I refuse to believe it without checking it, yes. (I noted somewhere upthread that there was a link to a GRL paper that might shed more light on the details in this particular case.) I take the same attitude when I read a claim about physics. I don't accept arguments from authority, and that's what "actual scientists are saying it" is. Actual scientists can be wrong. So can I, but that doesn't mean they get a free pass.
There's an extremely large body of literature and multiple fields of study that have voluminously documented this. Books, podcasts, journals, news articles, congressional records, caselaw, websites, documentaries, museums, conferences spanning decades, hundreds of billions in investments, countless hours of lectures, multiple fortune 500 companies, entire university departments...
Your personal enrichment isn't my responsibility and I feel as much obligation to defend this body of work as I have to defend Maxwell's equations or the Pythagorean theorem - that's kinda on you at this point. You're free to be a crank and I'm free to decline to engage. I do however, wish you success in your pursuit.
On the one hand you say educating is not your job, on the other hand you are very concerned about misinformation -- which is a matter of education.
You thus contradict yourself for purely rhetorical reasons.
Worse yet, saying "you are wrong" is not correcting misinformation for the sake of onlookers. You need to tell them why -- which you failed to do.
I don't think you interpret English very well, and certainly you don't explain well, so it's impossible to see whether this is an area of physics you actually know or not.
So far, I am doubting that you understand this area well enough to correct others. All I see so far are two beside-the-point nitpicks.
Explain physics or stop kvetching. If it's not your job to explain, then it's unhelpful to say "you're wrong but it's not my job to explain!" Fish or cut bait.
What do you mean? Even if the information happens to be correct in this case, it's still not a good idea to believe everything you read. There's plenty of bad info about physics out there, and it's not that easily to tell the difference.
I have a PhD in physics. I gave my assessment of the article in the first reply above. You're welcome to disagree, but since it seems you're mostly interested in rejecting the article on the basis of who published it instead of the content, perhaps this is a dead end.
I don't think the poster was saying any of this. They were simply stating that the post was informational and that they weren't offering any commentary on the situation, just giving facts.
I mean, sure a physicist can be wrong, but if they are giving facts as are currently accepted by the community or even as they know them, it isn't an emotional statement of whether they agree. It is just that: Facts as we know them, to the best of our ability and not giving the commentary with it.
Robin Hanson isn't the one saying it's wrong. A number of other physicists (e.g. Garrett Lisi as mentioned in the post) have said it's wrong, on the basis that the calculation is easy and when they do it they get a very different result. Hanson is just the one who claims to have found the particular error that the paper made, because nobody else thought it was worth bothering to find the particular error in a paper that got such an obviously wrong answer.
Even a physicist should accept that the argument made by greglindahl above doesn't hold water, logically speaking. I don't want to make an appeal to authority here as the sole reason you should believe me.
How am I agreeing with you? I'm asking you where you've seen that kind of critique. It's not one that would be used in a middle school physics class or article aimed at the general public.
Small correction. Except for the first two lines of the parent post, the rest is a quote from Jaynes' paper linked above. It may be hard to tell because of the limited formatting options on HN.
I think you are not doing credit to the many physicists and science communicators who thoroughly explained why this was quackery. And in a world with quacks - people who have deceived themselves or are deliberately deceiving others - I think it is defensible for most of us to ignore people who claim to have violated the conservation of momentum with scant evidence.
The great thing about that excuse is that the amount of information needed can be set arbitrarily. There will never be enough information available to satisfy people using this excuse. It'll just be "INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER"[1] until the end of time.
It's true that I wouldn't have complained if the link originally pointed to nature.com (rather than originally pointing to phys.org and then being edited to point to nature.com) but it's also true that I wouldn't have had the time or ability to work through so much as the abstract, which I find utterly, utterly impenetrable, even with a non-trivial interest in physics, and make any comment at all.
In its defense, the phys.org article embedded a video with a much more accessible explanation of what happened.
The video is imperfect, there are a number of unnecessary over simplifications and patronizing sounds and silly faces, but I still found it more informative than the article.
i am not criticising the physicists, or the person who originally posted the article, or denying how interesting it would be if waves were not found, or disparaging the technical difficulties involved.
i am just tired of the same hackneyed phrase being used in every article related to general relativity. google has over 12 million hits for the phrase "einstein was right". the national geographic is a quality publication. it should know better.
You can win an internet argument anywhere, but if that's all you want to achieve here, then maybe stop trying to debate physics.
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