Occasionally, people try to give “even-handed” accounts of crackpot physics, like people who claim to have invented anti-gravity devices. These accounts don’t go so far as to say that the crackpots are right, and will freely point out plausible doubts about the experiments. But at the end of the day, they’ll conclude that we still […]| 4 gravitons
Black holes have been in the news a couple times recently. On one end, there was the observation of an extremely large black hole in the early universe, when no black holes of the kind were expected to exist. My understanding is this is very much a “big if true” kind of claim, something that […]| 4 gravitons
It’s no secret that the early twentieth century was a great time to make progress in fundamental physics. On one level, it was an era when huge swaths of our understanding of the world were being rewritten, with relativity and quantum mechanics just being explored. It was a time when a bright student could guide […]| 4 gravitons
A paper about scientific fraud has been making the rounds in social media lately. The authors gather evidence of large-scale networks of fraudsters across multiple fields, from teams of editors tha…| 4 gravitons
How much can you trust general relativity? On the one hand, you can read through a lovely Wikipedia article full of tests, explaining just how far and how precisely scientists have pushed their knowledge of space and time. On the other hand, you can trust GPS satellites. As many of you may know, GPS wouldn’t […]| 4 gravitons
I had a chat about journalism recently, and I had a realization about just how weird science journalism, in particular, is. Journalists aren’t supposed to be cheerleaders. Journalism and PR have ve…| 4 gravitons
Have you heard of “vibe physics”? The phrase “vibe coding” came first. People have been using large language models like ChatGPT to write computer code (and not the way I did last year). They chat with the model, describing what they want to do and asking the model to code it up. You can guess […]| 4 gravitons
To be clear, hype isn’t just lying. We have a word for when someone lies to convince someone else to pay them, and that word is fraud. Most of what we call hype doesn’t reach that bar. Instead, hype lives in a gray zone of affect and metaphor. Some hype is pure affect. It’s about […]| 4 gravitons
