. It's only humiliating if you've staked your ego on a particular theory. If your interest is only in getting to the truth, it's a reasonable point of view.

tropdrop• 2 years ago

Because he repeatedly ignored fellow researchers pointing out that the seismic activity he attributed to interstellar impact did not differ from seismic activity recorded at that location whenever a heavy truck drove on the main road near the detector.

Although I agree with you that "humiliating" might be too loaded a word (but it drives clicks, so here we are).

hersko• 2 years ago

If you read his rebuttal (which is linked in the article) he explains that he was relying on DOD satellites, not the seismic stations. The article doesn't even mention that....

angiosperm4• 2 years ago

It is humiliating because he violated all principles of legitimate science. He was not just wrong, his claims were not even possibly scientifically right, or meaningful.

pfdietz2• 2 years ago

I am not surprised.

https://twitter.com/PaulFDietz/status/1679809546104057856

thegrim000• 2 years ago

The hate and humiliation campaigns are so interesting. I've seen and read hours and hours of Loeb's commentary and he's never once made any hard claims. He proposes interesting hypotheses that could explain data, and then goes out and collects data to figure out what's actually going on. That's science. That's the scientific process. You propose the set of hypotheses that fit the available data, both the mundane and unlikely, collect more data, and rule out hypotheses that don't fit the new data, and whiddle it down.

Anybody that thinks he's made hard claims are mostly just suckered in by trash pop sci articles that spins what he says into ridiculous headlines/articles like "Loeb says there's UFOs on the ocean floor!" to get clicks.

Ironically, the very article that was linked here makes unscientific hard claims: "The seismology data used to locate this meteorite wasn’t due to an impact, but merely a truck passing near the seismic station". That's a hard claim. There's no "we think the most likely explanation is X" or "the data is better explained by X theory". The paper the article links to as "proof" also makes no hard claims but merely says that they think the data "suggests" a traffic based origin better explains the data. The article itself is the definition of unscientific and everything they're trying to pin on Loeb.

[Edit] The paper which claims the traffic-based origin also has a grammar mistake in the very first paragraph, so I'm not very enthused about reading further and seeing how methodical their methods were, when they couldn't even manage to write a one paragraph summary without error.

matthewdgreen5• 2 years ago

I don’t know if Loeb is right or wrong about any of this (and I would find it much more exciting if he was right) but the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” saying really applies to Loeb on this one. To track an interstellar asteroid to a precise location on the ocean floor and recover pieces of it requires an extraordinarily precise chain of evidence, and if even a fraction of this article is accurate, that doesn’t feel justified here.

angiosperm4• 2 years ago

Extraordinary claims require legitimate evidence. "Extraordinary" cannot describe evidence; all evidence is ordinary. What happened here is that the evidence was so bad as to be incapable of supporting any claim.

rhelz4• 2 years ago

We probably are all familiar with the Fermi Paradox, but Issac Arther noticed it has a very interesting implication: Claiming that an alien probe has visited the earth is NOT an extraordinary claim.

Under very weak assumptions (basically that an intelligent race would have the desire and ability to explore the galaxy via self-reproducing probes) the galaxy should be crawling with such probes. Even at sublight speeds---and even if probes were only sent between stars when the stars naturally moved closer than a light year from each other just from their orbital movements around the galaxy--in a few million years the probes would be ubiquitous.

What is extraordinary is the negative evidence we get from not observing these probes. It means that there has never been even one intelligent species who had the technology and desire to explore the galaxy. Or even that there wasn't a small minority of them who wanted too--or even one Elon-Musk-esque individual who wanted to.

Given that we can almost do this ourselves (heck, if our own Elon Musk tried, I wouldn't bet against him succeeding) Avi Loeb's hypothesis that one of these probes might have hit the earth isn't an extraordinary hypothesis at all. We should expect to find these probes, and maybe we haven't found them yet because nobody has bothered to look for them.

pfdietz2• 2 years ago

The isotope evidence strongly implies he's wrong.

rhelz4• 2 years ago

Yeah, even if the hypothesis is refuted, why is this humiliating? This isn't kindergarten, its not like having your hypothesis refuted gives you cooties. No moral culpability accrues to you.

What's humiliating is what's happening in Psychology right now. Humiliating is having to retract your paper because you made up the results. Humiliating is losing your career because you are a big fat fraud.

angiosperm4• 2 years ago

What is humiliating is to be seen failing to learn from elementary criticisms by longtime professionals.

In this, Loeb is different from promoters of the end-Pleistocene comet strike in North America, where all the criticisms were obviously specious and tendentious. In that case it was the critics who were humiliated. E.g., Boslough insisted, both circularly and speciously, that the historical rarity of comet strikes proves that no such recent strike could have occurred.

Loeb is different from promoters of the 130,000 year old mastodon butchery site in San Diego, where all the criticisms published after were already fully refuted in the original paper.

ecronant• 2 years ago

If Sagan put out Cosmos tomorrow for the first time it would be branded trash and misinformation by a dangerous, idiot inquisitor style, media landscape doing everything it can to not go broke.

A hypothesis about aliens is just a slow pitch, right over the plate for the inquisitors to smash.

The inquisitors are hell bent on making sure young people understand that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.

gargablegar• 2 years ago

What’s happening in psychology?

angiosperm4• 2 years ago

That Loeb failed to collect material outside the area he designated, as controls, demonstrates he was not even attempting actual science.

baja_blast• 2 years ago

But he did

cozzyd• 2 years ago

Speaking of hate campaigns, I'm at the same institute as one of the people referenced in the article and have received unsolicited unhinged email from some crazed Avi Loeb disciple urgently imploring me to "address" my colleague's "slander" and "character assassination" of Avi Loeb. How bizarre...

The humiliating truth behind Harvard astronomer's alien spherules

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