Current Events > Luis Alvarez is what every science crackpot should aspire to be.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Video on it, starting at 14.28 to 23:20.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI&t=1684s&t=14m28s

TL:DW - guy was a real scientist working in a specific field of physics, did work on the Manhattan Project. Later went on to win the Nobel prize for discovering stuff to do with particles and resonance states.

Later became interested in all kinds of fringe ideas like how egyptian pyramids had secret chambers in them and what caused the dinosaur extinction event, and what killed JFK. Stuff way outside his "lane".

He was wrong about the egyptian pyramid stuff, but the important thing is that he got a bunch of experts in the field involved, did actual experiments, accepted it was wrong and then moved on.

He actually...wasn't wrong about the dinosaurs. This is the guy who worked out that an asteroid hit earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. A guy who worked in particle physics, helped develop the atomic bomb and also won a nobel prize for more or less developing the entire field of data analysis and subatomic physics.

He also wasn't wrong about JFK. Was one of the earliest investigators to figure out that the backward head snap made sense from a shot from behind.

Interesting dude.

Can you do a TL;DR for your TL;DW summary?

IAmTheNakedMan posted...

Can you do a TL;DR for your TL;DW summary?

Guy won a nobel prize, should have stopped there. Ended up going into a bunch of other completely unrelated fields and ended up being right about almost everything.

I read something by someone who was mentored by him, and I remember how highly the writer thought of him

But we still don't know who JFK was killed by because people debate it being Oswald, I thought it was common knowledge how his body reacted to the shot, so he didn't really solve much there AFAIK

I thought it was well accepted dat der were multiple causes for da extinction of da dinosaurs, not just da meteor dat impacted da Yucatn peninsula.

pinky0926 posted...

Guy won a nobel prize, should have stopped there. Ended up going into a bunch of other completely unrelated fields and ended up being right about almost everything.

pinky0926 posted...

Guy won a nobel prize, should have stopped there. Ended up going into a bunch of other completely unrelated fields and ended up being right about almost everything.

Why should he have stopped if he was right about everything?

C_Pain posted...

Why should he have stopped if he was right about everything?

There's a known phenomenon called "nobel syndrome" where genius scientists in a particular field end up winning a nobel prize and then end up going way off the deep end and promotin all kinds of whacky fringe nonsense. The thought is that their prestige as a nobel prize winner blinds them to their own confirmation bias (i.e. "I have a nobel prize, I must be right about everything").

Even putting that aside, it takes a considerable amount of expertise to be right about anything at all. For someone to just go off into all kinds of random tangents of science is unusual hollywood stuff, not really what happens in real life.

The weird thing here is that he was right about nearly all of this stuff, and more importantly he actually conducted the experiments really well.