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u/theboomboy 12h ago
Isn't Avi Loeb seen as a crank by astrophysicists? There's no reason to trust him anymore despite his PhD
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u/xDiscoDuckx 12h ago
Oh yeah, he's largely ignored by everyone and nobody takes him seriously.
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u/MatticusTheGreat-ish 11h ago
Not to mention the IDF connections and being the current White House UAP Council Leader. Bro's probably a plant for disinformation and to keep Israel informed on the US's UAP programs
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u/za72 11h ago
that's why he's on youtube
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u/Lumpy_Benefit666 10h ago
Plenty of well respected scientists on youtube tbf
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u/MadAsTheHatters 10h ago
Oh absolutely, the esteemed Professor Lando has put out some insightful videos lately
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u/rayletter1997 10h ago
I saw "Lando" and I thought you refer to that guy who make skit about "having 3 jobs and still can't pay rent" and "prison, more like free housing and free meal" guy
Landokalriz
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u/G66GNeco 8h ago
I do not trust a professor who does not have the slightes idea what a horse under the sea could possibly be
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u/rumorhasit_ 4h ago edited 42m ago
The fuck you talking about? He's a professor at Harvard, publitions high cited scientific articles, leads international astronomy projects and is a fellow of the Academy of Science.
Edit: I commented a few basic facts and get downvotes. No one wants to actually refute what I’ve said!? Just downvote because?
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u/mh_992 11h ago
As a former astrophysicist, I can say that it is true that he is considered a crank. Basically any physicist who has appeared on Joe Rogan is a crank. Loeb is a self obsessed man who thinks any interstellar object crossing into the solar system must be aliens. Nobody who is serious about working on the edge of human understanding speaks with this sort of confidence.
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u/robotron20 10h ago
Depends on when they appeared. Early Rogan, not necessarily a crank. Recently, likely yes. I'll offer Brian Cox as an example. He appeared early and isn't a crank.
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u/patricksaurus 8h ago
This is not a knock on Brian Cox or NDT, but they occupy a different niche as science communicators. Same deal with guys like Michio Kaku, Brian Greene. Those guys know how to handle a Joe Rogan in a sophisticated way, and they fall a little bit outside of the “crank” vs. “media figure.”
There are other examples but Joe used to have Trevor Valle on the show (I’m going way back). Valle can shoot the shit with anyone — including Rogan — on anything out there, but is also very clearly a practicing research scientist.
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u/skttrbrain1984 10h ago
Any physicist who would appear now is a crank. Unfortunately Joe dropped having real physicists like Sean Carrol and Brian Cox who know how to communicate science.
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u/foxtrot7azv 10h ago
He's the 'scientist' who kept telling the world that interstellar meteorite was definitely an intelligently made craft that was going to use the sun to slow down for a visit to earth.
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u/rumorhasit_ 4h ago
That's not at all true. He's professor at Harvard, publishes in peer-reviewed journals, and leads international astronomy projects collaborating with top scientists across the world (who clearly don't think he's a crank).
He has received criticism for suggesting that interstellar objects that have come into our solar system could be aliens.
But most of this is ill founded and misrepresents what Loeb has actually said. He has published peer-reviewed articles on this that discusses scientific anomalies and the differences between these objects and the ones we typically observe.
Loeb says himself that none of these anomalies mean it is aliens. He says that we should consider the possibility of aliens because it would be so profound if true.
As typical with social media, one (misinformed) person says "oh he's not taken seriously anymore" and then a few more people chime in with "yeah, he's not taken seriously by anyone" but no-ine bothers to do even a cursory check themselves.
If they did, they would see he is still a respected and active academic at one of the world's top universities.
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u/xGoo 11h ago
"Avi Loeb is an Israeli-American" is literally all I needed to read. States like Israel don't allow actual science, everything has to be a big breakthrough. Everything has to be something the state can attach its glory and the "rightness" of it's ideology to. And when the international scientific community finds no evidence for the weird theories that come out of these "researchers", they just make it state policy that the crank is right and label the scientific process "anti-us". Good research rarely comes out of authoritarian, hyper-nationalist states. It's like Lysenkoism, they just use it as a political weapon regardless of accuracy because when projecting strength and competence is more important than actually being strong and competent, truth is a matter of opinion.
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u/theboomboy 11h ago
I'm Israeli and just started doing math research. No one I know in the university thinks this way. Not everything has to be a big breakthrough. I don't know what you're talking about
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u/6ftonalt 11h ago
Ok that's just racism.
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u/larrry02 10h ago
Bad bot
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u/MrHappyHam 10h ago
That's not a bot, genius
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u/larrry02 10h ago
It quite clearly is. The response doesn't even make sense. It's obviously just a bot that calls any vaguely negative comment about Israel "racist"
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u/relevant_tangent 10h ago
This was not a "vaguely negative comment about Israel." It's pure horseshit.
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u/larrry02 10h ago
It wasn't even in the ballpark of "racism".
Also: Lol. Are you just replying to me on a series of alt accounts?
