Adam Riess opens his inbox to find an email from someone he’s never met. Tempering disappointment with words of encouragement, the sender delivers the news that Riess is wrong. About everything. This is a Thursday. It could be any other day in the decades since Riess announced that the universe is expanding out in all directions at an ever-accelerating pace. His discovery won him the Nobel Prize and provided evidence for the existence of dark energy, a mysterious force that makes up most of the universe and drives its expansion. It’s also a siren call to hundreds of self-proclaimed gurus, evangelists, pharmacists, physicians and chemical engineers who fill up Riess’s inbox each year with their own theories with subject lines like: Time To Get On Board.
“Usually these people are tremendously confident,” says Riess. “Even though it’s way off the mark, they’re sure it’s phenomenal.” His inbox is rife with sufferers of the Dunning-Kruger effect, a bias where those missing crucial information have more confidence than the experts. Some senders seek grand purpose or demand recognition while seemingly unaware of existing research and physics fundamentals. All offer solutions to the field’s biggest problems. Their theories meet many of the criteria on the Crackpot Index, a scoring system created by mathematician John Baez a quarter-century ago to evaluate physics theories developed by outsiders. “No one wants science to be like ‘if you don’t pass certain checks you’re not allowed to contribute or theorize,’” says Riess. “It should be open.” Yet the digital deluge tests the limits of scientific openness, and the patience of even the most receptive scientists, despite the historical role outsiders play in driving scientific revolutions.
Science’s inside outsiders
Riess is sharing random emails from his inbox to help me understand why physicists are ignoring a theory in cosmology put forward by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman. In 1971, Kauffman theorized a way for matter to transform into life. He proposed that life emerges as spontaneous self-organizing molecular networks called collectively autocatalytic sets (CAS) at “the edge of chaos,” a transitional boundary between order and disorder. In CAS, components of the network interact by mutually creating and constraining each other, shaping and animating a living organism as a system distinct from its environment. The whole organism then influences all its components in a circular causal loop. Kauffman suggests that trillions of such systems emerge and co-evolve in our biosphere through an open-ended process of circular, sideways and interdependent causation constantly moving forward in time. This makes it impossible to fully predict all the ways any one organism will evolve and behave in relation to all others in the environment, despite adhering to physical laws. He argues this unpredictability necessitated the evolution of intuition and creativity—emergent capabilities that aid survival in a world that can’t be navigated by reason, formal logic and linear approaches alone. His views reinforce his own penchant for unconventional speculation. They also challenge both reductionist physics and gene-centric theories of life’s origins, proposing instead the spontaneous emergence of complex, self-sustaining metabolic systems capable of materializing throughout our universe.
Highly speculative ideas rarely test out. That’s why CAS is something of a scientific unicorn—a highly speculative idea, the basis of which has since been confirmed in molecular biology, single-cell organisms and chemical systems. Bold speculation has served Kauffman well. His theoretical postulates made him a seminal figure across complex systems science. As such, he laid the theoretical foundation for cancer differentiation therapy and self-regulating genetic networks. He also pioneered combinatorial chemistry to accelerate drug discovery. He now thinks that emergent self-ordered processes associated with life’s origins can be traced to peculiar features of quantum mechanics that extend far beyond our own biosphere. He thinks this pattern of behavior that gave rise to life also gave rise to the creation of our universe.
Despite his track record, Kauffman’s unconventional speculations check off at least two boxes on the 37-point Crackpot Index: claiming his ideas are on the cutting-edge of a paradigm shift and that physicists don’t want to hear it. They don’t. Reporters are required to independently verify claims, and understand the reasoning behind expert opinion. I’ve contacted 17 physicists including cosmologists, astrophysicists, a biophysicist and two quantum biologists. The handful who respond at all, decline to comment on the record about Kauffman’s ideas.
