Comment by floatingatoll | Hacker News Reader

Comment by floatingatoll | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Cosmologists would be rationally happy once the result holds up, but as with most science fields, the folks within the field will be irrationally hostile to an outsider showing them an insight they’ve overlooked, and may spend the next ten or twenty years aggressively fighting against it regardless of its merits.

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

I think we should maybe wait for the cosmology community to actually boo this result before we indict them for doing so. Gravitomagnetism is not some weird or ignored concept to them and the paper (unlike Locklin) doesn’t claim that they’ve ignored it. It instead cites the existing attempts to model its effects on galaxy rotation and shows that a less simplified model may actually be able to explain the observational results.

Tokamak plasma physics is a cousin of cosmology anyway — at the end of the day they’re studying balls of plasma it just depends on if they’re natural and giant or man made and small. I worked in a plasma physics department and people did both reactor physics and cosmology all of the time. So thisnt really an outsider perspective.

> and may spend the next ten or twenty years aggressively fighting against it regardless of its merits.

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...

(Possibly) obligatory SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-math-works

I’m going to edit this into my post now because it’s so much better than what I said! Thanks!

As Max Planck is quoted, "Science progresses one funeral at a time". (He probably said it in German.)

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!

Alfvein cosmology was largely abandoned after the discovery of CMB. It’s too bad really, since it holds up quite well in many regards. The hostile tone when discussed is frustration that it is no longer even discussed by mainstream cosmologists. We teach kids about plum pudding but not the career cosmologists about MHD?

I would be shocked if career cosmologists don't learn about Landau damping in their E and M classes.

A bit like Bitcoiners and traditional economists :-)

In this analogy, the Bitcoiners would be credentialed graduates of non-economics fields that contain relevance to Bitcoin, and bringing their scholastic experiences to bear on convincing economists about Bitcoin.

While I imagine that does sporadically happen here or there, it's clearly not the usual form of participation :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com