Endless Thread - Nerd Fight

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

The halls of science, known for prim propriety and careful debate, are feuding. A new theory of gravity challenges Einstein's general relativity, our current understanding of that thing that keeps our feet on the ground. Physicists are upset. "Cotton gravity"—named in honor of mathematician Émile Cotton, not fluffy flora—was first posited by Japanese researcher Junpei Harada in 2021. The idea, which modifies general relativity and discounts the theory of dark matter, spurred a surprisingly catty argument on arXiv.org, an open-access website for scientific preprints. Things got nerdy. And hilarious. Endless Thread explains. ===== Credits: This episode was written and produced by Dean Russell. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The hosts are Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell.

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WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Dean, in classic form, this episode started with me sending you a Reddit post and saying, could you make something out of this? The physics girlies are beefing, specifically theoretical physicists who are literally at the forefront of their field. Academic beef. is so funny. And then you ignoring me for a period of time and deciding. Pretty sure I was on vacation.

I'm pretty sure I was on vacation. And you sent me this video. You still ignored me, though. I'm just kidding. And I was standing there with my wife and I was looking at this video and she was like, why did Ben send this to you? And I watched the whole thing. And then at the end, I was just like, I think it's because I'm a nerd.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. Well, here I am. I looked into it. I looked into it. And so for this here endless thread from WBR, Boston's NPR, the hot place for Goss and the science and TikTok world, I bring you a short snacky story. We'll call nerd fight. Nerd fight! That's what we yell, right, when the nerd fight is happening. Nerd fight! The halls of science, Ben, the halls of science places for prim-propine. and careful consideration are witnessing a very public and dramatic feud. It's almost like watching a slap fight between a bunch of nerds. Ben meet Dr. Blitz, a physics PhD with about 250,000 TikTok followers.

One of them is me. On this platform and on others, I go by Blitz, Blitz PhD, Dr. Blitz, because I have a PhD in physics. All right, Dr. Blitz. People who follow Dr. Blitz are interested in things such as differential geometry, string theory manifold toy models of quantum gravity, black hole hole event horizons, things that have no bearing on anything to do with the real world. Is he saying string theory isn't real, man? Is that what he's saying? Nothing that would affect your day-to-day life. I think that's what he's trying to say.

All right. Dr. Blitz is the reason that anyone without a PhD, including you and knows about this story. He brought it to TikTok. Okay. This is the story of a feud that began a few years ago. Had nothing to do in my office. I was looking at these papers that just popped up on my feed.

Dr. Blitz was looking around on the internet at a feed that is not TikTok or X or whatever. It's a special nerd feed called Archive. Oh, yeah. Is it Archive.net? No. Archive. org. A-R-X-I-V.

Yeah. Yeah. So for the uninitiated archive is like a digital feed for scientific preprints, like papers awaiting publication in academic journals. And because they are preprints, they are also not peer-reviewed, which means they can get a little wild. So Dr. Blitz is scrolling. He sees this paper about a new theory called Cotton Gravity.

And it's hard to go into the details of this without actually going into the details. Do you have any idea of cotton gravity? is. Gravity that's like kind of fluffy and feels pretty good against your skin. That's what caught my interest. I have to admit. There's a disappointing answer to this, but it caught my interest. Oh, perfect. That is not to say that cotton gravity isn't super cool. I mean, like, for all the people out there listening who like are like, well, I don't care about nerd fights, which I mean, like, how could you not? There's some cool stuff in here that we will get to. And first, we got to start. We got to start With the context.

So, Ben, our current understanding of gravity, like what is gravity? That was described by... Sir Isaac Newton, Apple? There was an apple that falls on his head. That was the case until about 1915. And then it was Einstein with general relativity. Yeah, general relativity. Yeah, fine.

So Einstein's theory says that gravity is not a force. It is a curved field. I'm sure people have seen this rubber sheet analogy. It's not a great analogy, but it'll do. You put the apple on the rubber sheet, and it bends down a little bit. I've seen these videos on the internet. It's great. Yeah, and then you, like, roll the balls around

and, like, their behavior changes as they come close to the large object that has gravity, and that's, you know, the gravitational field is, like, changing the way that they behave. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. For anyone who hasn't seen any of those videos,

That did it for you. I'm sure. I'm sure you see it now. Everybody's seeing these. Come on, everybody. There are, you know, some things that Einstein couldn't explain, though. For instance, like galaxies rotate faster than his theory predicts. So scientists think there is some invisible... I think you probably forgot to carry the one, don't you think? I think he forgot to carry the one, probably. Well, the version of forgetting to carry the one is, like, forgetting to take into account some

invisible thing that we now call dark matter. We can't see it. We don't know what it is, but it's this thing that unless you put it into the theory, then it doesn't make sense. I wish I could do that in my life, you know? Like if I'm just like wrong about something, just be like, yeah, it's the dark matter. It's the dark matter. It makes sense if you put the dark matter in.