Motivated skepticism
Sorting crackpot from jackpot ideas through science’s informal spam filter usually catches junk, but sometimes messages of consequence get blocked. Germ theory, plate tectonics, the Big Bang and countless other fringe theories lay buried in the crackpot pile for decades before surfacing as scientific consensus. Bona fide breakthroughs are historically stymied across the sciences by entrenched psychological biases including motivated skepticism. This bias leads people to scrutinize claims they dislike or instinctively doubt more rigorously than those they favor. It’s fueled by anchoring and ingroup biases—favoring ideas acquired early and from members of one’s own group. Biases may be pronounced in scientific communities inured to defending against science denialism and historical persecution. These biases are particularly perilous to cross-disciplinary efforts.
Yet precedent exists for successful, speculative and subversive cross-pollination. Leveraging his intuitions as a physicist, Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger proposed a number of highly speculative, non-mathematical, wrong ideas in biology—and one largely correct idea that anticipated the discovery of DNA, challenging the biological consensus at the time. More formal attempts to bridge the gap between physics and biology by quantum biologists and biophysicists like Denis Noble are relatively recent and met with considerable skepticism. Despite his accomplishments and acclaim, a renegade speculator like Kauffman, without a background in physics or a bridge discipline, faces even more hurdles.
“You spend so long trying to understand what they’re saying,” says Riess of the widespread misuse by physics outsiders of the physics lexicon. Yet he keeps reading emails from strangers. He explains that scientists are conditioned to keep an open mind. It’s a duty. He clicks one attachment after another, scanning for physics staples like math, observational data, a testable hypothesis, ideas that connect. When he doesn’t find any, he looks for one last thing. “Are they asking any questions?” They aren’t. Riess moves on. One sender after the next fails to meet an exceedingly low threshold for engaging a physics titan. Later, I ask Riess if he suffers from crackpot fatigue. “Yes. Suffering. Absolutely suffering,” says Riess.
Riess declined to say anything specific about Kauffman’s paper on the record.
Controversial speculators
“The truth is, they want to avoid risks because if they make a mistake, they may get less funding,” explains astrophysicist Avi Loeb when I ask why Kauffman’s hitting a wall with physicists. Loeb is no stranger to controversial speculation. He heads the privately funded Galileo Project launching expeditions to recover possible artifacts of advanced alien technology. Loeb is one of the few scientists celebrated for his contributions to theoretical astrophysics who’s made bold claims that signatures of intelligent alien life may be right under our noses.
“Most practitioners are drilling in a niche. They become experts, world experts, and the problem with that is that very often you hit the bedrock of the subject, and you can’t really move sideways because you became the expert in a very narrow niche,” says Loeb. His widely publicized enthusiasm and dedication to searching for alien artifacts has taken its toll on his academic reputation, though he’s as critical of his peers’ motives as they are of his. “They don’t see the full picture, the landscape, and they don’t want to deviate from what they already know. That’s why [Kauffman’s] finding this resistance.”
Loeb is sympathetic to a biologist’s efforts to explain life in the universe. He also understands the limits of any one scientist’s expertise. Having begun his career as a plasma physicist, Loeb was offered a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University on the condition that he switch to astrophysics. He recounts a daunting learning curve transitioning from one field of physics to a related field of physics. His ideas were dismissed because he was an outsider. “I remember very vividly the first five years being extremely difficult, even though I was young, to learn the vocabulary, the way people express themselves,” says Loeb. “I had no idea. I didn’t know how the sun shines, for example, and that was embarrassing.”