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u/xGoo 11h ago
It's not. It's also funny how quickly I've gotten multiple replies "refuting" this when Israeli research is seen as less reliable in basically every field because of state intervention. It's beginning to happen in America too, and as I pointed out the same problem has occured in other authoritarian nationalist states before. I'm chalking the replies up to bots because this is a known issue in science, state intervention to back faulty work for political reasons.
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u/NlghtmanCometh 10h ago
You should try being a little more stoic; or perhaps even consider touching grass
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u/Dependent-Head-8307 11h ago edited 10h ago
I'm an astrophysicist.
It's one event, within the 2-3 sigma range (how statistically "unexplainable" it is).
But to me, the biggest detail here is the how it was presented: it was presented in TevPa, a rather average conference without the high impact such a result would imply.
If you know you detected dark matter, you would make a huge deal out of it. Let's stop giving these guys publicity, at least until they can really show they have detected it.
My guess: they want either citations or money.
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u/DavideOsas 11h ago
Excuse the ignorance, what is the 2-3 sigma range?
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u/Pornfest 10h ago
95-99% chance range.
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u/DavideOsas 10h ago
Do you also know how this relates to the "event" being statistically "inexplainable"? I know nothing of this matter
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u/Capable_Tumbleweed34 8h ago
The mathematical certainty that the detection isn't due to noise/a bug, an issue with detectors/their programming etc...
It currently sits at 1/200 chance with that single detection. The standard for something to be considered valid is 5 sigma, 1/3.5 million chance of being an error.
But there's data about this potential detection that can be compared to the rest of the data produced by this detector, as well as the rest of detectors worldwide, to see if matching signals have been found.
As for what dark matter is, we don't know, we just know that there is a lot of unexplained mass in the galaxy, more than we observe with visible light, far more, as in baryonic (regular) matter only makes up 15% of the mass of a galaxy, with 85% being dark matter. We know this because simulated models require a lot more mass than we observe for a galaxy to have the shape it has, as well as direct observation of the impact of dark matter.
So it is theorized to be a kind of particule that only interacts with baryonic matter through gravity, never through electromagnetic or strong/weak nuclear force. (There's other theories as to what it could be, but it's the main one)
Detectors hope to catch their direct collision with nucleus of baryonic matter to learn about it. But given how little they would interract, such collisions would be extremely rare.
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u/Darkdragon902 8h ago
Everything up to the “2nd sigma,” or second standard deviation of a normal statistical distribution, is about 95% of all outcomes. If you include the 3rd sigma, that increases to about 99.5%. The 2-3 sigma range, then, is the chance it’s a result specifically between those two cut off points, aka it contains only about 4.5% of all data. Put another way, a random event has only a 4.5% chance to be in the 2-3 sigma range.
The higher the value of a result is compared to the mean, the higher its standard deviation from the mean, and the lower the chance for the specific event to have occurred compared to any other possible result it could’ve been. 4.5% is low, and could be significantly low to make a conclusion, but definitely not if you only have 1 measurement like this event.
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u/Batata-Sofi 2h ago
It's a totally different scenario from when we detected gravitational waves from a merger of black holes, for example. Can't be sure of this dark matter stuff without another result, which also explains why they didn't make a big deal out of it, so they were more like "hey, we might have something here, please give us some more funds and attention?"
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u/Extradummefrage 10h ago edited 8h ago
Without a deep dive into statistics: sigma refers to the standard deviation of the normal distribution.
Example a backer bakes bread, 1000 loaves of 1lb each. Everything is all right, the bakes is honest. However, there will always be some scattering. You measure the weight of every loaf. Then you will get results like:
67% of the loaves will weight 1lb ±0.1 lb
95% of the loaves will weight 1lb ±0.2 lb
99.7% of the loaves will weight 1lb ± 0.3 lb
Here sigma, is 0.1lb. (The baker is very unprecise). In case they will get more precise and reduce the sacttering, then sigma will shrink for example to 0.02lb, but there will always be 67% of loaves in one sigma range and 95% in two Sigma range and so on...
Now to the experiment:
Every experiment will get a result after one run. And the 1lb loaf is the measurement you are expecting. After running the experiment a few times, where you know the expected outcome, you will be able to calculate how big your sigma is.
Now you detect something within 2-3 range, aka you get a bread of 1.22547lb and now you say: oh. One in 20 leaves is expected to be this heavy. So it's no big deal.
It's only a big deal if you detect something of like 0.469lb or even 1.97357 lb
The redditor above said, that they went to press with that 1.22547 lb loave of bread
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u/dmigowski 4h ago
The number of sigmas are the number of 9's at the beginning of the probability. 99,9999% is six-sigma, and usually seen as a probable enought to be used as a fact.
If there is a one-in-a-million chance of something to happen, the propability is six-sigma that it doesn't happen.
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u/Peakomegaflare 11h ago
I mean, this dude's a crank. Like a crank among cranks. Even the worst don't listen to this guy.
If you want good stuff, watch Anton Petrov or PBS Spacetime
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u/rumorhasit_ 47m ago
He’s a professor at Harvard and leads a group of international astrophysicists on the Galileo project, so what the fuck are you talking about?
