Avi Loeb on How the Scientific Community Isn't Open Minded

You know, Einstein made three big mistakes at the end of his career in the 1930s. He argued that black holes don't exist, gravitational waves don't exist, and quantum mechanics doesn't have spooky action at a distance. He argued all these three things at the end of his career when he was the most experienced. And he was wrong. We have experimental data that shows that he was wrong on all three. And what is the lesson from that? Even the smartest person, you know, that was last century in physics can be wrong if he works on the frontier because you never know exactly where the truth lies. Okay, you have to take risks. And if people want to just demonstrate that they are smart, it's better not to take risks. And how do you not take risks? If you work on ideas that will never be tested against data, against evidence. So if you work on superstring theory, or on extra dimensions, or on the multiverse, you can do intellectual gymnastics and impress your colleagues that you're smart. And you will get jobs, you will get recognition, you will get awards. If that's your goal, that's a completely legitimate framework. But I see it as a violation of our commitment as physicists to understand nature. You know, it's not really about us. Physics is a dialogue with nature. You listen to nature, you see what the experiments are telling you, and you learn. And perhaps you were wrong. You take risks. It's not about your image. It's not getting more likes on Twitter. So that's why I don't really care what my colleagues say. If this object looked unusual, I just talk about it the way I would talk about any other anomaly. And people were asking, you know, why isn't he backing down? Well, I will back down as soon as there is evidence, you know, if I saw a photograph showing that it's a rock, or if I saw some other objects like it that we definitely have clear evidence that they are naturally produced, then I will give up on it. And I'm not afraid of being wrong. That's part of any work on the frontiers. This is my thoughts on the quantum physics aspect of this. I think there's not enough people that understand what they're doing to criticize them, so there's no social pressure. The difference between that and the concept of exploring extraterrestrial life is extraterrestrial life is inexorably connected to nonsense. It's an actually connected to crazy people that think that they're talking to aliens, they're channeling people on another planet. I have an answer to that. Suppose there was a whole literature on COVID-19 that is completely fictitious. You know, like people were saying crazy things about COVID-19 that make no sense whatsoever. Well, you can find them. Yeah, suppose there were books about it, there were films about it. Now, would that mean that scientists, reputable scientists, should not work on a vaccine for COVID-19? No, no, no, but that's why that doesn't apply. So who cares if there are people that say nonsense? You don't care, you ignore them. COVID-19 is a real thing, and you can prove it in a lab, quickly, instantly. It's universally acknowledged as being a real thing. The problem with extraterrestrial life is there's no evidence that it's real. Well, but if you step on the grass and you say, look, it doesn't grow, then obviously, because you're stepping on it. So if you bully anyone that works on the subject, then young people don't enter into this research field. If you don't fund it at all, you dry it up, then there will not be discoveries. No, I agree with you. And then you say, look, there are no discoveries. I step on the grass, and it doesn't grow. Therefore, there is no point in continuing to wait for it to grow. I agree with you. No, I think it's a side effect of our social interactions. And I think a lot of professors, a lot of people in academia, they come from maybe a more socially awkward environment. They come from a lot of people that get into teaching, a lot of people that get into being professors. They weren't like the class king. They weren't like the most popular person. And social interactions with them, maybe they were bullied. Dr. Carl Hart, who's an academic, was on a couple days ago, was actually talking about this very subject. And that a lot of academics, they try to undermine other people's work. And they do so in kind of a bullying fashion. Yeah, because it's all about the ego. You see, I was asked by the Harvard Gazette, the Harvard University Gazette, which is the Pravda of Harvard, this official newspaper of Harvard. They asked me, what is the one thing you would like to change about the world? You know, a very big question. So I wrote an essay. I said, I want my colleagues to behave more like kids. Because as a kid, I remember that I was mostly curious about the world. I would not be afraid of making mistakes. I wasn't worried about my ego or my... Something really strange happens to those kids that take risks and are not worried about themselves so much. Something bad happens to them when they become tenured professors in academia. Tenure is supposed to give you the freedom to explore directions that may turn out to be wrong. That's what Einstein demonstrated at the end of his career. So you would expect people to take advantage of that. But instead, once professors become tenured for life, meaning that there is no risk to their job, they are starting to pursue honors and awards, status, recognition. They are afraid of making mistakes. They build these echo chambers where they have students and postdocs repeating their mantras so that their voice will sound louder, so that they will get even more recognition. Now I say this, you know, the scientific inquiry is not about us. It's about the dialogue with nature, trying to figure