She seems to have good credentials and mostly sticks to claims that seem to have some evidence...but her penchant for clickbait titles and other YouTube algorithm hacking commentary makes it hard to take her seriously.
She also seems to really enjoy taking contrarian views, which resonates with a lot of people who distrust "the scientific establishment" or who "want to believe".
This is the thing that bothers me about her videos, though. Certainly established science should be challenged when there is the potential that something isn't quite right. (Science itself may be "perfect", but it is performed and chronicled by flawed, biased humans.)
But I feel like she takes a contrarian view just for the sake of being contrarian, so it's hard to tell which of her ideas actually have merit, and which simply exist to challenge the status quo, even when the status quo is conclusively proven.
Edit: that said, I really do want to believe this! The speed of light being an absolute limit to how fast we can travel (or even communicate), means most of the universe (even most of the galaxy) will be forever out of reach to us. And that's kinda depressing. Unfortunately, physics doesn't care if I'm sad or happy about it.
Edit2: on the other hand (I wrote the above after only having watched have the video, shame on me), I do find compelling her idea that some mathematical constructs (like special relativity) inherently cannot fully describe reality (in SR's case, SR doesn't include gravity). So saying "special relativity says FTL travel causes time paradoxes and thus cannot be possible" may be true, but since SR can't fully describe reality (hell, neither can GR), maybe it just doesn't matter. That doesn't prove that FTL travel/communication is actually possible, but at least suggests that we shouldn't be so adamant about it being impossible. But who knows, IANAPhysicist, etc.
Most of her arguments seem to end up along “everything currently funded should be canceled and what I am doing should be funded instead”, which I find extremely hard to take seriously.
That, or yes - clickbait contrarian. This seems to get a lot of loud followers though.
>The speed of light being an absolute limit to how fast we can travel (or even communicate), means most of the universe (even most of the galaxy) will be forever out of reach to us. And that's kinda depressing.
One-way space travel would still be possible using constant acceleration:
>A spaceship using significant constant acceleration will approach the speed of light over interstellar distances, so special relativity effects including time dilation (the difference in time flow between ship time and local time) become important.
>At a constant acceleration of 1 g, a rocket could travel the diameter of our galaxy in about 12 years ship time, and about 113,000 years planetary time.
It’s really not upsetting that “people exist who don’t agree with the prevailing narrative” especially in science, because the “prevailing narrative” has extremely good reason to exist, and more importantly, especially where physics is concerned, the prevailing narrative almost certainly worked, and gave correct answers to the questions that were asked.
The problem with the “prevailing narrative” in physics is never that it’s “wrong”. It’s that it’s either not deep enough or not wide enough an explanation.
Even Einstein’s upending Newtonian physics abs basically proving it as “wrong” as any prevailing narrative can probably be proven has made little difference in the usage of Newtonian physics, which still continues to be employed for nearly everything it would have been if relativity was never discovered.
It just means that we now have a theory that can answer questions that Newtonian physics could not. And we have a clearer and broader picture of what reality is. It means that we have become aware of unknown assumptions and approximations in our earlier understanding, that we didn’t even know about.
She's a professional YouTuber (among other work), those sites basically require you to do that sort of thing to get and maintain traction over the long term.
This one isn't particularily bad and the content is fine.
That’s a bit unfair toward her. She’s not just a professional YouTuber. She is also a bonafide[1] physicist, who has spent years acting as a contrarian to the mainstream ideas.
Yeah but calling her a “professional YouTuber (among other work)” is a very blatant misrepresentation of who she actually is, considering the opinion most people, especially on this site, would have of a YouTuber. An HNer who does not know of her would almost certainly come away with the idea that much like most YTers, she doesn’t know much of what she is talking about.
When in reality, she’s a bona-fide professional physicist, whose knowledge of physics is why she’s a YT personality. Before she was a YTer she had (and possibly still does) have one of the better physics blogs on the internet as well.
Give her a break. Unfortunately the way search is these days, you need to use clickbait titles even if your content is great. So it's part and parcel with our times and how the Algorithm works, unfortunately.
On the other hand, without the click bait titles and other YouTube algorithm hacking, how many of us would have watched it?
I’m happy having watched it. The argument about particles travelling at light speed and then suddenly having mass and travelling below light speed is one that I haven’t heard before. The note about 0/0 being finite rubbed me the wrong way, but I see the point.
