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Comment by Sanzig | Hacker News Reader

Author's Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Lerner

I get the impression he's regarded as something of a crank in astrophysics communities.

The end of the article really feels like he is trying to sell me something.

> We at LPPFusion have been applying that knowledge concretely to the development of a cheap, clean and unlimited source of energy that can entirely replace fossil fuels starting in this decade.

And I doubt that the website (iai.tv), that I have never head of, is a source that can be trusted.

They've been on WeFunder for a while trying to crowdfund operations.

I did not invest.

But that's the problem with groupthink, isn't it? That is, wrong until it's not and then suddenly everyone pretends like they knew it was true all along. Science has ego-issues the same way sports and entertainment do. Scientists aren't any less human than the rest of us (tho' they often seem to pretend otherwise).

The alternative is for the group to exhaustively spend time entertaining every theory so as not to exclude anyone prematurely.

Shouldn’t the burden of proof be placed on the individual rather than the group?

> Shouldn’t the burden of proof be placed on the individual rather than the group?

Yes, but don't cover your ears and yell "burden of proooooof" so loudly that you can't hear them out.

The earth is round, until it isn't?

On the other hand, scientific consensus isn't "groupthink", and being a contrarian doesn't automatically entitle you to other people's attention and time.

Or does it?

There are plenty of examples where science got it wrong. Were it took years, even decades to get enough people to listen.*

That's not the way science is supposed to work. Politics? Yes. But not science.

I trust you can do the math from here.

* And when the tides turn, these not even an acknowledgement, let alone an apology. Scientists shouldn't not be turning in their graves for lacking an apology. That level of arrogance is also not healthy and proper Science.

Well the Vatican did, to Galileo Galilei. Eventualy, took a while :P

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13618460-600-vatican-...

> scientific consensus

Science doesn't advance by consensus. It advances by constructing models and comparing their predictions with observations. As Einstein famously remarked when someone mentioned to him that a hundred scientists had signed a letter saying they were doubtful of his theory of relativity: "If the theory were wrong, one would have been enough." We don't believe our best current theories because there is a consensus. We believe them because they have made accurate predictions that have been confirmed by experimental data to many decimal places.

> [Science] advances by constructing models and comparing their predictions with observations.

No, not so much. That is scientific method.

Science is paradigmatic. The advancement of science only occurs when the current science paradigm is toppled. Currently, ΛCDM Theory is the paradigm. And it is not when it is discovered that CDM does not exist and the Universe is not expanding when the paradigm topples. Because that may have already happened... JWST may have completed this task.

A decent example of the resilience of paradigms is the luminiferous ether. Michelson published the results of his experiment in 1881. Maybe there were some that immediately realized the significance, but the paradigm remained through the ether crisis, and even after Einstein published Special Relativity in 1905, and deep, deep into the 20th Century and arguably shallowly into the first few years of 21st Century.

Science paradigms are sticky and resilient, even when they are completely wrong.

So it will take decades after the discovery that CDM doesn't exist before most scientists are finally on the same page and the paradigm is finally toppled. Only then, after being wrong for maybe as long as 200 years and most have moved on away from the previous paradigm that Science legitimately advances.

He doesn't write like a crank. He's clear, concise, and has a history of work without sounding overly egotistical. I don't want to get prematurely hyped, but this could be the real deal.

He does write like a crank. He deliberately misquotes the "Panic!" title of a research paper, and misconstrues what Kirkpatrick is referencing when she talks about being kept up at night - her original quote is just her speaking broadly, not about The Big Bang possibly not being real.

That's two things he's bent to support his position within the first two paragraphs of this piece. Right out of the gate he's shown that he can't be trusted with data.

Not so much a crank as a person pushing an agenda and being willing to bypass the normal scientific process to do it.

I think he's the very model of a crank - he's been actively pushing a hypothesis mainly defined for what it isn't for at least 30 years that's been kicking around for over 60 years that's failed to make a single successful prediction and repeatedly gets falsified and instead cherrypicks new results and goes "See! Everything about that model is wrong and therefore mine must be right." The Big Bang just broke some people.

im also sceptical but in high school i learned about a bunch of people who were thought to be cranks but turned out to be right. for me personally its not too hard to immagine that big bang turns out to be false but i appreciate that it is the best model we have so far

But you didn't learn about the millions of cranks that turned out to be wrong.

sure i did. but what you say doesnt invalidate what i said. if someone finds this interesting they can pursue answers perhaps. personally i find it entertaining. also apparently this guys work has been published in a reputable journal

the point was that "the unpopular, unconvincing hypothesis is right" need be treated as a possibility only if the probability is high enough, and knowing that the vast majority are wrong is an important bayesian input in properly estimating that probability

help me out. historically, at what point in bayesian probability estimation did "there is no such thing as ether" theorists go from crank to lets pay attention to these guys

This is cherry-picking.

Your interlocutors have already stipulated that on occasion, the scientific establishment has been wrong, and the cranks have been right.

Their point is that this is almost never the case. There are and have been cranks who dispute the scientific consensus on almost every point since the scientific method was first developed.

Are you also suggesting we should believe the anti-vaxxers who still back Andrew Wakefield's paper?

Are you also suggesting we should believe the people who say climate change isn't real?

Are you also suggesting we should believe the people who say the earth is flat?

Are you also suggesting we should believe the people who say that our current trees aren't "really" trees, and all the "real", giant, trees were killed long ago? [0]

All of these are cranks who disagree with the established scientific consensus—sometimes in bizarre but harmless ways, sometimes in extremely damaging and disturbing ones. If your point is genuinely "we should listen to cranks because they have a good track record", why not them, too? Why not all of them?

Or is there, in fact, something specific about this one that makes you think it's got something going for it besides "they might be actually super smart and seeing something the rest of us are missing"? If so, maybe lead with that, instead?

[0] https://www.inverse.com/article/21098-flat-earthers-trees

im not suggesting any of that. the burden of proof should be on the presenter sure. but calling this guy a crank is stretching the definition of a crank a fair bit. hes been funded by nasa and was published (once ?) in an astronomy journal

personally i dont think big bang theory deserves to be held up to same regard as classical and quantum mechanics, electro and thermodynamics, and relativity. and i dont think questioning it is anywhere close to flat earthism or creationism. still i happen to believe it is the currently best supported model, albeit one with plenty of questions to answer

The Big Bang is indeed a form of Creationism. It was first conceived by a priest, Georges Lemaître, in an attempt to reconcile scripture and astronomical observations.

So…

I literally composed my post excluding the word "crank", because I felt "unpopular, unconvincing hypothesis" was a less judgemental way of phrasing it, and one that focused on the idea, not the ideator, but you went ahead and used crank anyways

anyways, the threshold is likely when the hypothesis becomes convincing enough to a sufficient proportion or number of experts in the field

The vast majority of doctors did not believe in germ theory 170 years. There were like one or two people called cranks telling surgeons to wash their hands before surgery. The vast majority can often be wrong. It’s a terrible input

I should think that after all these centuries we had learned to listen to the cranky physicists.

I don't see how you get that impression from Wikipedia. You're just projecting your own bias and pretending it backs you up.

> Lerner's ideas have been rejected by the professional physicists and cosmologists who have reviewed them.

Are you being obtuse?

No. Probably just dumb and ignorant, thanks for asking. I don't equate "rejecting ideas" with "seen as a crank", but I only have a four year degree, so the linguistic nuance of academic backstabbing and gatekeeping is lost on me.

I'm sorry, I should have used different language. I thought you were saying the Wikipedia page held no criticisms of him at all.

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