No problem. So it's kind of funny because dark matter started out as this kind of wild guess hypothetical workaround. But the more scientists have looked into it, the more evidence they find to support it, support dark matter as a thing. That said, for some scientists, dark matter still feels like blaming a drowning, one of the Loch Ness monster or something like that. They think there may be a simpler explanation. So people try to come up with new theories of gravity that are very similar to Einstein's theory of gravity, but change it in a certain way. Cotton gravity is one of those new theories.

It has nothing to do with the fluffiness. It was named for the mathematician Emil Coton, who died in 1950. Okay. Cotton gravity may explain the universe, depending on who you ask. And it also says that dark matter probably doesn't exist. Wow, shots fired. Indeed, yep. But, Ben, this one fluffy idea has collapsed into a black hole of

debate. We will get to the heavy science drama in just a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. and hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice.

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Ben, here we are looking at the drama that unfolded over a little idea that may or may not disprove Darkbanner. Probably not, but anyway, this idea called Cotton Gravity. Now, our TikTok guide, Dr. Blitz, was following this story from the get-go. He was reading along as the first papers were coming out about cotton gravity in 2021, 2022, initially by a researcher named Junpe Harada. Dr. Blitz watched more researchers, though, jump onto the bandwagon. And people were getting excited about cotton gravity until December 2023, just a few months ago. You have these two people, Clement and Noiser, I think they're French.

They write a paper called Cotton Gravity is Not Predictive. These two French physicists write a response to cotton gravity. The gist is that it's all a waste of time. And these two physicists, who I will call the dark matter duo, explain why cotton gravity sucks saying things like, You can't make predictions using it, so it's useless. Yeah, not predictive is like I feel like that's like the physicist's version of like, that feels like a deep insult.

For anyone interested in the details, I'm sorry, I won't even try to. explain them. They're like beyond my ken and then some. But anyway, after about a couple of weeks, three weeks later, January 19th, four scientists, Susman Mankhammedica, Molinarian, Nahara, who I will call the Cotton Quartet, they're very pro-cotton gravity. They write a response to the dark matter duo's response to the Cotton Gravity paper. I don't want to assume anything, because sometimes science just gets this way. But it seems to the dark matter. like these are not people that like each other very much. Now, Ben, you may skim this paper and you would be like,

whatever, but there are these little phrases sprinkled throughout that speak to scientific mean girlism. For instance, the Cotton Quartet says that the duo's claims are, quote, completely mistaken. I could never imagine saying to somebody else that I don't know, particularly well. You are completely mistaken. You know nothing about, like, I just can't imagine saying that. And that, this paper, the Cotton Quartet's paper, quote, explains the confusion and errors in the dark matter duo's work. Or as Dr. Blitz said on TikTok,

that's the physics equivalent of calling someone an idiot. Yeah, this is heavy stuff. Not long after the response to the response comes a response to the response to the response. Oh, no. The Dark Matter duo, who hate Cotton Gravity, they write a paper called Farewell to Cotton Gravity. In the very first paragraph, they accused the four authors of basically not reading the original critique. And then they proceed to say, while this should be obvious, we feel it is necessary to reformulate and expand our argument in this short note.

Like what? Wow. I literally gasped when I read that. And I wasn't being hyperbolic. I'm like, you can't just say this should be obvious, but apparently we have to explain it to you. That's taking it pretty far. So in this paper, the duo also says, quote, let us correct several erroneous statements. And, quote, actually, we did mention that.

This is now turned into an all-out physicist spat. Then a few weeks ago, one more paper comes out. out. This is, to get us all on the same page here, this is the response to the response to the response. It was written by the Cotton Quartet, so the people who are pro-cotton. And in it, they do admit to making a mistake. But the next sentence, they write, however, every single other argument we expressed in our criticism of their original submission remains valid and has not been addressed nor disproved by Clement and Noiser. They also say that this will be their last response.

