Loeb’s peers publicly and forcefully accused him of grandstanding, pandering, and, worst of all, pseudoscience. The response inside the academy was nothing short of withering. Never before, though, had such an established figure in the scientific community gone full Roswell. Many respectable scientists have speculated on the odds of there being alien life. It was an astounding moment for the field of astrophysics, and for the popular imagination. He first started to gain widespread attention a few years ago, after saying that a mysterious object that had recently passed through the solar system was most likely put there-get ready for it-by aliens from outer space. But it is certainly true that no other scientist has crushed the media in 2021 quite like Loeb.
It was quite a self-assessment for a guy who specializes in dense academic papers with titles such as “A Statistical Detection of Wide Binary Systems in the Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxy Reticulum II,” and whose best claim to fame, until recently, was that he directed Harvard’s Institute for Theory and Computation and its Black Hole Initiative. “I’m perhaps the most known scientist in the U.S. “It seems like it’s reached a certain threshold where a lot of people know about me,” he remarked. “She has very good songs.”Įven before I’d arrived at his home, Loeb had sent me a tweet from a science writer whose wife announced that “her new TV crush Avi Loeb is like a sexier Anthony Fauci.” Loeb was unimpressed: “My wife said Fauci is a low bar.” Indeed, Loeb speculated with an impish grin, seeing as how Brad Pitt had played Fauci on Saturday Night Live, perhaps Pitt could play him, too, in the movie that was sure to be made about him one day. Operating out of his pandemic-era home office, Loeb has become nothing short of a pop-science phenomenon since the beginning of the year, logging more than 1,200 interviews on everything from mainstream television and radio to podcasts hosted by the likes of Joe Rogan and the singer King Princess. “I’ll try to be much more enlightening than the Cuomo story.”ĬNBC and I were merely two of the seven interviews Abraham “Avi” Loeb had on his schedule-a typical day, he was quick to point out. It was a producer from CNBC explaining that, because of the fast-breaking Andrew Cuomo resignation story, the network would have to push his scheduled interview back until later that night. The bespectacled scientist, compulsively clad in a dark blazer and dress pants, took the call on his Apple Watch. I was sitting on the porch of Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s stately home in Lexington this summer, as cardinals flitted among his roses and hydrangeas, when his phone unexpectedly rang.
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