Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he's found fragments of alien technology

This is the latest take-down of Loeb from Big Think:

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

There is a lot science in this piece that is over my head, but it's still fun to read because it's important for knowledgeable people to take the time to smack these guys in the face with hard facts. And it's a reminder that confirmation bias is not exclusive to the uneducated.
 
Axxman300 said:
There is a lot science in this piece that is over my head...
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It has to be there, even in a popular piece, because it's ever more important these days to show receipts. It's not necessarily important that every reader understand the scientific details. But it's necessarily important that it be transparently presented, so that people who do know the field can endorse the conclusions of the article from a perspective they can credibly represent as informed.

...but it's still fun to read because it's important for knowledgeable people to take the time to smack these guys in the face with hard facts.
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Self-policing is an extremely important aspect of modern science. Narrowly considered, the scientific method is about proper experiment design and execution. More broadly considered, the scientific method also includes peer review and public debate. Asking people to trust science and scientists means showing a willingness not to protect bad actors, but rather to challenge them on defensible grounds of scientific rigor.

And it's a reminder that confirmation bias is not exclusive to the uneducated.
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Science is hard, even for physicists.

I've encountered a few other people like Loeb. Because physics styles itself as foundational to all other physical sciences, a few physicists come to believe they are automatically qualified to practice all the sciences that look to physics. All the physicists I know are very smart, and know they are very smart. But none of the physicists I employ are so arrogant as to believe that other scientific pursuits are within their grasp without additional curated study. Which is to say, all my physicists are also other things. And they have taken the pains to learn those other things the right way, just as any other student of them. None of them has said, "Well, I'm a physicist, which means I'm automatically able to practice these other disciplines too."
 
Puppycow said:
In the interest of fairness, Avi's response:

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/a-meteor-is-a-truck-according-to-the-new-york-times-cef1ce01d054
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After previously hanging his hat on the seismology data, he merely sweeps under the carpet the problems with it. Then he changes horses to concentrate on the sky observation data. However, he doesn't escape the criticism of his methodology: he's just making up methods as he goes and assuming they must give him the answer he wants. Yes, they produce numbers that he can proffer to a high degree of precision, but that's not how a methodology is validated in science. So he's back to simply dabbling in other people's fields using more arrogance than background.
 
Every time he opens his mouth, the stupid flows forth:

Humans will evacuate from Earth within decades, Harvard professor predicts

A renowned ‘alien hunter’ has said there will soon be a human exodus from Earth in the same way the Israelites set off into the desert thousands of years ago.

Harvard professor Dr Avi Loeb believes the migration could happen within the next few decades, and will be led by a modern-day Moses who has already been born.

He added that those pioneering humans may also find a new god among the stars, likely a form of alien life.

‘Just this week we had the Passover celebration of a few thousand people who left their status of slavery building the pyramids 3,200 years ago,’ said Professor Loeb.
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Sure, as soon as Zefram Cochrane invents his warp drive. :dl:
 
shemp said:
Every time he opens his mouth, the stupid flows forth:

Humans will evacuate from Earth within decades, Harvard professor predicts

Sure, as soon as Zefram Cochrane invents his warp drive. :dl:
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I was going to make a snarky comment, but then I decided to first read the story and the headline makes it sound dumber than what he actually said.

"Humans will evacuate from Earth within decades" implies that everyone will go. That's what "evacuate" means. Nobody is supposed to remain in a building when you "evacuate" the building. Evacuate means everybody, in theory at least.

What Loeb actually said:
Professor Loeb added that it would only be a select group who journeyed to the stars.

‘It will not be the entirety of humanity obviously, but a small group who will proceed to explore interstellar space . . .
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Perhaps a better Biblical reference would be the Noah's Ark story.

Yes, it's still dumb, but the way the story is written and presented makes it sound even dumber. Down to the picture of a dude in a spacesuit straddling a rocket as if that's how people would travel through space.
 
