The problem with wanting "controversy" in "hard" sciences is that if there's a "controversial" theory of physics or biology, that's really just another way of saying "there's not convincing evidence in favor of it, and it doesn't provide a productive framework for future research". If it's backed up by evidence, if it's a useful way of thinking that leads to lots of interesting new research, it's not going to be particularly controversial.

There's a good chance it will largely stay within the area of the first volumes' articles, perhaps with a bit more focus in bioethics or something of that sort. I could also forsee some sort of bombshell paper appearing that draws attention to the journal and raises its profile.

A reasonable comparison might be whistleblower outlets. They tend not to churn out scandalous intelligence all the time, but rather, have long boring periods punctuated by significant submissions.

I hope the journal establishes itself really. I think the main stake it's trying to make is protection of author anonymity, which I imagine could get very contentious at more mainstream outlets, even those in the physical sciences. I could even see a disgruntled editor at a typical journal leaking information about a submission in some belief that everything should be open, despite some consensus among the remaining editorial and publishing staff that anonymity should be preserved. Remember that there's a huge trend now in academic publishing toward radical transparency, in the sense of getting rid of blinded reviews. This is taking the opposite approach it seems, of increasing anonymity of everyone involved. If nothing else, it demonstrates the value of anonymity in academic publishing, and maybe provides a counterperspective to radical openness.

This is a credulous view of the hard sciences, which many scientists and almost all people who study the philosophy or sociology of science would disagree with. Certainly Kuhn would disagree fundamentally.

Many ideas which are uncontroversial within their respective scientific fields today were, in fact, very controversial in decades or centuries past: relativity, quantum physics, plate tectonics, evolution, heliocentrism, ...

All of those examples provided a productive framework for future research, and after the research was done were supported by convincing evidence. They wouldn't be considered "controversial" in a modern field, people would just rightly be skeptical until the research bore fruit.

This is a hypothetical that is obviously impossible to disprove, but I fucking doubt it.

Science, including in the hard sciences, is rife with personal animus, envy, and rivalries. Scientists are not dispassionate logic machines who simply maintain a healthy skepticism until the research bears fruit. Many of them will viciously attack your research, you, and the institutions that support you if they feel threatened by your ideas, and they are not above lying and cheating to get their way.

As the pithy saying goes, science progresses one funeral at a time. Max Planck--a man who knew a thing or two about advocating controversial ideas--put it slightly more kindly [1]:

> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. . . . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

An argument at the other extreme has the impact killing off all non-avian dinosaurs within one hour after the impact across the globe.

1. https://www.journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/1/1/131/...

That would be nice.

Look at how much models based on absurd assumptions dominate epidemiology, a field you'd expect to have a biological foundation. The whole thing is controversial as hell outside the field because it very obviously doesn't work, but inside the field they don't care because abusing statistical modelling lets them publish lots of papers and get lots of citations.

You could argue, OK, epidemiology isn't a hard science. Maybe it's actually a social science. But at some point it becomes tautological and the definition of "hard" science simply becomes any science in which you aren't personally familiar with the disputes.

The examples given by the OP were: "astrophysics, philosophy of mathematics, molecular biology, quantum physics etc".

You mean like a lot of things in psychology or social "science"?

Or what about string theory in physics?

On the other hand side there are things like:

http://www.electricuniverseuk.eu/the-science/

Even there been Nobel prices for the underlying physics this stuff form the link above goes mostly in the same ballpark as flat-earth stuff. (I'm not a "believer" but I came across this stuff looking at pictures of loaded plasma and cosmological "dark mater" filaments that look bizarrely similar).

Actually even in math they have "controversies", not everybody "believes" in the same stuff, for example like constructivism or its opposite.

So I see some space for a journal which would publish science that nobody else likes to publish because it's not mainstream enough.

You mean the research area that slowly gained interest, was intensely studied for decades, and now is slowly losing interest as it fails to acquire experimental evidence and the new avenues for research based on it dry up? Are you mad that people spent so much time on it for so long or that they're now moving on to other ideas?

> Even there been Nobel prices for the underlying physics this stuff form the link above goes mostly in the same ballpark as flat-earth stuff.

I am familiar with the works of Hannes Alfven (largely because I once tried to read a library in alphabetical order); I'll grudgingly admit that his ideas could be called "controversial" while also still being "interesting".

I think it's an interesting case-study into whether there is(/was) a problem with controversial theories in astrophysics.

1. Was Alfven "hurt" by his voicing of "controversial" but "legitimate" scientific theories? Did his career suffer?

2. For the theories he put forth that were ultimately accepted by the broader scientific community, what did the trajectory of the acceptance look like? Was it just a matter of "the older generation dying off"? Was their new evidence presented that tipped the scales? Was it the applicability of the theories and methodology to other problems?

3. For the theories he put forth that were ultimately not accepted, can we now fairly discard them as "interesting but wrong?"

Alfven is in the sweet spot of "long enough ago that we should be able to 'score' a lot of his work by now, but not so long ago to be muddied by time". It could be interesting to dig into in depth.

> Actually even in math they have "controversies", not everybody "believes" in the same stuff, for example like constructivism or its opposite.

I'm not going to claim there's never been a fist-fight between a constructionist and a non-constructionist, but the "disagreements" like constructivism are much more along the lines of "I find constructivist proofs and am curious how much of mathematics can be build constructively" versus "turns out the answer is 'not enough' and there are more interesting things to do anyway", not "YOUR METHODOLOGY IS HERETICAL AND YOU MUST BE DRESTROYED".

Tell it to Copernicus.

Check out the book Structure of Scientific Revolutions maybe.

Hopefully as they get more attention they'll attract more interesting controversial scientific takes.

Robert Heinlein wrote in an essay ("Paul Dirac, Antimatter, And You") that he believes that Paul Dirac believed until his death that the gravitational constant G is decreasing slightly over time, and that he thinks Dirac was right. Is there evidence for or against this proposition?

Also, whatever happened to Garrett Lisi's unified theory of everything based on the E8 Lie group? was that important? how is that going?

None of my introductory university physics education mentioned this stuff so I' not really clear on whether it's well-known, unimportant, or something else. I just happened to be reading a big collection of this science fiction author's nonfiction work and that one claim stood out to me as kind of bizarre (G is going ... down?!) and always wondered what the deal was.

Well, it makes sense, that is the direction it points in after all.

I think that the articles about philosophy and ethics are also good to have; as other comments say this is what the existing writers know, and so I hope that writers who do physics, mathematics, etc will also write more.

(I also like that the articles are available as HTML and XML as well as PDF, to allow for reformatting and such things; I dislike many things about PDF. However, then about XML, it necessarily is using the XML both for the data and for the text. I think that XML is OK for text, and not as good for data (such as the data in the <front> block) (there are better formats).)

Some of my own ideas are also controversial, although I should leave it to the real scientists who have similar ideas to write about them, since their ideas will probably be better than my own. (Such a thing is not for sure, but it is likely.)

They mention formatting the document for submissing using Microsoft Word. Well, not everyone uses Microsoft Word, so they shouldn't require that. Also, since it is published as XML anyways, it might be better to use a subset of that, it can easily them be formatted as 12 point font double space or whatever (they do not specify specifically what font (e.g. serif, sans serif), but they could easily enough change the formatting to whatever font is wanted). (Also, writers who will write about mathematics might want to use TeX, anyways (or MathML; it seems they already declared the namespace for MathML, but I have not looked at all of the articles to see if they are used or not).)