Will Kinney

Let me tell you a little bit about my second book, and how it relates to my first book. 1/ #t=aboutBook" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/…

@DrBrianKeating @Thievesbook @G_S_Bhogal They gave Erlich a MacArthur in *1990*? JFC

Sure, but why would he think he’s stupid, aside from willingly exposing himself to Twitter dunking at age 90? He truly was the darling of academia for generations, despite being abjectly arrogant and irredeemably wrong. What’s the incentive for self-reflection when you have all these shiny academic accolades? Not getting ratioed? - **Crafoord Prize** in Biosciences (1990) — awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (often described as a complement or alternative to a Nobel in fields like ecology where no Nobel exists). - **Heinz Award** in the Environment (1995) — shared with his wife Anne Ehrlich. - **Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement** (1998) — often called the "environmental Nobel." - **Blue Planet Prize** (1999) — a major Japanese international environmental award. - **BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award** in Ecology and Conservation Biology (2013). - **MacArthur Fellowship** ("Genius Grant") (1990). - **Elected Fellow of the Royal Society** (FRS, 2012). - Other memberships: U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1985), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1982), American Philosophical Society, and more. - Earlier awards: Sierra Club John Muir Award (1980), World Wildlife Fund Gold Medal (1987), ECI Prize in terrestrial ecology (1993), World Ecology Award (1993), Dr A. H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences (1998), Volvo Environment Prize, and others. These honors reflect his influence in academia and conservation—particularly on biodiversity loss, coevolution, and human population impacts—even as critics point to failed forecasts from his earlier popular works. (Note: Paul Ehrlich the ecologist is unrelated to the 1908 Nobel-winning immunologist of the same name.)

Ehrlich made one huge miscalculation and then spent much of his career contorting himself into a pretzel to justify it. He was a powerful case study of how the fear of looking stupid can make a smart man genuinely stupid.

@Matzan481_ BOAT

I am down with that.

@SandyofCthulhu @Matzan481_

Here is a Russian joke about food shortage, told to me BY a Russian Jew. Everyone is standing in line at the butcher shop, because there is a rumor of meat. After they'd been waiting in line for about an hour, an official comes out and shouts, "There is not enough meat for everyone. All the Jews must go home." So, moaning and sad, all the Jews head home. After another hour of waiting, the official comes out again and shouts, "There is STILL not enough meat. Everyone who is not a Party member must go home." All the non-Party members go home, cursing their luck. After yet ANOTHER hour of waiting, the official comes out one last time and shouts, "Well, there isn't any meat at all really. Everyone go home." So Ivan turns to Yuri and says, "See? This is how it always is. The Jews get all the breaks."

@cosmicfibretion @RennanBarkana Another mission won't help with this particular problem. The measurement is already dominated by cosmic variance uncertainty.

@WKCosmo @RennanBarkana Not rigorously, at least. If anything the data motivates another space-based CMB mission.

It feels like I’ve awoken in the Twilight Zone. There’s an abundance of new data in cosmology and astrophysics and it just keeps on flowing with brilliant new experiments. That’s not stagnation!

@cosmicfibretion @RennanBarkana Yeah but you can't add the probabilities like that.

@WKCosmo @RennanBarkana Not individually. Collectively, they do not appear to be consistent with the predictions of LCDM. arxiv.org/pdf/2203.06142

@cosmicfibretion @RennanBarkana The large-scale angular anomalies in the CMB are not 5 sigma, and never will be.

Defining progress in fundamental physics as the discovery of a new particle is an extremely narrow one. All of the juicy anomalies are in cosmology. The Hubble tension is at 7 sigma, the large-angular-scale anomalies in the CMB are at ~5 sigma, and there's a plethora of others at 3-4 sigma. The universe is quantum. There's no evidence that there exists some scale at which it stops being quantum. I think it's far more reasonable to view these anomalies as quantum effects in the IR that we do not understand than to assume we need to modify GR or LCDM to fit the data.

@coreyspowell @Science_George @skdh It's especially true of particle physics. It's widely discussed. Hardly a secret.

@coreyspowell @Science_George @skdh I interpret what he said as exactly what he said: the expense and complexity of the instruments we need is an impediment. AI might help find a way around that, it might not (I'm skeptical), but he's not wrong on that basic point.

he's entirely right of course. even if you think he is wrong, at the very least physicists should think about why everyone else agrees they've lost the plot.

@SunnyDfan4eva Tell that to Bluesky

@WKCosmo To be fair, 98% of the people commenting on the Bliss story thought it was ridiculous someone came forward with “allegations” as if she had been abused. Almost everyone rightfully thought it was a non-story

Something we really need to get away from is flattening things down to the point where there is zero distinction made between Cesar Chavez being a serial child molester and a 26-year-old assistant professor going on a date with an undergrad.

@coreyspowell @Science_George @skdh He didn't say that either.

@WKCosmo @Science_George @skdh The claim here is that we'd learn more from re-interpreting existing data than from getting new data from new colliders and telescopes. That *might* be true in certain fields...but it's just a claim & for problems like galaxy formation or black hole physics seems simply wrong.

@coreyspowell @Science_George @skdh There's a lot of daylight between that and "experiment is unnecessary." I mean, his statement is factually correct. You're reading what you want into it.

@WKCosmo @Science_George @skdh I'm just responding to the claim as presented here. How else can you interpret "progress has relied on expensive hardware like colliders and telescopes, that slows discovery"?

I love the smell of lignite in the morning.

@coreyspowell @Science_George @skdh I don't think that is part of the claim.

@skdh You think that physics can advance without observational data? Because that is the second part of the claim: not just that theory has stagnated, but that collecting data is unnecessary and even counterproductive.

The plane! The plane!

@DeivonDrago @TSHamiltonAstro Sometimes life imitates fiction, and that is a good thing. 🫡

@WKCosmo @TSHamiltonAstro I’ve seen versions of that pic some years before - but strictly in black and white.

Peak preppy.

@DeivonDrago @TSHamiltonAstro Also looks like AI.

@WKCosmo @TSHamiltonAstro That looks like a Hollywood movie scene.

@ScientificGems It's perfectly fine to read Euclud, it's just not necessary (or even especially useful) if you want to learn modern mathematics.

@WKCosmo Some classical Christian high schools do still teach from Euclid, I believe. And personally, I've read both Euclid and Archimedes.

There is a fundamental disconnect between STEM and humanities/philosophy in that STEM by its nature does not value the wisdom of the ancients in any special way. We understand a lot more about Einstein's theories than Einstein did, because we have had a century to find deeper, simpler, and clearer ways to think about the physics. Contemporary scientists by and large are not confused about the things that Einstein was confused about, we are confused about new things, that Einstein barely imagined.

@ScientificGems Yeah, but nobody reads Euclid or Archimedes as part of their math curriculum.

@WKCosmo Mathematics by its nature DOES value the "wisdom of the ancients." The mathematics of Euclid, Archimedes, etc. is all still valid mathematics. Even in science, we honour the pioneers. Their books are still read, and we name things after them: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s…