I've seen a couple of articles about this guy recently and they both struck me as weirdly credulous given the apparently complete lack of evidence supporting his theory and the fact that approximately no other scientists seem to find it credible.
There's a moment at which every scientific theory is only thought credulous by a single person.
Agreed, but the same is also true of any conspiracy theory or half-baked idea. The theory should be evaluated on it's merits, not the number of supporters. And theories that can be tested are always better than ones that can't IMO.
As jboggan mentions, this theory is both falsifiable and testable in practice.
I think it's important that there are always a few people in science who go against the mainstream, as long as they do actual science, so falsifiable and testable theories.
Whether or not any of it makes a lick of sense once you start actually crunching numbers is another question. The lack of interest from other scientists leaves me skeptical (even if I'm silently enamored of the neatness myself).
The pop science press is depressingly bad.
"Don't take refugee in the false security of consensus."
Here is one of his recent papers: Emergent Relativity https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0302028.pdf
They put it pretty bluntly in the article.
To this article's credit, though, it is more measured than others. Just as a whole it seems weird to me how much attention such a seemingly insignificant hypothesis is getting.
And that's what George Chapline is offering the pop sci press.
PS: I'm not arguing with your statement, you have all the right to think that way. Maybe even people who lived during Einstein's earlier times thought the same for their previous century.
My (non-physicist) understanding of this, is that neutrinos from then will be quite low energy now, due to the expansion of the universe(?), and so not detectable by the method IceCube uses. There is a minimum energy required, in part because the charged particles generated by the neutrino interaction need to be moving faster than the speed of light in water (or whatever the detection medium is) for there to be Cherenkov radiation generated and then detected.
That said, I would love to see a response from a more knowledgeable person!
Its a good standard to hold yourself to when explaining things to others. But not one to hold others to when explaining to you.
https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/8/114933-the-robustness-...
"Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize." -- Richard Feynman
The problem is that it is REALLY hard to describe to the layman just how excruciatingly difficult it is to do what LIGO does.
I like to think that I know a thing or two about electrical engineering and quantum mechanics, and even I probably don't get just exactly how amazing LIGO is.
[1]https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.11...