Chris Lintott

[laughs]

In that, you know, recently Chris Lintott has changed the game.

Mm-hmm.

And in a way, we're changing it again today with one of the most unpredictable people that we know.

It was very generous broadcasting.

Today's guest is Chris Lintott, who is the host of The Sky at Night.

You know, he is Patrick Moore for the 2020s.

So The Sky at Night, to people who may not know what it is around the world, is this very long-running BBC astronomy space, generally, TV show that I think is one of the earliest shows that was ever on BBC, and it still continues the second Monday of every month.

We've found a new frontier.

Say no more.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is what Chris Lintott did yesterday.

[gentle music]

One cannot trivially dismiss the man as some kind of loon and yet, at the same time, what he has been writing about this object 3I Atlas and indeed other objects before this has generated widespread condemnation from astronomers.

Professor Chris Lintott of Oxford University calls his ideas nonsense on stills and an insult to the exciting work going on to understand this object.

And as I alluded to, this isn't the first time that Loeb has injected aliens to explain anomalies.

Dr. Steve Desch has said that Avi's earlier alien claims are conflating the good science we do with ridiculous sensationalism.

One cannot trivially dismiss that.

But at the same time, I think often his framing of these arguments does a disservice to his substance.

For example, in response to Professor Chris Lintott's criticism, he suggested this could be an alien Turing test for intelligence that clearly he passes but Lintott fails.

To me, this kind of stuff cheapens his arguments, as do the repeated comparisons of his work to that of Galileo, his recent decision to invent a scale named after himself, the Loeb scale, and deflecting criticisms with ad hominem attacks, such as labelling critics as having never written a single paper or being second-rate scientists.