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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The Hubble Tension is certainly real. The Hubble Constant can be estimated from a number of completely independent astrophysical phenomena. There is a significant difference in the value computed from ‘local’ phenomena, and distant phenomena. It is often referred to as the “5 sigma” tension, because that is the statistical significance of the disagreement. This has been know long before James Webb, but as the article says, these observations just lowered the uncertainty on one of the probes. But we were fairly certain already that this tension is real.

    Whether it’s a crisis or not is up to the individual. Things not agreeing in science — especially astrophysics/cosmology — is just part of the process. I don’t know anyone that is ‘worried’, so much as looking for ways to solve the problem.



















  • I agree that publishers are the proverbial landlords of the academic environment. It’s always been absurd to me that scientists pay to publish in journals, and readers pay to access them… 😵‍💫

    However, (maybe independently of the above) I think there needs be an interpretation layer between some scientific article and the broader public (not popular science articles). Too many times I’ve seen direct quotes from scientific papers, which are understood within their niche/expert communities, get taken completely out of context or just simply misunderstood. This is completely normal; not even scientists understand the language of other fields in science.

    There’s been a recent increase in some scientists creating Youtube videos to accompany published works, where they simply talk through their results in everyday language. This is probably in the right direction and helps bring real science to the public in a digestable but unbiased way (then the journal article serves as verification of their claims in the video).