Puppycow said:
I was going to make a snarky comment, but then I decided to first read the story and the headline makes it sound dumber than what he actually said.
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I don't dispute the central theme of Loeb's claim. "Evacuate" is the wrong word, and Noah's Ark is a much more apt reference. What got me into rocket science was the determination that human survival will greatly enhanced by spreading out to different planets. We're less susceptible to planet-wide extinction events.

But it will take several generations of us rocket scientists to make that a viable solution. I think Loeb's time estimate is naively aggressive.

I just think if you're a Harvard professor, your references to Judaism should be historically accurate. But also, if you're a Harvard professor of physics and astronomy, your predictions should rise above an extremely common trope in science fiction. Exodus from a dying Earth, or whatever, is something your average nerdy 14-year-old has already thought of. If you're going to publish on this from the perspective of a genius so profound as to be YHWH's gift to science, tell us how we're going to do it.
 
How we're going to do it is a mere engineering problem, hardly worth the attention of a Physics Professor At

HARVARD!

And that's unnecessarily snotty of me. I once had to deal with a new-minted Harv'rd chemistry prof who was a) decades younger than me and b) immeasurably superior to any wretched administator in an office.
But I'm sure he got ironed out soon enough and by now enjoys tenure somewhere. I can't imagine him surviving anywhere but in academia.

Where you got your degree makes some difference at first, but your standing in your field depends entirely on your work.
 
sackett said:
How we're going to do it is a mere engineering problem, hardly worth the attention of a Physics Professor...
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He doesn't seem to care too much about rigor or correctness in all the other empiricism he's dabbled in.

I can't imagine him surviving anywhere but in academia.
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You'd be surprised. At one large aerospace company I have dealings with, there's a guy we'll call F.S. (because he's still inexplicably working there). F.S. is a PhD in Astrophysics and won't let you forget it. Anyway, he figured his illustrious credentials qualified him to operate any sort of equipment. He browbeat a young tech to give him access to a piece of our equipment with two commas in its price tag, whereupon he wrecked it so thoroughly it had to be returned to the manufacturer for rebuilding at great expense and delay. After talking with others, it turns out you haven't earned your spurs at that company until you have an F.S. story.

Where you got your degree makes some difference at first, but your standing in your field depends entirely on your work.
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Agreed. Loeb's work leaves much to be desired. Maybe he and F.S. can team up. If they succeed only in getting themselves off the planet, I'll consider it a success.
 
F.S. sounds like one or two very senior European profs I knew, men of great theoretical standing and of embarrassing experimental repute, who could rewire a grad student's apparatus into a sort of (briefly) kinetic sculpture. But those men were exceptionally rare.

I'm reminded more of the classics faculty I knew. It was said of them, because they really and actually couldn't survive outside a cloistered enclave within academia, that they were already institutionalized.

It was in the nature of my work that I dealt with few people in the humanities, and almost entirely with geologists, physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and biologists. A fine body of serious people they were, and I got along well with them

But then there were a few experimental psychologists. I could say a lot about them, and I won't. Be thankful.
 
arthwollipot said:
Between this guy and Ted Kaptchuk, I'm starting to worry about Harvard's quality control.
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Yeah, Harvard Law has really gone downhill since the days of John Adams.

Do the smartest people go to Harvard? Do the smartest people teach at Harvard? No, not really. Harvard has the ineffable quality of prestige, owing in part to the effable property of age. It does benefit from a plethora of funding, so that could be considered a practical advantage. If you go to Harvard, you get a degree from Harvard, which is important to the "accept no substitutes!" sort of people. And apparently that leads to tolerance of favorite crackpots.
 
The wheels of the gods grind slow but they grind fine

Mystery of our first interstellar visitor may be solved

Now, a team of researchers says ‘Oumuamua was definitely a comet, albeit one with an unusual makeup. “We can explain a lot of the strange behavior (sic),” says Jennifer Bergner, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the work, published today in Nature.
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Damn. I was really hoping it was an alien truck. :o
 
theprestige said:
In the interest of saving you a click: It's a hypothetical model that explains the observations. It's not a solution to the mystery, which in fact may well never be solved. Or even solvable.
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The link does say"maybe solved".

