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This is a critical response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18609375 ; in the comments is a response by Jamie Farnes, the author of the paper, and a rebuttal by the blog's author.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may be just text, but the points being made are technical, and the blog's author is an expert. The author of the paper is now in a position where they feel like they have to defend themselves publicly, and I don't think this is the forum for a scientific defense (for the three reasons I listed above).
If paper in question becomes fodder for the mainstream media (or at least the mainstream scientific media) then there is no reason why they should not have to defend their theory/arguments/speculations publicly in a less than formal peer reviewed forum, especially one of fairly high regard in that subject area.
I'm not a physicist, just an interested bystander but some of these arguments don't seem to hold water to me: > There’s a more general point to be made here. The primary reason that we use dark matter and dark energy to explain cosmological observations is that they are simple. > A creation term is basically a magic fix by which you can explain everything and anything. Dark matter is an unknown 'substance' that inter…
Dark energy is the cosmological constant introduced by Einstein. So that criticism is rather ironic.
> Einstein originally introduced the concept in 1917 [2] to counterbalance the effects of gravity and achieve a static universe, a notion which was the accepted view at the time. Einstein abandoned the concept in 1931 after Hubble's discovery of the expanding universe.
> Einstein reportedly referred to his failure to accept the validation of his equations—when they had predicted the expansion of the universe in theory, before it was demonstrated in observation of the cosmological red shift—as his "biggest blunder".
Occam's razor is a heuristic used in the investigative process, not a principle. While it's fair to point out that a theory makes everything more complicated and thus might make it less likely to be sound, it's not fair to push back on the first bit of research into a theory because they haven't had the time to fully develop it. Indeed, a scientific revolution generally starts by treating as false an assumption previ…
Also that point seemed odd. Isn't unification of two previously separate phenomenon (dark matter and dark energy) simpler in Occam terms? It's using one thing to explain two, even if the actual mathematics are more complex to state. Also there's other troubling cosmological issues that this would appear to address, such as Hubble's constant having slight variation outside of measurement tolerance, which slightly diff…
Tone of this blog post is extremely pedantic and comes across as if the author were personally insulted by the paper. But her argument is basically "You didn't understand the math, and you misunderstood the work that you cited". I feel like the burden is a little higher -- i.e. put in some effort to at least show the readers the math she's talking about and the counterfactual conclusions they arrive it if worked out.…
The math for this would not make any sense to a layperson, but is widely accepted. Proposing a new theory of negative mass means proposing much more significant alterations to the underlying theory of gravity; the theoretical machinery supporting this current understanding is huge.
Occam's razor is a heuristic used in the investigative process, not a principle. While it's fair to point out that a theory makes everything more complicated and thus might make it less likely to be sound, it's not fair to push back on the first bit of research into a theory because they haven't had the time to fully develop it. Indeed, a scientific revolution generally starts by treating as false an assumption previ…
Also that point seemed odd. Isn't unification of two previously separate phenomenon (dark matter and dark energy) simpler in Occam terms? It's using one thing to explain two, even if the actual mathematics are more complex to state. Also there's other troubling cosmological issues that this would appear to address, such as Hubble's constant having slight variation outside of measurement tolerance, which slightly diff…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also that point seemed odd. Isn't unification of two previously separate phenomenon (dark matter and dark energy) simpler in Occam terms? It's using one thing to explain two, even if the actual mathematics are more complex to state. Also there's other troubling cosmological issues that this would appear to address, such as Hubble's constant having slight variation outside of measurement tolerance, which slightly diff…
Whether it is simpler depends on the details of the unification. Two comparatively simple theories are not made simpler with a very complex unification.
When you read breathless science journalism about the latest revolutionary paper, remember how it usually works out. Enjoy it as entertainment if you wish, but don't get your hopes up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is that even a concern for you here? This is clearly written for laypeople.
It may be just text, but the points being made are technical, and the blog's author is an expert. The author of the paper is now in a position where they feel like they have to defend themselves publicly, and I don't think this is the forum for a scientific defense (for the three reasons I listed above).
Tone of this blog post is extremely pedantic and comes across as if the author were personally insulted by the paper. But her argument is basically "You didn't understand the math, and you misunderstood the work that you cited". I feel like the burden is a little higher -- i.e. put in some effort to at least show the readers the math she's talking about and the counterfactual conclusions they arrive it if worked out.…
I suspect she is insulted, but more so by the press release surrounding a new paper unconfirmed by experimentation. That is now how science works.
One could say it's like calling a buggy alpha version of a software project a stable finished product, if we pretended people actually did give a damn about that in software.