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.
1. It's clear you did not read the paper and are ignorant that the author is high profile physicist and cosmologist famous for developing measurement methods.
2. The view of science you are parroting is naive and mistaken. Theorizing and experiment are both necessary and inform and constrict each other.
I believe that gnufied is saying that this isn't a clean demonstration. If one paragraph of explanation is buried in 1,000 pages of dreck, then is the onus on the reader to find the nugget, or the author to emphasize the important part?
> One of the benefits of being an astrophysicist is your weekly email from someone who claims to have “proven Einstein wrong”. These either contain no mathematical equations and use phrases such as “it is obvious that..”, or they are page after page of complex equations with dozens of scientific terms used in non-traditional ways. They all get deleted pretty quickly, not because astrophysicists are too indoctrinated in established theories, but because none of them acknowledge how theories get replaced.
I've seen a lot of linkbait from phys.org (and other press release reposter). It's usually better to try to explain why the title (or the whole article) is wrong than just complaining. [Someone will downvote you anyway.]
> have been producing layperson-accessible science summaries for years/decades that address these and other questions.
Citation please. Every layperson accessible summary has said "we use advanced statistics and machine learning" and I haven't found a simple high school statistics accessible explanation yet. Unlike say the higgs boson, I think for this experiment a simple statistical treatment is not an unreasonable request.
Please show me and correct me. I would love to be able to believe we have detected gravitational waves.
I'm sorry if I came across that way, didn't mean to. But you have to realise that it's tiresome all this new internet phenomena of laymen questioning the work ethics of actual professionals because they think they could possibly do better, if only etc. I don't usually comment on HN about Physics because... well, never mind, it really was a bad idea this time.
If you're interested in the data you can browse the references, go to the libraries (as physicists have to do even at college, because it's kind of hard), find out first what exactly you are asking... even mail someone. And you can also measure things by yourself, this is a free universe and everybody can study its properties (Mercury is out there and maybe you can afford a nice telescope). What is unreasonable, very unreasonable, self-entitled in my opinion, is expecting that experimental physicists provide some kind of repository of (internal-notes redux) data for casual readers of pop sci. That would cost their time (or some overworked PhD student's) and project money, the bad news is no one is willing to do that nor paying for it. It's not that there's some kind of conspiracy, it's that people are actually busy working.
> And, in Julia’s defense, this is all spelled out in the documentation, immediately accessible from the REPL. I just never read it carefully enough.
My concern is most physicists won't read that either and may not even notice the loss of precision until it's too late (after a paper has been published).
To evaluate the validity of those facts, whom can I ask for advice? Because, I cannot afford years of study in physics to understand and assess the relevance of those facts to graduate school.
Besides that, when we talk about facts, why is that I cannot find any solid scientific sources to those claims in that article?
It's a phys.org link, it's not supposed to make sense. Invariably, with phys.org you're better off reading the source article or not reading anything at all.
Or this is just a researcher stating to a reporter that he does not have proof, to avoid false headlines. The underlying reason of course being that there is not such a thing as "proof" in physics.
You shouldn't be convinced by one sentence saying that a conclusion was reached a few years back. But you also have no basis for confidence in the negation of that conclusion on the basis of that almost total lack of data or theory.
You can't honestly believe that teams of people with physics Ph.D.s just didn't address these questions - how do we infer from observational data, what do we infer from that data - so go read the paper.
> There is no reference to an actual paper in the article
Hover over the underlined "proposed a solution" in the first paragraph and see https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.11563 -- although the article certainly doesn't go so far as to point to e.g. §23 and the Conclusion, so I at least partly agree with you.
I don't have much time for AdS arguments, so haven't done more than quickly skim for relevance to the Quanta article (which I also just skimmed for much the same reason).
> these pop science sensationalist websites
I can't really agree with characterizing Quanta as either "pop science" or "sensationalist", and presumably the Simons Foundation, it's backer, would disagree even more strongly.
Even though I just skimmed, I certainly agree with the first sentence of Susskind's lecture's Conclusion, even without reading much of the rest of it. :-) (I also agree with the Conclusion's final sentence on p. 83. In fact, the whole last two paragraphs!) For my part, the Quanta article doesn't seem to have done Susskind or the lecture any great disservice. For that alone, I think the OP author should be commended.
1: https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf
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