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> If you think there are others, please exhibit one. If everyone like you attempts to rail road the imaginative process at the beginning of hypothesis formatio
by oraphalous 2y ago
> If you think there are others, please exhibit one.
If everyone like you attempts to rail road the imaginative process at the beginning of hypothesis formation, then we'll never get to the point of being able to exhibit one, should one be possible.
The demand for rigour at this point in a discourse - which was pretty clearly signalled by the commenter to be offered at a stage prior to substantive hypotheis formation - just shuts down the imaginative process. It's not constructive.
- dtgriscom 2y agoWhen a random techie comes up with a completely novel hypothesis that contradicts a broad range of theories accepted by the vast majority of practicing physicists, the proper response is not to stop and say "Hmmm. I wonder if he's right. Let's talk about it."
- JasonSage 2y agoWhy not? Seems perfectly normal to just talk about it. I learn things all the time by wondering if somebody else is right. Much better than just thinking everything is simply the way I think it is now. Even if you know somebody is wrong, talking about it is absolutely harmless.
- layer8 2y agoThe issue is that these physics threads always end up the same, with commenters having only popular-level background offering suggestions they came up in five minutes, mirroring obvious thoughts that actual physicists have of course already thought of decades ago, and in much more detail. It is really hard and quite unlikely to come up with novel ideas that haven't already been discussed and played out ad nauseum in that field.
- JasonSage 2y agoI’m not suggesting the techie is correct, I just don’t think the right answer is complete dismissal instead of communication. Ok, so you know it’s obviously wrong, but there’s no obligation to then go and stifle their curiosity or imagination. Just don’t say anything or let them talk to somebody who has the time and care to indulge. The original commenter I’m replying to, taken at their word, is ready to dismiss anything somebody says, regardless of merit with no further discussion, just because they think there’s “no way” that person could be right. Which is hilariously close-minded way to conduct oneself.
- layer8 2y agoThis is fine the first few times, but after a few dozens it gets exhausting. This is also not about stifling their curiosity or imagination. It's about understanding that in a field as advanced as physics and cosmology, how incredibly unlikely it is for some layman to come up with a worthwhile idea that hasn't already be tackled. To even be able to explain why an idea is impractical or beside the point, a solid knowledge and understanding of the field is often aready necessary. Articles like from Quanta Magazine dress the topics up in language that make them seem substantially simpler, and closer to human intuition, than they actually are.
- koolala 2y agoOnce we have open source AI training data and AI historians they could help make real science directly available instead of pop magazines.
- eigenket 2y agoQuanta Magazine generally write very well written, well researched and pretty comprehensive articles. They cite their sources and they're very careful to get science as correct as they possibly can (I'm a scientist, and they once contacted me to fact-check one of their articles). Comparing their work to the dross that AI produces is insulting
- koolala 2y agoInsulting? Sorry! I didn't mean to say "pop mag" in a bad way like "ai" in a bad way. I'm actually excited for computers getting big enough to comprehend human language and science. I hope one day Dross becomes Dos! AI needs more XP. VR AI and VR AI Science edu is what I'm most hyped for.
- scrubs 2y agoSorry, all this twaddle is like a culture war ... it's noise. Take the cosmologists and put them out of mind. Now, exhibit a testable hypothesis. Better, try to explain the 67 to 75ish mpc/s ranges in other methods. Then we can talk. Nuff said!
- JasonSage 2y agoAlso > The issue is that these physics threads always end up the same, with commenters having only popular-level background offering suggestions they came up in five minutes … is this really an issue? I speculate you’ve taken something you don’t want to see personally and dressed it up as “the problem” when you could instead just find a way to be okay with it. But maybe there’s something genuinely problematic with that behavior which I don’t know about.
- ssklash 2y agoIf you've spent any amount on HN reading physics posts, you will see it is absolutely an issue.
- shigawire 2y agoI remember the halcyon room temp superconductor days.
