startswithabang.bsky.social
Cosmologist, science communicator, author, speaker, and longtime writer of Starts With A Bang.
Not the next Carl Sagan; the first Ethan Siegel.
970 posts
4,778 followers
729 following
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But if I can stop you from trying to engage others the way you've tried to engage me, and instead to ask permission before charging in to beat what is most certainly a dead horse among physical cosmologists, then at least that's a public good that will have come of all this.
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That may be a biased sample, sure.
But all five of us:
-are bona fide cosmologists,
-are aware of this and many other conceptual/teaching issues,
-don't think there's a "right" and "wrong" way of doing things,
-and think you have a _____ up your ______ when it comes to this issue.
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For you, the issue is YOU WANT TO BE UNDERSTOOD.
For me, the issue is you have been tremendously rude, entitled, and confrontational, and you don't see it.
That's fine.
Now you've been told.
Including me and the people I've talked with, it's a 5-for-5 judgment.
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Markus, this makes me question whether you have understood me at all.
I have talked specifically (no names) to four other cosmologists about you, in particular, as respects kinematic vs. expanding space.
The "Markus being Markus" response I got was literally about that.
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And if they don't want to engage, then you haven't obligated them to either:
leave a string/thread that challenges what they've (correctly!) done unresponded to,
or,
to jump into a discussion they don't want to have with, and pardon me here but the shoe fits, someone with a quite zealous opinion.
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So I'll tell you explicitly:
if you want to engage someone in the future (NOT ME, please, ever again; please take that away from this conversation), maybe ask them if they know about and/or are interested in an alternate way of viewing things?
That allows them to choose "yes" iff they want to.
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So I thought, maybe I can just tell him why there are good reasons to do it the way I do it instead of the way he wants me to do it and he'll stop at long last.
Those were my thoughts. I told him no before, he's persisting, so better me than a woman or more junior person than me, I guess.
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And so when you did it again, I thought to myself,
"ah, this guy again, with the Bunn and Hogg paper and his kinematic perspective, and he keeps doing it to me, so God only knows how many other scicommers he's doing the same toxic thing to?"
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"So I am well aware that it is discorteous of trying to engage someone in a discussion they want to avoid."
So, you are aware of this.
And you are also aware that you have tried to engage me in this discussion before, and I have expressed my displeasure, even telling you to stop or I'd block you.
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Working in base 36 there, are ya buddy?
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Obviously that's an understatement!
I'm thinking of steeling myself and writing a piece about what I really learned from June's AAS meeting.
Everyone is gonna be unhappy about the reality of the way the winds are blowing. (Except the fascists and the anti-science crowd.)
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LOL. Now ask about the last 8 digits of pi.
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I'm trying to tell you that your "invitation to engage with me on this issue" has taught me: never accept such an invitation again. Treat it as a radioactive land mine and just stay away.
Is there something actually wrong?
No?
I won't make the mistake of engaging with you on this again.
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But on this issue, what did you think was going to happen?
That I'd suddenly be converted to seeing a matter-of-perspective issue as a right/wrong issue the way you do?
That your (personal) preference would negate my own experiences working as a cosmologist specialized in structure formation?
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I have to choose:
"what do I spend my time and efforts on?"
The lesson you are teaching me is: just stop replying.
Ignore them all, or any response gets viewed as, "oh, great, he wants to engage with me!"
You are a good PIO and you've made many excellent science illustrations. Thanks for that.
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Scientists contact me all the time about:
-their model of dark energy,
-their alternatives to dark matter,
-their interpretations of QM,
-their extensions to the standard model,
-their reformulation of relativity,
-their preferred pedagogies,
and in general, to point to their own research.
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When I make "that's wrong and your information is out of date, you should learn this" types of mistakes, experts in their fields contacting me is more than appropriate.
It's how I stay current in astro/physics, even in fields outside of my own.
But I also have to tune SO MUCH noise out.
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You are no doubt aware that most of the requests for communication I get are:
1.) Consider my theory/alternative formulation of physics please.
2.) Please pay attention to my ideas/writings/thoughts and promote them instead of what you do.
3.) You are wrong about XXX in physics. Use this instead.
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The reason it's unwelcome is that we all have limited amounts of time and energy.
Who should we engage with? Where should we focus our efforts?
Should I be writing new articles? Books? Making podcasts? Other scicomm projects?
Should I be fighting fascism?
Spending time with my family?
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But clearly this is very, very important to you.
The fact that you have talked to three dozen cosmologists about it in person, and attempted to engage who knows how many others online, indicates its level of importance to you.
This is very common, but as I've explained, unwelcome.
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I have asked many people, "am I missing something here?"
The answer is no.
You have a different perspective than me and I don't share it, for many good reasons, which I have, purely out of kindness to you, explained to you at length. This time, more at length than ever before.
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I guess what I don't understand is that I've told you exactly that many times over many years.
And yet every time you notice I've written about expanding space, you bring it up again. You do not relent.
I know what you think. I've read the papers you keep pointing to. I've spoken to the authors.
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Missed you in Anchorage about 3 weeks ago.
You should've been there. Yes, it was good for astronomy, but it was also an excellent gathering for support group/funeral proceedings for US astronomy and US astronomers. (And yes, Aussie Jessie, you count!)
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Is that of general interest?
Maybe to you it is.
To me, it is hopefully the very last time you will approach me about this issue, or any similar issue, because I have already wasted more time and effort on this than I would have ever cared to in my life, and I don't think it helped anyone at all.
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They can be that in an ideal world.
But take a look at your online thread.