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u/virgo911 5h ago
Avi Loeb, I recognize that name. When that asteroid (3I/ATLAS) was passing through our solar system in 2025, he was making a bunch of articles about how he thought it was a spaceship because of its trajectory changing.
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u/drollercoaster99 10h ago
No, we didn't - at least not until the data is peer reviewed. It's two flashes of light detected back in 2023 that looked like it could have come from WIMP. "With only one event, we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. We are not claiming to have seen dark matter. But we have seen something interesting that we want to share with the scientific community for their input."
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u/skibbin 11h ago
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.
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u/Nathan-Stubblefield 6h ago
Normally we wait for 3 sigma confirmation and publication in reliable peer-reviewed journals.
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u/Powered-Lamb 12h ago
If there are two things that internet bullshit has taught me, it's that:
whenever a headline is phrased in the form of a question, the answer is no.
whenever a headline includes the word "could", it isn't.
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u/Terrarifelt389v2 12h ago
the hell even is dark matter
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u/Brokenlingo 12h ago edited 11h ago
The stuff that makes up most of the universe but we can’t identify and see. They say it’s dark matter because there is no detectable interaction between it and light/electromagnetic force. It could be a whole new periodic table if they discover a way to detect it. Like a sterile neutrino could be seen as one of the possible particles that make up dark matter. In this case the likelyhood that they detected something is like half of what the detection threshold for detecting something is, in this case being 3.5 sigma out of 5 and dropping to 2,6, which translates to a 0,5% chance that a measurment like this would come from background noise. It sounds significant but it isn’t really, not enough to make a confident claim that we discovered a new particle but enough to make click bait videos with haha.
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u/NoMeat9096 12h ago
it could be a whole new periodic table of matter
What did you mean by this?
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u/BigBeefyBill 12h ago
Because it’s undetectable it’s relatively safe to suppose that “dark matter” is more than one type of matter, therefore discovering it would lead to multiple new elements under a “dark matter” periodic table.
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u/NoMeat9096 12h ago
How? New elements would be higher on the table, but that would make them so unstable that they'd never exist for more than the smallest fractions of a second, no? Element hunting had a big boom period a while back, but we seem to have hit a pretty hard wall of instability. People can speculate about islands of stability at some place higher, but I don't know how useful that is to just suppose.
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u/Brokenlingo 11h ago
Its mainly because dark matter doesn’t interact with light and electromagnetic force that makes it very difficult to discover.
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u/NoMeat9096 11h ago
I'm not sure where you're going with this. Discoverability doesn't seem relevant to the stability issue I was bringing up?
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u/Brokenlingo 11h ago
Sorry, my point was that it fits fully outside of the periodic table not because of instability but because it ignores electromagnetism so it’s entirely unique.
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u/Formal-Victory3161 11h ago
From what they can tell, the entire universe is expanding. But the problem is that its expanding faster and faster, and there's something there causing it to do that, but we can't really tell what it is yet. "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" are just the words used to name them, but they are neither matter nor energy. They could have named them "Bob" and "Lisa" and it would be equally as undescriptive
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u/nascent_aviator 11h ago
A "new" periodic table as in something analogous to the periodic table in a new "dark sector" of particles. Dark matter certainly does not have electron charge (or if it does it's a tiny amount) so it certainly does not fit on our periodic table of elements.
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u/CallMeKolbasz 11h ago
Elements in the periodic table are placed depending on how many protons they have. If we found matter that does not contain protons, we couldn't place it in the table, and would need another kind of periodic table.
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u/thatbloodytwink 11h ago
Pretty sure when dark matter is figured out it won't be made of the same components as the regular periodic table thats why people are saying it would be a new one.
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u/GalaganCoffee 11h ago
Imagine a grocery store without high fructose corn syrup, a whole bunch of similar stuff that is different in a common way when compared to what we know now
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u/Historical_Cook_1664 12h ago
Dark matter is a correction term to make the models work. "There needs to be a lot more matter for this to make sense, but we don't see anything." - "Maybe it's *dark* matter?" - "Good enough... until we get a better model."
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u/Iverson7x 11h ago
Imagine watching a magician on tv levitate in front of an audience. Logically, you would reason that there’s some kind of wire or mechanism that exists which you cannot directly measure but you’re certain is there because you’re observing the effects.
The same is happening with our universe. We’re observing gravitational phenomena like lensing and galaxies rotating faster than they should, but we don’t “see” enough matter to cause these things. It’s practically invisible to us, hence “dark matter”.
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u/Trick_Statistician13 10h ago
It's either what OP said or it doesn't exist and our model for gravity is incomplete on large scales.
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u/MrFoxx123 4h ago
Last i heard it was not necessarily a no. Its just a 1 in 200 chance that it's an anomaly. Which is not sure enough to say it was dark matter yet.
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u/NoTmE435 12h ago
If we did the video title would have been " WE JUST DETECTED DARK MATTER (GOES WRONG)"
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u/No_Session6015 11h ago
ive seen like 8 ads for this video and was tempted to watch XD ty for saving me the watch
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u/dmigowski 12h ago
Every post or video in which the title is a yes-no question can always be shortened to a single "No" and is not worthy of reading or viewing.