- kelnos 2y agoYes, it's an issue. I come here as a layperson who is interested in the universe; it's exhausting to read plausible-sounding but completely meritless theories brought up by people here with little more training than I have, and try to decide if these ideas are actually useful, or are just uninformed things some rando thought up in five minutes after reading a pop-sci cosmology book. I'd much rather hear plausible theories made by people who actually know what they're talking about.
- koolala 2y agoHas anyone ever tested the theory of matter that is repelled by gravity instead of attracted? They would zoom away and seperate like helium escaping the Earth.
- ForOldHack 2y agoThis would be way cool. A way to rid science of randos and their theories. For the fourth time today, I have to admit being facetious.
- koolala 2y agoToday is a new day.
- tsimionescu 2y agoWhat theory is that? How would it be tested? Gravity is not even a force, it is a consequence of how space deforms around mass&energy. So, even if something like "negative mass" existed, it wouldn't repel, it would just cancel out.
- koolala 2y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_matter#Negative_mass https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_matter#Negative_mass The cancle out your talking about is what happens with magnets and dipoles. What if negative mass was a monopole? Testing the theory would be be the same kind of tests created for testing the Big Bang.
- tomrod 2y agoEvery day.
- koolala 2y agoSame with room temperature highly conductive matter :( Every day I wish we had Hoverboards, Flying Brooms, and Magic Carpets. Instead... every day is another car ride to the grocery store.
- Izkata 2y ago> mirroring obvious thoughts that actual physicists have of course already thought of decades ago, and in much more detail. They will eventually die and a younger generation will enter the field who don't know why those ideas were dismissed. For all you know you're shutting down a 14-year-old (either directly or someone observing) who is actually interested and may become one of those physicists. It's roughly equivalent to https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- kelnos 2y ago> They will eventually die and a younger generation will enter the field who don't know why those ideas were dismissed No, the younger generations are constantly entering the field, slowly learning and building up the tools required to think about these sorts of things. By the time they've done that, they don't need to have their silly ideas shut down, because they do that themselves, using the knowledge they've built. And when they do have novel ideas, they have the mathematical and scientific tools to actually argue why their novel ideas deserve expensive, scarce telescope time, unlike the armchair pop-sci wannabe cosmologists (myself included) on HN.
- kstenerud 2y agoBecause it's noise, and noise is distracting, and there's a LOT of noise out there. Part of being an expert is knowing how to filter out the noise so that you can actually get some work done. If one wanted to deal with noise all day, they'd join SETI. Or parliment. If someone has a novel theory, let them come up with evidence to support it, and clear identification of how the theory can be invalidated. That's not closed-mindedness; that's pragmatism. Could they actually be right? Yes, in the same way that a baby could beat Muhammad Ali - but you won't see anyone lining up to buy tickets. You only have so much time in your life, so no need to waste it on peoples' 10-second "theories", like "How about achieving faster-than-light communication by stuffing so many photons down the fibreoptic cable that they "push" each other faster?". Some ideas are just plain dumb and obviously not worth a trained person's time.
- JasonSage 2y ago> If one wanted to deal with noise all day, they'd join SETI. Or parliment. > If someone has a novel theory, let them come up with evidence to support it, and clear identification of how the theory can be invalidated. Ok, sure, but you can’t really be coming to _Hacker News_ expecting the latter, or none of the former, so it’s a moot point and poor expectations.
- kstenerud 2y agoYou absolutely can and should when they come at you accusing you of being "closed minded", "unimaginative", and "not open to new theories" (see the discussion thread). It's one thing to politely ignore crackpot theories or state the established facts in response, quite another when the crackpots start attacking you.
- koolala 2y agoWhat are you busy with? Are there any particular other subjects you would want to talk about instead?
- tqi 2y agoOn the one hand, I agree that those people are usually wrong and generally pretty annoying. On the other hand, who cares? This is a random internet forum, not the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, so maybe there is no such thing as a proper response?