And do we ever have more than "a hypothetical model that explains the observations"?

:boggled:
 
Was it an asteroid, comet, or even an alien spaceship? For years, astronomers have been perplexed by ‘Oumuamua, a mysterious object up to 400 meters long that entered the Solar System in 2017. No such object from beyond our Sun’s reaches had visited us before, with this interloper moving so fast it could not be bound to the Sun. ‘Oumuamua, as scientists christened it, was also odd in that it looked like an asteroid but behaved like a comet.
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I assume those are the only three things it could be, with "alien spaceship" being the most unlikely of the three by many orders of magnitude. So to refresh my own memory, I looked up the difference between asteroid and comet again:

Asteroids are made up of metals and rocky material, while comets are made up of ice, dust and rocky material. Both asteroids and comets were formed early in the history of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago. Asteroids formed much closer to the Sun, where it was too warm for ices to remain solid.
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The only major difference is whether it contains ice or not, if it does contain ice it's a comet. If not, it's an asteroid. So by saying it was a comet, what they are saying is that they think it contains ice. That's all.
 
The question is, where did Science.org go wrong? It's not a reliable source and panders to a low common denominator.

Jesus H. Christ! A ******* rock from another star system comes through our inner solar system, and people go nuts making ridiculous claims! How many go through all the time without being noticed? How many millions have gone through before telescopes were invented? IT'S A ******* ROCK!
 
shemp said:
The question is, where did Science.org go wrong? It's not a reliable source and panders to a low common denominator.

Jesus H. Christ! A ******* rock from another star system comes through our inner solar system, and people go nuts making ridiculous claims! How many go through all the time without being noticed? How many millions have gone through before telescopes were invented? IT'S A ******* ROCK!
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"America First! Don't go throwing our tax dollars at a rock!
Our vets deserve better!
Finish the Wall!
Protect our families from this invasion!
Save our pets!
Rock not endorse Trump. Trump smash rock!" :wackygrin:
 
JayUtah said:
Yeah, Harvard Law has really gone downhill since the days of John Adams.

Do the smartest people go to Harvard? Do the smartest people teach at Harvard? No, not really. Harvard has the ineffable quality of prestige, owing in part to the effable property of age. It does benefit from a plethora of funding, so that could be considered a practical advantage. If you go to Harvard, you get a degree from Harvard, which is important to the "accept no substitutes!" sort of people. And apparently that leads to tolerance of favorite crackpots.
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Fact is Harvard has always allowed in a few people who should not probably be there from an academic point of view, because of the old boys network.
Harvard Law was founded in 1817...John Adams was alive but obvioulsy did not attend.
I think it was the first law school in the US; until then lawyers trained by studying and working with other lawyers ..."read law" was the popular term.
 
dudalb said:
I think it was the first law school in the US; until then lawyers trained by studying and working with other lawyers ..."read law" was the popular term.
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William and Mary founded a law school in 1779 and likes to claim it's the oldest in the US, but apparently there was at least one founded earlier (Litchfield in 1774).
 
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dudalb said:
Harvard Law was founded in 1817...John Adams was alive but obvioulsy did not attend.
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John Adams graduated from Harvard in 1755; only thereafter—as you say—did he "read law" (U.K. law, obviously) with attorney James Putnam. As in English law, an American attorney in colonial times had to be "called to the bar," which generally entailed an oral examination before a judge. In the play from which my avatar comes, there's a fantastic exchange between Adams and Thomas Jefferson in which Adams asserts his academic superiority for having attended Harvard, whereas Jefferson shuts him down by saying he attended William and Mary.

dudalb said:
I think it was the first law school in the US; until then lawyers trained by studying and working with other lawyers ..."read law" was the popular term.
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Agreed. In another role I played (not pictured), Sir Joseph Porter, KCB, describes his ascendency in law and from there to become First Lord of the Admiralty: from office boy to articled clerk to law partner, member of Parliament, etc. I wonder if Prof. Loeb followed a similar career path in the sciences he's trying to profess.
 
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