What is going on with the incredibly hostile tone in the article? As far as I’m aware, cosmologists are working hard to actually find answers and would be happy about any result that holds up.
To provide an IT analogy, imagine being tech support for a bunch of alpha-cowboy engineers. They’ll tell you they did all the obvious things, they’ll object to being asked to perform simple diagnostic tests (“does the problem go away if you create a temporary new user account on your system?”), they’ll resent you for not having an immediate solution, and they’ll resent you when you find the basic step they missed. Yes, they’ll accept the solution you offer, but they’ll fight you tooth and nail until it’s unarguably proven that you’re right.
That’s often what cross-domain innovation in science is like.
EDIT: per comment below, this is a much better explanation: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-math-works
it seems more accurate to say that they retire and the new generation of physics professors are more open to those ideas because they encountered them as students before building a career on some sub-sub field which migh have ended up as a dead end...
I just wonder how many biochemists will need to retire and get Alzheimer's before work on suppressing amyloids is finally abandoned, and something that could possibly work gets a grant.
In the meantime, take your valacyclovir!
While I imagine that does sporadically happen here or there, it's clearly not the usual form of participation :)
I bet it gets more clicks than a moderate tone would.
"Cosmologists hate him! See how he solved dark matter with this one weird trick..."
There are too many academics with huge egos. Too many papers obfuscate simple results behind unnecessarily complex and brittle mathematical models, because huge formulas and proofs make the authors look smart, and impressing the reviewers is a requirement for publication.
Everyone who has a PhD in engineering knows professors who make careers out of solving made up problems with tenuous connection with the real world, and thus highly questionable utility. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think engineering is about solving practical problems and building shit.
And then in physics, it's apparently now mainstream to produce theories that aren't testable. Of course, the math has to be very sophisticated and specialized -- dead-end work with simple math wouldn't get funded, much less become an entire field of study.
Which is to say: explaining reality is hard, and all the linear problems have solutions. Today, some find it more convenient to invent another universe that still has open problems, and solve those. To obfuscate, in comes a ton of math with weird notation invented with colleagues who also play this game.
It would be awesome if 3 generations of researchers got scooped by an applied physicist from a different field because nobody bothered to model galaxy rotation curves with general relativity. GR would be too boring, entirely lacking in crazy math.
I find him hilarious but I suppose it's a cultural thing and I understand that lots of people find it degrading.
No idea. But the question that bothers me is: is he right? I mean, is this idea something obvious? I'm not even asking if it's true, just if this is one of the first explanations you should come up with when facing this particular problem.
Because, in that case, it's puzzling.