He found the interstellar object he was looking for and the smile on his face makes it clear he thinks he found it. https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/science/scientists-looking-interstellar-object-8680155/lite/
1,000
3.00@NicoDelon Shame. He does so many obscure podcasts I could see him possibly joining. You quickly debunked him though.
That would have been rad and I’m still not absolutely 100% sure it’s not him, but if it’s him he’s behaving weirdly. @colorednoise said they emailed him at his Harvard address and he denied it was him.
@blackle Avi's objects of concern are less visitors, and more just stray probes, thin, cheap, lacking propulsion. Still baffling if true though.
@makoyass This is correct. A probe would resolve this YES. I am thinking about ways to judge the quality of his evidence. I think we should set a minimum sigma. We aren't confirming Higgs-Boson so six sigma isn't necessary, but should be at least >2 probably. Any statisticians in the fold?
@BTE as a statistician, I see no way the evidence for this kind of claim could be converted to "sigma" in any reasonable/defensible/unambiguous way. Most likely any evidence would be primarily qualitative ("see, it has this weird structure under electron microscope", "it contains molecules we haven't seen naturally ocurring before", ...). Converting such claims to a numerical summary would usually require a ton of hard-to-verify assumptions and the impact of the specific assumptions on the reported "sigma" would be larger than any signal in the data.