Avi and Oumuamua: Setting the Record Straight
hubie writes:
Avi and Oumuamua: Setting the Record Straight:
As an astrophysicist that searches for signs of alien technology beyond Earth, I'm often asked these days what I think about Avi Loeb.
Loeb, you might know, recently rose to public prominence with his claims that the first discovered interstellar comet, 'Oumuamua, is actually a piece of an alien spacecraft passing through the Solar System. Since then he has headlined UFO conventions, written a very popular book about his claim, and raised millions of dollars to study UFOs with his "Galileo Project" initiative. His latest venture with that money is to sweep a metal detector across the Pacific to find fragments of what he claims is another interstellar visitor that the US military detected crashing into the ocean, resulting in the headline "Why a Harvard professor thinks he may have found fragments of an alien spacecraft" in the Independent.
Loeb has the credentials to be taken seriously. He is a well-respected theoretical cosmologist that has made foundational contributions to our understanding of the early universe. He served as the chair of the Harvard astronomy department, and leads the distinguished Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is well known as an outside-the-box thinker who is brave enough to be wrong often enough to occasionally be right in important and unexpected ways. He is a prolific paper writer, mentor to many students and postdoctoral researchers, and a leader in the community. I, in particular, was strongly influenced by a lecture he gave on "diversifying one's research portfolio" to include a lot of safe but passe research, some more risky cutting edge work, and a small amount of outre science. It's important advice for any scientific field.
But his shenanigans have lately strongly changed the astronomy community's perceptions of him. His recent claims about alien spacecraft and comets and asteroids largely come across to experts as, at best, terribly naive, and often as simply erroneous (Loeb has no formal training or previous track record to speak of in planetary science, which has little in common with the plasma physics he is known for). His promotion of his claims in the media is particularly galling to professionals who discover and study comets, who were very excited about the discovery of 'Oumuamua but have found their careful work dismissed and ridiculed by Loeb, who is the most visible scientist discussing it in the media.
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