Faking It without Making It

I've been seeing a lot of thumbnails on YouTube recently for videos about Terrance Howard's ideas about the nature of physics. Neil deGrasse Tyson thoroughly debunked Howard's labour of love:

I was tempted to say Howard's overconfidence in his scientific acumen is a sign of the times, but, then, we've always had celebrities saying kooky things about the universe. I'm more interested in the attention deGrasse Tyson and other people with real knowledge of, and understanding of, the principles of the scientific process have brought to the concept of peer review. DeGrasse Tyson notes that the proper forum for vetting research is not Joe Rogen's show (on which Howard revealed his treatise) nor even, deGrasse Tyson says, on deGrasse Tyson's own podcast. The sad truth is that many people think of Googling as research while what research actually consists of is a vast quantity of material carefully prepared and examined by a minority of people whose skills have been prepared and examined throughout their lives. Stuff most people have never even considered reading, stuff you might need college enrollment or affiliation to get passwords to read. Not that many college students read it as, in my experience at college, many students resort to good old Google to fill out their citations.

I was not particularly surprised to learn a science teacher at a junior high school I used to work at had never heard of Henry Oldenburg or presumably Oldenburg's part in establishing the Royal Society in the 17th century and the process of peer review. You can see Oldenburg depicted in my web comic, by the way, in a chapter in which he shows off the Society's collection of scientific curiosities. All of my illustrations were taken from an actual catalogue made in the 17th century.

Of course, that doesn't make me scientifically qualified to take part in a peer review. It kind of makes sense that an actor would be susceptible to the Dunning-Kruger effect. It's his job to imagine he has expertise he does not. Similarly, a writer has to imagine what it's like to be someone with a vastly different body of experience and education. At the end of the day, I really don't know what it's like to be a pirate or an intergalactic bounty hunter.

Anyway, I feel kind of bad for people dog-piling on Terrance Howard but he does deserve it, particularly as there are plenty of people out there ready to swallow what he's spouting. Here's a video on Howard's paper by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder: