I'm not saying his theory is right, or that the presentation doesn't smell a bit of crackpottery (it does), but at least he's referencing some real science he's done and that has apparently been accepted.
His main grief is not that his genius theory is not understood , but that he cannot discuss it with his colleagues for the reason above.
People have set up a petition [1] so that he present his ideas during a seminary (he's indeed quite popular with videos on youtube frequently reaching more than 100k views).
To give you a more concrete example, he stumbled upon a paper by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder [2] which presents a very similar approach to the Janus model but with a broader, more abstract framework Petit is not able to understand. He reached out to her and was accused of plagiarism ! He tried to play it cool, saying she would be remembered as the 21st century's Einstein (her paper predates his by a decade), telling her she should invest energy into this (she published that paper in 2008 and did not follow this track further) offering her to collaborate as friends on the subject. Result: she declined because of his background.
Now, what background are we talking about ? IIRC he published a paper in the 90s where he thanked M. Bazoof. What you have to know is that Petit has been personally involved in the UMMO affaire [3]. Along with several people, mostly from Spain, he received letters and phone calls by people that claimed to be from another planet. These letters were full of scientific content and he's written multiple books about it (the latest, from last year, is jokingly subtilted "How far can we think to far ?"). Back to M Bazoof: "What ? He is citing an alien ? Is he kidding us ?" => that's Petit that imitates his colleagues' reaction back in the days, and then he burst in laughter. Serious again: "But that's the truth, alien or trickster, I received UMMO messages without which I would not have thought of the Janus model. A stuff life this, this is is insane, you have no idea. It brings you into a life-long adventure. It's like my life is the script to a Spielberg movie. And I suppose I'm Doc from back to the future ! laughs".
"If it's not fun, it's not really serious" is one of the maxims he lives by.
[1] https://www.mesopinions.com/petition/sante/droit-debat-nouve...
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.2838.pdf
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_objects_proposed_in_...
Sabine Hossenfelder is an open-minded researcher, as far as I can tell. Sad that the author could not follow up with her, but there must be reasons for that.
Very interesting, thank you for the comment. I like math and computer science academia more than physics for these reasons -- people are less cut-throat, and generally more fun than in physics.
See the bottom of this page: http://www.januscosmologicalmodel.com/.
Some of his latest papers have been published in Astrophysics and Space Science, Modern Physics Letters A & Progress in Physics [1]
[1] https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?hl=fr&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=JP+Pe...
There's a huge difference between a paper about a model being published, and the model being accepted as a true fact.
So it's not like this model is totally isolated from what is being done in physics, although he has developed it on his own. He's into bimetric models of gravity like many other people in his field, and as far as I can tell, this is Occam's bush growing we are seeing here. Let's not hasten to use the razzor.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.2838.pdf [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18609375 [3] https://cerncourier.com/does-antimatter-fall-up/
If that's the case, I apologize for my own noise.
EDIT: Even so, that The Fine Article is (potentially) directed at an inappropriate audience doesn't tell me much about its "crackpottery", except in a mildly Bayesian kind of way.
I like to pay attention to the discussions on physics articles that cross the HN front page because I more often than not learn something by reading the conversations between the people who understand the material better than I do. That remains the kind of discussion I want to see.
The usual reason for someone doing that is that they know their model won't be accepted by scientists. That's what I'm betting on here.