Has it caused other people to engage? Look on? Like your posts? Thank you for bringing up a clarifying issue for misconceptions that they had?
Or is it a desert?
This entire discussion is all about you and your views.
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If you had said, "I think aspect X is different from what you're saying" then I could have either chosen to engage or not.
Probably not if I'm not interested, but at least you can have your say without making demands on that I _have_ to engage because you incorrectly corrected me.
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If someone has made a genuine mistake, as in, "you have said a thing that is really bad, like in conflict with what the consensus of scientists working in the field think, and you are misinforming the world as a result," then being critical is justified.
Untruths must be exposed and clarified.
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Oh my, no.
If you want to have a BEHIND THE SCENES DISCUSSION THAT BOTH PARTIES CONSENT TO DISCUSSING, that's one thing.
If you want to have a public discussion that both parties consent to, that's also something.
But the way you approached me wasn't consensual.
You declared: I have an issue.
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I can only say that I have brought your concerns up to a few other cosmologists that I know of, or had them notice that we've had interactions and approach me, and all of them told me that they're sorry that I had to endure "Markus being Markus."
Do with that information what you will.
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But I also have to choose where to focus my time and energy, and this isn't where I want to put them.
If you are going to insist on talking to dozens more cosmologists about it because you believe that they share (or you can make them share) your concerns, I can't stop you.
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I am not focused on the same questions you are. I have very different goals and audiences in mind when I communicate science than you do.
And I also have a very different set of experiences and values when it comes to cosmology than you do.
What I am doing supports those, not your goals and values
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There are many important things that we can work together on.
Raising awareness about fascism.
Communicating science to the public.
Attempting to build a better world that supports the existence of science.
It's not that it's you versus "all mainstream cosmologists" but you have to remember:
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I am attempting to give you a satisfactory explanation so that you understand why what you are doing is bothersome.
Telling you outright "this is bothersome" hasn't worked, so I am giving as full of an explanation as I can give, hoping to prevent you from inflicting this on others in the future.
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That's pretty much the limit of what I have to say, except for one more thing:
do not think you are doing me, or any other cosmologists, favors when you write to us to express your preferred teaching pedagogies.
You are making us roll our eyes with a "this crap again, man?" feeling.
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The fact that you have a favorite perspective that isn't the one mainstream people working in the field have is fine.
People have their favorite QM interpretations.
People have their favorite gauges.
You have this.
That's fine.
But others, like me, have very good reasons for our preferences.
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But the reality is, when you work in physical cosmology, the Friedmann equations become your bread-and-butter.
That's what you think about; how the Universe expands. How properties between two points in an expanding Universe evolve.
How perturbations in density, velocity, position, etc. behave.
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This is far more useful, not only to me but to almost every cosmologist I've talked to.
And I say almost: there are people who get hung up on esoteric points (like you about the Milne Universe) and get very excited about it.
Geraint Lewis is one.
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And when we do talk about expanding space, we don't throw away "everything we used to help us understand the situation in the kinematical limit;" we relegate those aspects to what we call peculiar velocity: decomposing recession into an "expanding space" part and a "peculiar motion" part.
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But it had a side-effect: I came away thinking that "relativistic mass" had gotten a bum rap over the decades, and I wound up being an annoying undergrad apologist for the concept.
It would take years to beat it out of me again, and I look back on that time with embarrassment for my naivete.
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It honestly reminds me of back when I was interning at Fermilab in 1997, and I thought the best way to learn relativity was to go way back to the original authors who understood it best.
Their library had a copy of Eddington's explanations of it, so I read them.
I enjoyed them; it was interesting.
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The fact that you keep coming back to Milne is fine; that's how you've made sense of it.
But as a working cosmologist, Milne is a historical footnote: someone who tried to poke a hole in the foundations of relativity and the expanding Universe, and since the Universe isn't empty, who cares?
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When people are taught about the expanding Universe kinematically, this is their default thought, and why they keep asking about "how can the Universe expand faster than light?"
Expanding space helps cure this misconception.
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It's why there is such a major difference between a GR set of calculated distances/velocities/lookback times/etc. and a purely SR one, as illustrated here:
universe-review.ca/I02-20-lambd...
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Why is it a misconception?
Because in the actual expanding Universe, there is nothing stopping two points in space from receding from one another at apparent speeds exceeding the speed of light in a vacuum.
In the pure Doppler case, you can't do that.
But the Universe DOES do that!
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And this is where you run into a second FAR more common misconception: the idea that cosmic expansion is equivalent to just a naive Doppler shift, where two objects mutually move away from each other through unchanging space.
That is demonstrably wrong, and a big, big misconception.
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This is really dangerous.
The Milne Universe __IS__ a weird outlier: it is the one case where FLRW is actually isomorphic to Minkowski.
Sort of like taking the function (x^2)/x and saying "but x = 0 isn't a special case" YES IT IS! It is the only case where x^2/x doesn't reduce to x.
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Sure, you can go on and define some new form of action (Baction?) that includes that Benergy, too, but now we're just building a house of cards that has no relation to physical reality.
Why?
Because we want to impose energy conservation in a situation where energy is not conserved!
That's bad!!
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Why?
Because the "energy-like" thing I defined isn't like energy in any way. It can't do work, can't be extracted, can't be converted into other forms, can't even be measured.
My long-time friend Ben asked me about it, and I've decided to call this new version of energy "Benergy" after him.
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For about two years, I had this misconception: that energy could be conserved in GR if only you defined it in this specific way.
And that is BAD.
That is a misconception.
Because the more fundamental truth is that energy truly isn't conserved, and the "extra definition" I imposed is bad, too.