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.
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.