Motl with his immature style and his political extremism is very easy to mock, but I don’t think he’s intentionally contrarian. When he writes about physics at least his opinions agree with the mainstream view as far as I can tell. Three examples
Some time around 2005 Motl frequently exchanged hostilities with another blogger, Peter Woit of Not Even Wrong (that’s actually how I first heard of LM: I was following NEW which frequently linked to Molt’s blog to mock him). The disagreement was that Woit was a critic of the String Theory whereas Motl was a defender of it. The latter view is much more common in the academia.
In January last year, Motl criticized Sean Carroll’s blog post about the interpretations of Quantum Mechanics. Here again Motl is defending the most popular view.
This is much less clear cut but, if you continue reading despite the political raving (which I realize is not easy), everything he says in this review about discrete and continuous mathematics and how it relates to the foundations of physics is eminently reasonable and what I’d expect to hear from a physicist.
These are not cherry-picked examples, it’s all I recollect reading of Motl about physics, since I don’t follow his blog regularly. In all these cases the vibe I’m getting is not contrarianism, but exasperation with people who pretend they have deep insights into his field when he feels all they have is a nice turn of phrase and the ability to please the audience.
I agree that Motl has an occasional keen insight, but it is usually and unfortunately buried under a mountain of opinionated nonsense. And I don’t mean his political opinions, whatever they are, which I never pay attention to. Given that there are bloggers out there who are consistently insightful, like Baez, Aaronson, Carroll and others, I find that life is too short to look for nuggets of wisdom in his piles of garbage. Incidentally, I used to like Woit’s writings before, but I find them a bit lower quality lately. Sometimes he sounds like Motl, only more respectful. Anyway, if you like we could discuss the merits of a particular point Motl makes, dissociated from the source of it. Unfortunately, I am not qualified to decide whether vacuum fluctuations in vacuum are “real” enough to eventually produce Boltzmann brains, but I tend to agree that, even if they are, they dissipate too fast in a de Sitter space to produce Boltzmann brains in any quantity.
Motl with his immature style and his political extremism is very easy to mock, but I don’t think he’s intentionally contrarian. When he writes about physics at least his opinions agree with the mainstream view as far as I can tell. Three examples
Some time around 2005 Motl frequently exchanged hostilities with another blogger, Peter Woit of Not Even Wrong (that’s actually how I first heard of LM: I was following NEW which frequently linked to Molt’s blog to mock him). The disagreement was that Woit was a critic of the String Theory whereas Motl was a defender of it. The latter view is much more common in the academia.
In January last year, Motl criticized Sean Carroll’s blog post about the interpretations of Quantum Mechanics. Here again Motl is defending the most popular view.
This is much less clear cut but, if you continue reading despite the political raving (which I realize is not easy), everything he says in this review about discrete and continuous mathematics and how it relates to the foundations of physics is eminently reasonable and what I’d expect to hear from a physicist.
These are not cherry-picked examples, it’s all I recollect reading of Motl about physics, since I don’t follow his blog regularly. In all these cases the vibe I’m getting is not contrarianism, but exasperation with people who pretend they have deep insights into his field when he feels all they have is a nice turn of phrase and the ability to please the audience.
I agree that Motl has an occasional keen insight, but it is usually and unfortunately buried under a mountain of opinionated nonsense. And I don’t mean his political opinions, whatever they are, which I never pay attention to. Given that there are bloggers out there who are consistently insightful, like Baez, Aaronson, Carroll and others, I find that life is too short to look for nuggets of wisdom in his piles of garbage. Incidentally, I used to like Woit’s writings before, but I find them a bit lower quality lately. Sometimes he sounds like Motl, only more respectful. Anyway, if you like we could discuss the merits of a particular point Motl makes, dissociated from the source of it. Unfortunately, I am not qualified to decide whether vacuum fluctuations in vacuum are “real” enough to eventually produce Boltzmann brains, but I tend to agree that, even if they are, they dissipate too fast in a de Sitter space to produce Boltzmann brains in any quantity.