- alexey-salmin 2y agoThanks, but I don't think it's a fair description of what happened here. I'm a mathematician who noticed that the statement "The totality of all the observations we have cannot be explained in any other way" is obviously false. Explaining is neither hard nor useful and it's not what science is normally concerned with. The goal is to predict new observations not to explain known ones.
- thrance 2y agoNo one prevents new ideas from being presented, but simply suggesting the universe does not expand without giving any arguments for this position nor trying to explain the observed red shifts, contributes exactly nothing to the discourse. This, is not constructive.
- rachofsunshine 2y agoThere's a difference between being closed-minded and saying "yes, we've obviously thought about this thing that you, someone with no apparent background in our field, thought of in ten seconds". And if you're an expert in any field that gets a lot of people who are interested, but not a lot of people who are experts, you hear these kinds of half-baked theories all the time, often with this exact "oh you orthodox experts just can't handle my field-disrupting free-thinking!" kind of framing. I'm a mathematician by education, and I cannot tell you how many people insist on things like 0.999... < 1 without an understanding of (a) what the left side of that expression even means, (b) what a real number is, or (c) what basic properties the real numbers have. Going "no, you're wrong, and it would take me a couple of full lectures to explain why but trust me we're pretty sure about this" is a reasonable answer to that, provided that you have indeed established that to your own satisfaction, at least.
- eszed 2y agoWhoa! What? Not a mathematician in any way (in case that isn't obvious), but I'd have totally thought 0.999... asymptomatically _approaches_ 1, but never reaches it, and so is <1. Is there a short-form explanation (that I might have a chance of understanding, lol) of why that's incorrect? I'd love to have my mind blown.
- techno_tsar 2y agoThere's a rigorous proof on Wikipedia, but there's simpler ways to show it. For example, we know that 1/3 = 0.333... 3 * 1/3 = 3 * 0.333... 1 = 0.999... You can also do it with subtraction. For example, 1 - 0.999... = x. Assuming x is greater than 0, then it should evaluate to 0.000...1. But we can't have the digit 1 after an infinite number of zeros. If there truly were a "1" after infinite zeros, it implies reaching the end of infinity, which is a logical contradiction. So x can't be greater than 0.
- justsomeshmuck 2y ago1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 3/3 = 1 .3… + .3… + .3… = .9… = 1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...
- ants_everywhere 2y ago> at the beginning of hypothesis formation But the expansion of the universe has been thoroughly studied for over a century. We're past the brainstorming phase. I generally think people should brainstorm to generate ideas and then filter them down. And it's true that filtering too early can significantly decrease the quality of ideas. And it's also true that in a place like Hacker News there will be smart people from all sorts of backgrounds getting to experience the joy of exploring a new topic that they're not fully up to speed on yet. The risk though is that somebody who thoroughly understands the field is reading your comment. So for that reason I think it's a good practice to always be aware that technical fields we're not expert in are usually more subtle than we initially think.
- xwolfi 2y agoBS, nobody has to listen to your imaginative process. Imagine away, build something that conforms with the data, then show it ! For now, we dont know any other way to explain than to say it expands, except maybe imaginative fantasies from amateurs on Hackernews, but does it count ?
- koolala 2y agoWhat if it expanded from anti-mass? Couldn't we form testable hypotheses from that? I looked it up on the Wikipedia page for Exotic Matter and there isn't much exploration or tested theories on it.
- BlarfMcFlarf 2y agoYou certainly could try. But don’t expect experts in the field to bother to do any of the legwork for you, and that includes learning about all the evidence that your model has to account for to be remotely as good as our existing ones.
- koolala 2y agoIt's exciting to me just even being able to ask experts if anyone has tried before! progress = legwork + new direction!
- snowwrestler 2y agoIt seems pretty silly to think that we are collectively “at the beginning of hypothesis formation” about the structure of the universe today, in 2024.