I guess they were getting sick of it, which is fair, because it was getting pretty messy. Ben, I reached out to the Cotton Quartet and Dark Matter duo. The quartet sounded like very excited to talk about this, almost like no one has ever reached out to them ever to talk about this. But then they never responded to my response. Oh, that's very out of character for them, I feel. The duo, however, politely declined, and they said that they only wrote those papers to, quote,

alert young researchers against going on a wild goose chase. Ooh, also very spicy for physicists, I guess. Very spicy. They said they never intended that this debate should go public. So, cotton gravity, is it a thing or not? Like, what's... Where have we landed here? I asked Dr. Blitz about this because I could definitely not answer that question for you even remotely. And he said, you know, the jury's out.

It's, you know, it's probably a safer bet to just go with Einstein, which kind of makes sense. But who knows? You know? I think what drew me into this, what drew me in is, you know, in the annals of science, they are full of feuds. Newton, his most famous quote is actually just a backwards way of calling Robert Hook short. If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants, that quote is just a way of being snarky. Wow. Edison called Westinghouse and Tesla's electricity invention deadly, and then he used it to execute an inmate to prove his point.

Wow. Which, like, wow. Man. And then there are a bunch of others, you know, the Bone Wars, Darwin versus creationism, and, you know, on and on. I asked Dr. Blitz what he makes of the history, this sort of snarky tradition. Does he think that scientific rivalries are for the better or for the worse? It's tricky, right? Because on the one hand, you don't want 100 different theories of gravity and everybody's like, yeah, they're all right. Like, you don't want that.

On the other hand, you don't want to turn people off from working on really neat ideas. even if they're initially wrong because if they had stopped working on it, then we would never know. The thing that strikes me about this story, right, is that, like, I think of scientists as incredibly sportsman-like, right? Like, they are people who, you know, fundamentally one of the things that you have to accept as a scientist is that the work you do will always be cross-examined. and checked and and maybe disproven at some later date, right? And so like one of the things that I experience in talking to scientists, as I'm sure you do as well, is like it's actually pretty hard to pin scientists down on like just pure statement of fact.

Like when it comes to the work that they do, right? Like they will always say something like all of the evidence suggests or I've never seen anything. that disproves this, which is, like, fundamentally, that's a hedge, right? It's not, you're not like, peanut butter is made from peanuts. You're like, in the entire history of the world, what we have seen from the data that we have collected is that all forms of peanut butter that we know to exist in the world have been created from peanuts. So, like, I guess the thing that strikes me here is that, like, even with that kind of

forced openness to others' ideas and others' evidence, there's still some sick burns that get thrown around. Yeah. So, like, what is the next development in this story, do you think, Dean? The mic has been dropped. I think if some discovery is made or something like that, then maybe we'll all be talking about cotton gravity. But for the time being, I think it's general relativity all the way.

Still, this story stood out to me as remarkable simply because it's a reminder that even the best ideas in science, the ones that we consider unassailable, like general relativity, they are always being poked and prodded and debated and tested. And sometimes those debates get a little catty and that's why this one popped off. But the more important takeaway is that science is a process. It never stops. It's never satisfied because we're never satisfied. We are human because we have to know how it all works and we won't settle for, you know, the first solution that we dream up. And when we do reach an idea and it's tested and tested and tested and tested and we get the same results, then we can kind of feel good about those ideas.

We can build our world around them while also making room, of course, for the very slight chance that that new idea will come along and shake everything up again. All right. Well, Dean, thank you for this thorough exploration of what seems to have amounted to a... It just did like an insult rap battle among physicists. It's very enjoyable. Nerdfight! Endless thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by me, Dean Russell, and the show is hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sieverts.

who is still coming out with her investigative series, Beyond All Repair. Check it out. It's pretty good. Mix in sound design by the sound nerd, Emily Jankowski. She is a sound nerd. She's won some competitions. It's just, you know, the proof is there. The rest of our team is Caitlin Harrop, Samata Joshi, Franny Monaghan, Matt Reed, Grace Tatter in Paul Vicus.

Special thanks to Dr. Blitz and Aareth Girl on TikTok. Endless thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and the touch, the feel of space time, the literal fabric of our lives. If you have a nerdy online fight story that you want us to tell, email endless thread at wbUR.org. We will respond, and then you can respond to our response, and so on and so forth.

Bye.