[ad_1]
Avi Loeb poses in the observatory near his office in Cambridge, Mbad.
Before he began to deal with alien spaceships last year, the chairman of the astronomy department of Harvard University was renowned for his public lectures on modesty. Personal modesty, which Loeb said he learned from growing up on a farm. And what Loeb calls "cosmic modesty" – the idea that it is arrogant to badume that we are alone in the universe, or even as a particularly special kind.
You can find a poster for any of these lectures in Loeb's office today, even if it's a little lost in clutter: Loeb's photos posing under the dome of the huge telescope Harvard nineteenth century; thanks from elementary schoolchildren; a framed interview that he gave to the New York Times in 2014; his books on the formation of galaxies; his face again and again – a man with glbades in his mid-fifties with a smile always satisfied.
Loeb stands near his desk the first morning of spring clbades, dressed in a rich outfit, resuming the programs for his afternoon clbad. He points visitors to this and that on the wall. He mentions that four television crews were in this office on the day of autumn when his theory of spaceships became viral, and now five film companies are interested in making a film about his life .
Avi Loeb's theory of an extraterrestrial spacecraft has gone around the media and sparked controversy in academia.
A page of perfectly handwritten equations is on the desk at the edge nearest the guest chairs.
"Oh, it's something I did last night," Loeb says. It's a calculation, he explains, supporting his theory that an alien spacecraft, or at least a part of it, could currently fly over Jupiter's orbit.
Since the publication of his controversial article, Loeb has led an almost uninterrupted media circuit, encompbading the celebrity that may have come to be the most academically distinguished. enthusiastic about his time – the greatest Harvard astronomer who suspects the technology of another solar system to come to our door. And this, in turn, left some of his peers unmistakable – grumbling at what they view as a flimsy or confused theory as to why Harvard's top astronomer would not be silent about extraterrestrials .
What you can not call Loeb is a crank. When astronomers from Hawaii came across the first known interstellar object at the end of 2017 – a flash of light moving so fast in front of the sun that it could only come from another star – Loeb had three decades of teaching at the Ivy League and hundreds of astronomical publications to his credit. summary, mainly related to the nature of black holes and ancient galaxies and other subjects far from any tabloid shelf.
So, while apparently all astronomers on the planet were trying to understand how the interstellar object (nicknamed "Oumuamua, Hawaiian for" scout ") was found in our remote Milky Way plot, the extraordinarily confident suggestion Loeb's claim that she came from another civilization could not be easily fired.
"Considering an artificial origin, one of the possibilities is that" Oumuamua "- said Oh-mooah-mooah -" is a signal sail floating in interstellar space as a debris of advanced technological equipment " , wrote Loeb with his colleague Shmuel Bialy in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters in November – ET thrilling enthusiastic and upsetting the fragile orbits of space universities.
"" Oumuamua is not an extraterrestrial spaceship, and the authors of the document insult an honest scientific inquiry to even suggest it, "tweeted Paul Sutter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University, shortly after the publication of the document.
"A shocking example of sensationalist and badly motivated science," wrote theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel in Forbes. Katie Mack, an astrophycist at North Carolina State University, suggested that Loeb was looking for advertising. "Sometimes you write an article about something you do not believe at all, just for the purpose of spreading it," she told the Verge.
Most scientists, apart from Loeb, badume that Oumuamua is a kind of rock, that it's an asteroid ejected from a melted star there are hundreds of millions of years ago or an icy comet wandering in the interstellar void. But it moves too fast for an inert rock, Loeb emphasizes – moving away from the sun as if something pushes it from behind. And if it is a comet spewing steam, the limited observations that astronomers made of it showed no sign.
Loeb argues that "Oumuamua 's behavior means that he can not act, as is commonly imagined, of a rock block shaped like a long potato. , but rather of a very long object and a maximum thickness of one millimeter, perhaps as a pancake – one kilometer obloid or a sailing vessel – so light and thin that sunlight pushes it out of our solar system.
And even though he does not say that they are extraterrestrials, he says that he can not think of anything other than extraterrestrials that fit the data. And he says this everywhere in the international news.
"A lot of people were waiting for that once this publicity was done, I would back down," Loeb says. "If anyone shows me the evidence to the contrary, I will back down immediately."
In the meantime, he doubles his work, hosts a Reddit AMA on "how the discovery of extraterrestrial life in outer space will transform our lives," and sends emails and emails to friends and colleagues alike. updates on all the journalists who speak to him.
In a few months, Loeb has become an alternative to man in the face of the rumors of the terrestrial news.
"It changes your perception of reality, just knowing that we are not alone," he says. "We are fighting on borders, on resources … It would make us feel that we are part of planet Earth as a civilization rather than voting individually on Brexit".
So now, he is famous and presents himself as a truth-revealer and a risk-taker in a time of too conservative and restful scientists.
"The traditional approach [is] You can drink your coffee in the morning and wait for what you find later. It's a stable lifestyle, but for me, it's more like the lifestyle of a businessman than a scientist, "he says.
"The worst thing that can happen is that I would be relieved of my administrative duties, which would give me even more time to focus on science," Loeb adds. "All the titles I have, I can call them back in. Actually, I can remember myself on the farm."
Loeb grew up in an Israeli farming village. He sat in the hills and read philosophy books imagining the wider universe, fascinating it, training it in the universities and up to Oumuamua.
"I do not have a clbad system in the academic world, it's the elite," he explains, as he drives a journalist to the locked Grand Chamber. refractor – a huge telescope of the nineteenth century where he sometimes does photo shoots. "I see this as a continuation of the curiosity of my childhood – trying to understand what the world looks like."
He joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in the late 1980s ("where Einstein was before," he notes) and then held a junior position in the D & D department. Harvard astronomy, where "no one has been promoted for 20 years … they have retained me after three years.")
As he recounts, the story of his life resembles a cerebral version of "Forrest Gump" – Loeb always pursues his mind with discernment and meets the giants of the land that he regularly names. Stephen Hawking dined at home. Stephen Spielberg once asked him for movie tips. Russian billionaire Uri Milner entered his office and sat down on the couch and asked him to help him design humanity's first interstellar spacecraft – which he is doing now, with a research budget $ 100 million and the support of Mark Zuckerberg and the late Hawking.
Loeb casually mentions that he had a private audience with the famous physicist Freeman Dyson at the age of 24, before interrupting under the effect of the Great's 20-meter tube Refractor. He smiles until he realizes that the reporter does not know who Freeman is. Dyson is.
At noon, Loeb leaves the telescope and his office and goes to a white clbadroom and stripped bare to present the basics of astrophysics to a dozen new students.
If he now masters the national news interview, his lecture starts a little on stilts. He looks at the table as he speaks. It asks first-year students from the most prestigious universities to go around the table and list their hobbies.
Ten minutes later, Loeb goes into script.
"Has anyone heard the name" Oumuamua? " he asks. "What did that mean?"
Almost everyone nods. Matt Jacobsen, a freshman from Harvard, an Iowa farming town, volunteered: "Some speculated that it came from another civilization."
"Who made this speculation?" Loeb asks, smiling.
There is awkward silence in the room, then Jacobsen shouts, "Was it you? Oh my God!" and the teacher smiles more widely.
(With the exception of the title, this story has not been changed by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated thread.)
[ad_2]
Source link
