Avi Loeb

You have to understand, the biggest damage of this...

Harassment or scrutiny or ridicule or personal attacks.

I don't care about it.

You know, my skin is by now titanium.

I don't really feel much.

The issue is really that it and that's the purpose of these attacks is they want to discourage

young people from deviating from the beaten path.

So they keep the herd in a tight configuration.

And the risk from that is, you know, one suggestion that was very popular when I started astrophysics, you know, like half a century ago, by the way, I lived throughout half of modern physics, roughly.

Half of modern physics.

So half a century ago, it was thought that there is a symmetry of nature called supersymmetry and that the dark matter is the lightest particle associated with that symmetry because it's stable.

And everyone said that must be right.

And lots of castles were built on this foundation, including string theory that was assuming this to be true.

And then the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was built for $10 billion.

searched for supersymmetry and didn't find it.

Now, what is the lesson?

Yes, it was a beautiful idea.

And sometimes nature is not what we think it is.

Okay.

So we should not ridicule ideas that are different than what the mainstream is doing because the mainstream makes mistakes.