When a random techie comes up with a completely novel hypothesis that contradicts a broad range of theories accepted by the vast majority of practicing physicists, the proper response is not to stop and say "Hmmm. I wonder if he's right. Let's talk about it."
Thanks, but I don't think it's a fair description of what happened here. I'm a mathematician who noticed that the statement "The totality of all the observations we have cannot be explained in any other way" is obviously false.
Explaining is neither hard nor useful and it's not what science is normally concerned with. The goal is to predict new observations not to explain known ones.
Because it's noise, and noise is distracting, and there's a LOT of noise out there.
Part of being an expert is knowing how to filter out the noise so that you can actually get some work done.
If one wanted to deal with noise all day, they'd join SETI. Or parliment.
If someone has a novel theory, let them come up with evidence to support it, and clear identification of how the theory can be invalidated.
That's not closed-mindedness; that's pragmatism. Could they actually be right? Yes, in the same way that a baby could beat Muhammad Ali - but you won't see anyone lining up to buy tickets.
You only have so much time in your life, so no need to waste it on peoples' 10-second "theories", like "How about achieving faster-than-light communication by stuffing so many photons down the fibreoptic cable that they "push" each other faster?". Some ideas are just plain dumb and obviously not worth a trained person's time.
You absolutely can and should when they come at you accusing you of being "closed minded", "unimaginative", and "not open to new theories" (see the discussion thread).
It's one thing to politely ignore crackpot theories or state the established facts in response, quite another when the crackpots start attacking you.
The issue is that these physics threads always end up the same, with commenters having only popular-level background offering suggestions they came up in five minutes, mirroring obvious thoughts that actual physicists have of course already thought of decades ago, and in much more detail. It is really hard and quite unlikely to come up with novel ideas that haven't already been discussed and played out ad nauseum in that field.
I’m not suggesting the techie is correct, I just don’t think the right answer is complete dismissal instead of communication. Ok, so you know it’s obviously wrong, but there’s no obligation to then go and stifle their curiosity or imagination. Just don’t say anything or let them talk to somebody who has the time and care to indulge.
The original commenter I’m replying to, taken at their word, is ready to dismiss anything somebody says, regardless of merit with no further discussion, just because they think there’s “no way” that person could be right. Which is hilariously close-minded way to conduct oneself.
This is fine the first few times, but after a few dozens it gets exhausting. This is also not about stifling their curiosity or imagination. It's about understanding that in a field as advanced as physics and cosmology, how incredibly unlikely it is for some layman to come up with a worthwhile idea that hasn't already be tackled. To even be able to explain why an idea is impractical or beside the point, a solid knowledge and understanding of the field is often aready necessary. Articles like from Quanta Magazine dress the topics up in language that make them seem substantially simpler, and closer to human intuition, than they actually are.
Quanta Magazine generally write very well written, well researched and pretty comprehensive articles. They cite their sources and they're very careful to get science as correct as they possibly can (I'm a scientist, and they once contacted me to fact-check one of their articles).
Comparing their work to the dross that AI produces is insulting
If you're not doing math, you're not doing physics.
Lookup what General Relativity actually is, what it looks like. The mass-energy tensor and the extremely complicated underlying partial differential equations it is actually encoding.[1]
Every parseable language explanation is irrelevant: the mathematics works. If you have an alternative idea...then the mathematics needs to work. What that means is irrelevant, provided it makes useful predictions and does not contradict established observations.
> Ok, so you know it’s obviously wrong, but there’s no obligation to then go and stifle their curiosity or imagination.
Dismissing uninformed ideas does everyone a service. If you're a complete outsider to a field and have no training it it, decide to come up with random ideas about difficult unsolved problems, and then feel stifled when an expert dismisses your ideas... well, that's a level of arrogance and hubris that I think is more than a little infuriating.
> The original commenter I’m replying to, taken at their word, is ready to dismiss anything somebody says, regardless of merit with no further discussion, just because they think there’s “no way” that person could be right. Which is hilariously close-minded way to conduct oneself.
That is a hilariously uncharitable interpretation of what they said.
I had the idea that each of these phenomena were being influenced by our local gravity well, in a different way. Then I remembered my physics. Then I read a few of their papers. This is not just good science, it's great science.
I withdraw my idea, but continue to wave lengths of wire 11.8 inches long.
I do wish I could read a website called cosmogony news, every day.
Has anyone ever tested the theory of matter that is repelled by gravity instead of attracted? They would zoom away and seperate like helium escaping the Earth.
What theory is that? How would it be tested? Gravity is not even a force, it is a consequence of how space deforms around mass&energy. So, even if something like "negative mass" existed, it wouldn't repel, it would just cancel out.
Same with room temperature highly conductive matter :( Every day I wish we had Hoverboards, Flying Brooms, and Magic Carpets. Instead... every day is another car ride to the grocery store.
> The issue is that these physics threads always end up the same, with commenters having only popular-level background offering suggestions they came up in five minutes
… is this really an issue?
I speculate you’ve taken something you don’t want to see personally and dressed it up as “the problem” when you could instead just find a way to be okay with it.
But maybe there’s something genuinely problematic with that behavior which I don’t know about.
Yes, it's an issue. I come here as a layperson who is interested in the universe; it's exhausting to read plausible-sounding but completely meritless theories brought up by people here with little more training than I have, and try to decide if these ideas are actually useful, or are just uninformed things some rando thought up in five minutes after reading a pop-sci cosmology book.
I'd much rather hear plausible theories made by people who actually know what they're talking about.
> mirroring obvious thoughts that actual physicists have of course already thought of decades ago, and in much more detail.
They will eventually die and a younger generation will enter the field who don't know why those ideas were dismissed. For all you know you're shutting down a 14-year-old (either directly or someone observing) who is actually interested and may become one of those physicists.
> They will eventually die and a younger generation will enter the field who don't know why those ideas were dismissed
No, the younger generations are constantly entering the field, slowly learning and building up the tools required to think about these sorts of things. By the time they've done that, they don't need to have their silly ideas shut down, because they do that themselves, using the knowledge they've built.
And when they do have novel ideas, they have the mathematical and scientific tools to actually argue why their novel ideas deserve expensive, scarce telescope time, unlike the armchair pop-sci wannabe cosmologists (myself included) on HN.
On the one hand, I agree that those people are usually wrong and generally pretty annoying.
On the other hand, who cares? This is a random internet forum, not the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, so maybe there is no such thing as a proper response?
