"I am CLEARLY being CENSORED because my ideas are SO RADICAL!"
Here we see the signaling call of the Physics Crank, which has been passed down from crank to crank over the centuries.
Scientists Protest Censorship in Cosmology
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: Scientists Protest Censorship in Cosmology
#12Is this cranks?
LPP Fusion is run by Eric Lerner, who (based on his Wikipedia article[1]) seems to be a long-time crank who's been pushing plasma cosmology since 1991. He's using his nuclear fusion development company as a megaphone for this. (I'll let someone else try to figure out if the fusion company is legit.)
Re: Scientists Protest Censorship in Cosmology
#13Editors of arxiv: "We aren't the place to publish insubstantial discussions. There are other places for that." Guys who wrote the paper: "But it's substantial!" Like... obviously the guys who wrote the paper think it's substantial, or they wouldn't have submitted it. The very idea of "we think it's good, so we want to publish this without anyone telling us it's not" is... silly. As a developer, this is like someone o…
Do not misquote. The direct quote is right there.
"There are many journals which would be interested in publishing a well-argued synthesis of existing evidence against the standard hot big bang interpretation. But MNRAS, with its focus on publication of significant new astronomical results, is not one of them."
This isn't rejection of a PR based on merit, it's selectively refusing to review a PR.
Re: Scientists Protest Censorship in Cosmology
#14Considering how many speculative or opinion-based papers are available on arxiv with no problem whatsoever, the fact that arxiv rejected these particular three papers seems very...odd.
Re: Scientists Protest Censorship in Cosmology
#15Editors of arxiv: "We aren't the place to publish insubstantial discussions. There are other places for that." Guys who wrote the paper: "But it's substantial!" Like... obviously the guys who wrote the paper think it's substantial, or they wouldn't have submitted it. The very idea of "we think it's good, so we want to publish this without anyone telling us it's not" is... silly. As a developer, this is like someone o…
Or, taking the other approach, sure, you can publish it. Just not on arxiv. Arxiv's editors decide what arxiv publishes. That's what editors are supposed to do.
> Arxiv's editors decide what arxiv publishes.
Yes, and arxiv's editors apparently have no problem publishing lots of other papers that are at least as "out of mainstream" as these. So whatever criteria they are using don't appear to be being applied consistently.
Re: Scientists Protest Censorship in Cosmology
#16Editors refusing to publish your work in their journal is censorship?
Nature and Science have censored me a few times then (got one through though!)
Re: Scientists Protest Censorship in Cosmology
#17At first blush, this reminds me of the phenomena where, every time some problem with evolution comes up (a missing piece in the fossil record, say), the creationists pop up with "See! Darwin was wrong!" arxiv would be completely right to refuse those "take that, Darwin!" articles. On the other hand, maybe there are serious problems with standard cosmology, and other models besides the Big Bang are worth considering.…
This isn't comparable to evolution theory where we have mountains of evidence of other species that were predecessors of the current ones. Or where we even have evidence of evolution happening during our lifetimes (e.g. Covid).
The Big Bang theory is extremely speculative.
Empirical Science is about building theories based on observations. We have no observations that provide any kind of evidence that there was a big bang. Yes, we now that the universe is expanding, and has been for quite a while. So reasoning backwards, there must have been a time that the universe was a lot smaller than now. But that's it. We don't know how small it was before it started expanding. Maybe our universe started from a single point or even from nothing. Or maybe it bounced back after having contracted to a small but definite size. We just don't know. And actually, with the recent JWST observations, hints that support a big bounce or something similar are building up.
Re: Scientists Protest Censorship in Cosmology
#18Considering how many speculative or opinion-based papers are available on arxiv with no problem whatsoever, the fact that arxiv rejected these particular three papers seems very...odd.
Considering how they host papers "refuting" Cantor and Gödel... seems like a weird time to get standards. https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.4433
Re: Scientists Protest Censorship in Cosmology
#19Does someone have a reasonably impartial source on what the hell is actually going on with the JWST findings?
Re: Scientists Protest Censorship in Cosmology
#20To anyone in the field:
How plausible is Loop Quantum Cosmology/Loop Quantum Gravity as a Big Bang alternative?
It seems more reasonable to me, but this is like a blind man saying one painting looks nicer than another.