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352 points instagraham | 9 comments | | HN request time: 1.409s | source | bottom
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nabla9 ◴[] No.43540635[source]
> The same solo author (a computer scientist) has made many similar claims based on a variety of datasets. Often coming to completely contradictory conclusions. Some of these claims have been followed up by astronomers, who found errors in his analysis and poor statistical tests. His claims have been discussed in this sub before. Independent studied have found no significant evidence of anisotropy.

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/534/2/1553/7762193

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021ApJ...907..123I/abstra...

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017MNRAS.466.3928H/abstra...

>Take his claims about JWST as an example. In 2024 he wrote a paper about some early data, claiming to find more galaxies rotating with the Milky Way. He claimed based on a sample of just 34 galaxies that the signal was significant. Now he has looked at a wider dataset of the same area, which should allow him to verify his analysis. But it shows exactly the opposite, more anti. So he writes a paper saying this new result is definitely significant but doesn't reflect on the fact he has written two papers which contradict each other. He has failed to reproduce his own result. The take away is that his results are not as significant as he claims. He's also looking at a tiny area, and nearby galaxies can have correlated spins. He doesn't take this into account either. There are multiple JWST fields in different directions he could examine in different directions to test his claims, there are two JADES fields, but he only publishes one.

>I do wish the MNRAS editors would take measures to stop publishing low quality claims like this without more robust review. If you look at the text, it’s largely repeating results from his old papers. There’s very little discussion of the new results.

source: https://www.reddit.com/r/cosmology/comments/1ja9i53/the_dist...

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1. iainmerrick ◴[] No.43540755[source]
Thank you. That's a shame, it was a cool-sounding story, just unlikely enough to sound plausible.
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2. datavirtue ◴[] No.43542249[source]
Clockwise? To which observer?
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3. jfengel ◴[] No.43542290[source]
It's arbitrary, but that's fine. The important part would be any asymmetry. The Big Bang implies that there shouldn't be one.
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4. pests ◴[] No.43542359[source]
Us?
5. joe_the_user ◴[] No.43543205{3}[source]
Just to be clear, it's not fine at all in any "this is a fine physical theory".

A statistically unlikely arrangement of cosmic objects relative to earth only - earth in particular, violates not just the properties of the big bang but "the cosmological principle" and common sense. It's a garbage theory, a headline that makes a math person just have a "how stupid do they expect the average person to be" reaction.

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6. GoblinSlayer ◴[] No.43543374[source]
On pictures Milky Way is usually shown to rotate counterclockwise. As is solar system.
7. thrdbndndn ◴[] No.43543776{4}[source]
?? he's saying "it's fine" if it's defined as "clockwise" arbitrarily.
8. iainmerrick ◴[] No.43544137{4}[source]
No, I don't think you have this right. There was no physical theory claimed, just a very surprising observation (though of course it turns out to be bogus). If it were true it would require an incredible explanation, but that's not at all the same as just proposing an outlandish theory with no motivation.

If you take the approach you describe, I think you'd have incorrectly dismissed the observation that distant continents look as if they could fit together like jigsaw pieces, as it implied the impossible theory of continental drift. Isn't that just the same sort of outlandish, clearly ridiculous observation as "there's an asymmetry in the way galaxies rotate"? Except of course that one observation is correct, and the other isn't. You can falsify it just by checking the observation, rather than dismissing it out of hand as impossible.

Edit to add: maybe a better comparison would be to the violation of parity conservation in the weak force, as proposed by Yang and Lee, although I just learned from wikipedia that the actual experiment was performed by Wu. If you think that isn't a valid analogy, I'd be really interested to learn why.

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9. joe_the_user ◴[] No.43550801{5}[source]
TL;DR; all your analogies are less extreme than the claimed observation because they don't violate the principle that physical laws apply uniformly throughout space/time.

Theory or data/observation is a sort of layered thing. The lowest data level is the data that the Webb or whatever telescope gets, then you have the theory that what's being represented in galaxies and you have all suppositions of standard cosmology and in that you have a posited theory that galaxies as viewed from earth rotate in a "given direction".

The thing about this theory/observation/whatever is that it's a pattern that, if true, would only be visible on earth (or in vanishingly small area relative to the claimed area of the pattern). If such a thing were happening, it wouldn't just contradict current physical laws. It would contradict the paradigm science has had since Newton that physical laws apply uniformly throughout the cosmos and especially that the earth isn't the "center" of the universe. The observation of continents fitting together or violations of parity conservation aren't analogous because they involve things that can be meaningfully observed anywhere.

All this is to say "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". As far as investigating. I could or someone could, spend the effort needed to investigate this. But science actually should have one level of claim+evidence that's "interesting, let's investigate" and another that's "oh dear, that's really crank stuff and you'd need to truly vast evidence before I'd even look". Other science would be overwhelm by bullshit.