out what nature is. It's not about elevating our status, our image. We will all die in several decades. So it's really not that. Now, actually, Lex Friedman was asking me, Avi, you know so much. What do you think is the meaning of life? And I told him, look, I think we just exist. Any meaning that we assign now will go away in a billion years because the sun will boil off the oceans on Earth. There will be no life on Earth. You know, all of these things that we call meaning, they are really temporary in the big scale. We should just enjoy the process, just like eating good food. You know, I will not mention another example. You know, doing this, like eating good food, you enjoy the process. So learning about the world, figuring out what the world is, is very enjoyable. You know, if I realize something nobody else did and understand something that nobody else did, it gives me pleasure. So just the process of doing that, that gives me meaning because I enjoy it. You know, so you should live your life in a way that you enjoy it. If you like good food, that's good enough. You know, you can live your life just eating. You know, that's what animals do. Yeah. Right. Can have sex. You can do all kinds. But if you want a deeper sort of satisfaction, I think understanding the world is what humans are capable of doing. And that's really a deeper level of enjoying life, so to speak. Well, there's a lot of examples of professors going out on a limb, being incorrect and then being punished, being ridiculed, losing their status in the community, or even being correct but not having the support of your peers who turn on you and turn against you and then it turns out ultimately they were correct. But there's very little repercussions for that. And there's this thing that happens with people and ideas where they get scared to take on something that could easily make them look ridiculous. And the best example of that is extraterrestrial life. It's so easy to get ridiculed for believing in it. It's like Bigfoot and then extraterrestrial life. No, I want to change that. I say this is a subject the scientific community can address with scientific tools, okay, with telescopes. Let's discuss it. The public is interested. You know, let's forget about the past and look for a better future, right? And my point is there are many examples for unborn babies, you know, in science where people were ridiculed and ideas were never pursued or delayed, you know, for example, looking for planets around other stars, you know, that was something that was suggested in 1952 by an astronomer called Otto Strueve who said, if you take Jupiter, the planet Jupiter, put it close to the sun, then it will move the sun back and forth a lot. And you could tell if there is a close in Jupiter near other stars by looking at their motion or looking as it occults, the star comes in front of it, transits in front. He suggested that 1952 for four decades, astronomers ignored that. Why? Because they said we know that Jupiter in our solar system is far away and we understand why it's far away. And therefore we shouldn't waste our time even looking for something like that. Then in 1995, a couple of astronomers found a hot Jupiter, Jupiter close to a star, and they got the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago for that. So my point is this is an example of a baby that was eventually born. So people would say, oh, yeah, science works. You see, eventually it was found. My point is it took four decades in those four decades, you know, we could have done a lot to advance science. And the other thing is I say, okay, this baby was born, but there might have been other babies that were not born, you know, ideas that were put forward and were scrutinized for no good reason just because people are close minded. And you know, the strange thing for me is that I see a lot of innovation in the commercial sector. You see, you know, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, you know, Apple, Google, they have parts of their companies that is that are doing blue sky research, you know, things that are not applied. Start it all started with IBM and before that. And then in academia, I see a lot of conservatives and much less innovation as in the commercials. Now the commercial sector is after making a profit. You would expect academia to be even more open minded, but it's not. And to me that has that must change. Is this something that you had as an idea before publishing this, this, these thoughts about extraterrestrial life? Yeah. Did that accentuate it for you? Yeah. Yeah, I didn't expect the response that I received. It doesn't bother me. You know, in my, I have 800 more than 800 papers that I published and eight books in all of these. I talk about anomalies, you know, over the years I talked about anomalies in other contexts, you know, like in the early universe and, and then when I mentioned speculative ideas in other contexts, there was no pushback, you know, it, it, it wasn't threatening to anyone. It wasn't, but something about the subject of extraterrestrial life bothers people. And frankly, you know, I'm just like a kid. I try to be as close as possible to the way I was at a young age. I'm just doing it innocently, working on this subject the same way I work on other subjects. And I get this response that now the only reason the two of us are speaking, you know, and I get a lot of media attention is because my colleagues are not behaving the same way. If everyone would accept, you know, I think it's common sense. What is common sense to me, if everyone would accept it, I would be no different than the person next to me. You wouldn't speak to you wouldn't be speaking to me. Sure I would. No, I still would. 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