See Alexander Abian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Abian
Abian was indeed weird, way off the deep end, but he wasn't promoting himself quite like Loeb does. Abian was a true believer in his theories, getting them out and having others believe them was more important to him than anything else.
https://web.archive.org/web/20001204074300/http://www.amestr...
He's still repeating this?
Loeb previously performed an analysis that said if 3I/ATLAS wasn't a comet and was instead an asteroid with no coma, it would have to be an unusually large object to explain its brightness. Since then, we pointed the Hubble at it and clearly saw that it was a comet, not an asteroid, so the entire premise of the calculation is wrong.
> When I proposed that it might be technological in origin, just like 2020 SO, this notion was ridiculed by comet experts, in a historical echo of Chladni’s scrutiny.
To quote Carl Sagan: "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Angela Collier has a video that goes over the common tropes and once you see it, you can recognize it quickly. It's the same thing with Erik Weinstein who is trying to sell his persecution, when in reality he's basically a paid propagandist for the billionaire oligarch Peter Thiel. Why Thiel wants Weinstein to discredit our academic institutions is a good question.
Angela Collier has the final word on physics and crackpots. Hilarious.
He exploits bad science journalism to get his name out there.
Generally with proper science journalism, it runs along the lines of the saying: "It's never aliens, until it is", but with Avi Loebs it always tends to be "It's always aliens, until it isn't".
I seem to remember a anecdote that Peter Shor gave lectures on his quantum factorization algorithm and only referred to it as the "quantum factoring algorithm" (or something like that) rather than "Shor's algorithm".
This may taking it a too far - he's too modest. Once it is well-established, go ahead and use the self-named theory.
But, some good smell tests for bad theories are a bibliography of mostly the same author and/or promotion of self-named entities.
King-Aaron•5mo ago
I feel like these are fun thought experiments.
7thaccount•5mo ago
A few years ago when that interstellar object flew by he saw his chance to make a bunch of money selling books. Now he just makes wild claims with no evidence that the object was a light sail and contacts the media. He then tried to claim that SETI hasn't actually done anything and got told off by Jill Tatar...the literal inspiration for the movie Contact. Then he went off and dredged the bottom of the ocean and found some little spheres (extremely common) and started claiming they were from interstellar space and fudged the data.
What makes this complicated is that Avi was a pretty respected scientist with a huge number of papers. He knows how to do science properly and how the peer review process works, but doesn't care anymore now that he's getting attention and making money.
Check out
Angela Collier's video on YouTube: harvard & aliens & crackpots: a disambiguation of Avi Loeb
Professor Dave Explains video: Avi Loeb is a fraud now.