Heightened scrutiny
Loeb says that most scientists get away with lazy and clumsy work that doesn’t get scrutinized because no one cares. Meanwhile, scientists exploring questions of consequence must go to great lengths to validate their research. Loeb’s peers routinely stress-test his work. On his latest expedition, physicists challenged the data he used to track an interstellar object believed to have crash-landed in the Pacific Ocean, despite the U.S. Space Command, a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), confirming Loeb’s claim of 99.999% confidence that the meteor was of interstellar origin. Not satisfied, meteor physicist Peter Brown and colleague Jiří Borovička conducted an indirect analysis of the accuracy of classified U.S. government detection equipment by comparing its data with independent fireball data—the official term for data about space fireballs that land on Earth. Published in The Astrophysical Journal, the analysis suggests both Loeb and The U.S. Space Command are wrong about the object’s interstellar origins. When asked for a response, a U.S. Space Command representative was unable to provide an on-the-record comment. Meanwhile, Loeb’s analysis published this month in the journal Chemical Geology, determined a small percentage of the materials recovered are neither human-made, nor materials known to be from our solar system, requiring further investigation.
Loeb’s advice for someone like Kauffman is to engage an expert in the field who is innovative. Someone who isn’t deterred by reputational blowback or the exceedingly high risk of a bold hypothesis being proved wrong. Ideally, this person can translate Kauffman’s ideas into insider nomenclature and draw from institutional knowledge to support, course-correct or build on his speculations. “It’s not just a matter of changing the language,” says Loeb, “but also, expressing the ideas in the context of things that are already known—the data.” Loeb emphasizes a requirement that defines the scientific method—observational data. Not reflected in the scientific method, however, is the observation that transformative insights often come from fringy, imaginative speculation. “Being curious and being willing to make mistakes, it’s the only way to learn,” says Loeb.
Loeb also declined to comment on Kauffman’s theory.
New technologies for more inclusive science
Riess encourages anyone who wants to engage meaningfully with physicists to back-test their ideas against existing data instead of emailing ideas that are easily falsifiable. “In science, we’re very good about publishing papers that are just data.” Like the trajectory of Mars. “If my theory has Mars wandering off, then my theory must be wrong because Mars didn’t do that,” says Riess. User-friendly technologies that vet ideas might increase the chances for outsider fringe theories of merit. Christian Salem, co-founder of the AI-powered scientific search engine Consensus, says they’re developing a feature that allows researchers to run their own papers against a database of hundreds of millions of peer-reviewed studies searching for conflicts that might invalidate or refine their hypothesis. With the release of GPT-o1, the AI model that OpenAI claims can answer physics PhD-level questions, automated vetting of fringe theories may soon do some of the heavy lifting of scientific openness, alleviating physicists’ crackpot fatigue. However, as AI is prone to inherit our biases, we could easily automate our blindspots into an AI-powered crackpot filter.
When data breaks the model
Part of the resistance to highly speculative ideas may come down to approach. Riess didn’t set out to make revolutionary contributions to cosmology. He came up with an innovative way of measuring distant exploding stars to track the expected slowing of the universe’s expansion. His results revealed the opposite was happening. The magnitude of this discovery forced a re-evaluation of the standard model of the universe. These days, Riess analyzes data from the James Webb Space Telescope about a discrepancy unrelated to Riess’s discovery but related to the universe’s rate of expansion, called the Hubble tension. The Hubble tension is part of a running list of observations that don’t fit the standard model of cosmology, suggesting the problem may lie in current theory. “I did all my measurements with the Hubble Space Telescope. Very good telescope. But, okay, the first thing you do when the results don’t make sense is repeat the experiment with a new telescope. So that’s what I’ve been doing,” says Riess. “So far the results are all checking out, which means the Hubble tension seems very real.”
Not everyone agrees. The Hubble tension is currently being challenged by astronomer Wendy Freedman. Riess is pretty sure Freedman is mistaken and he’s pretty sure he knows why. “We’re engaged in normal science,” he says. Freedman and Riess share foundational agreements that let them disagree about important points. “For every real thing like that, that I need to work on, and interact with, and understand, I’m getting so many more of these…” he refers back to his inbox. Riess’s preferred way of making progress in physics is data-before-dogma: “let me make sure it’s real.”
Inspired by the advice of Riess and Loeb, Kauffman is now working on data analysis with physicist Stuart Marongwe, at Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST). Updates to come.
Watch the interview with Avi Loeb that informed this reporting:
Read the full article here
