> Correction 16 December: An earlier version of this story incorrectly defined the kind of plasma that Professor Loureiro researched.
If I get shot and someone writes some libelous bullshit about how I worked with hygienic macro systems, someone kindly jump on that shit ASAP. Thanks in advance!
"Authorities have investigated whether his death could be connected to this weekend's Brown University shooting and, at this point, a senior law enforcement official briefed on both cases told ABC News there is nothing to suggest they’re connected."
Authorities and the university have also been asking for tips but then flipping the script as soon as they get them: "Accusations, speculation and conspiracies we're seeing on social media and in some news reports are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous."[]
Also worth noting... at one point the arrested the wrong guy.
They have no clue. And become hostile when people try to come up with one. While scrubbing student profiles and simultaneously claiming they have no knowledge of doing so. The whole thing is a total clown show and nothing said by the authorities is to be believed without independent verification.
Without further context, I don’t blame them for being hostile towards “Accusations, speculation and conspiracies…on social media and in some news reports”. Remember the Boston bombing? Tips shouldn’t be public.
Absolutely useless without a name and reputation on the line. It's an absurd to publish that multiple academics killed within an hour drive within one week have "nothing to suggest they're connected".
Are you from Boston / have you lived there? I do, and thank you for your concern. But this is confusing to say the least.
1. No one should be stupid enough to put their name and rep on the line, in a fluid situation, where there’s 0 idea who did the first anyways, for days now.
2. Dunno what you mean by academics, students and professors? Usually academics refers to professors / grad students / has a job at university related to teaching, but Brown victims weren’t professors. Hard to see how that indicates a connection.
3. It’s a real stretch to put Providence to Brookline at a 1 hour drive. In general, it’s two different worlds, so it’s strange to use it as a clear indicator they must be related.
4. If it’s obvious they’re connected, and making any claim of probability re: their connection should require putting your name and reputation on the line, what’s your name?
You are demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of trust. Aaron Katersky and Josh Margolin put their name on the line because without that you wouldn't know the provenance of the information and wouldn't know if you should trust it. Citing an unnamed officer making claims that they have insufficient evidence for is not good journalism, so their reputation takes a hit. The officer also deserves this reputational hit since they are making the unsubstantiated claim.
To be very clear here, the claim is that "there is nothing to suggest the two sets of predmeditated murders within a week within an hour are related". The fact that they're the same demographic, high profile, using the same weapon, close in proximity, and close in time are all concrete things that relate them. It is embarrassing to state otherwise, so the officer was not named. However the reporters are not immune to this, so they take the hit.
I am not stating the positive "they are related", I am refuting the negative "they are unrelated".
And as for my identity: I am not a reporter or public official. You don't need to and shouldn't use me as a source of truth. I am a member of the public applying logic to facts. I am closer to this event than you but I won't say more. As a member of HN who respects privacy I'm sure that should be enough for you.
You aren’t refuting a negative because the statement isn’t “they are unrelated” the statement is “(with current information) there is nothing suggesting they are related”
If you’re close to the situation, and have a substantiated reason to believe the claim that there’s no current information suggesting they’re related is inaccurate, you should be able to back that up. Except we both know you can’t, because you’re attempting to refute something that wasn’t actually said.
Other comments cover the “logic” being applied here. Dunno who those two names are. I’m genuinely worried about your grip on reality based on your writing, I don’t say that lightly and am very, very, serious, to the point I’d prefer to eat downvotes and offend you than hide that and possibly contribute to you worsening.
I hope you’re extremely close to one of these events and are extremely distraught, even though that’s tragic, because it would indicate you’re not just comfortable disassociated from reality.
Note the difference in your approach this morning versus now, to wit, you this morning: “ We have no info but he was the department head of the MIT PSFC. It's easy to imagine a deranged individual picking a high profile target by browsing MIT's website. Or it was a domestic dispute or road rage or any number of things that would drive someone to shoot someone in their home.
We have no information and can only speculate.”
One was a home invasion that may or may not be related to the victims work on fusion plasma. It is very likely unrelated to that work.
The other was a mass shooting style event that targetted an exam preperation review hall populated by econ students and led by a 21-year-old teaching assistant.
It's a stretch to connect an isolated murder of a field advancing physics researcher and a hall full of students just because all the victims are involved in book learning.
Possible connection, sure. At an improbable stretch.
ChatGPT can certainly knock up a Clancy like novel here, no doubt.
put another way, is there any sort of proof that this guy wasn't banging his neighbour's wife, or embezzling funds, or otherwise doing something shady?
On the off-chance that someone believes that there is border security between US states but that these states are an exception.
The US doesn't have border security between states.
The closest thing to an exception is the "don't bring agricultural products into California" stations. However, there's a bypass lane for folks who stayed within 10 miles of the border, and no one checks whether someone is using that lane inappropriately.
This is my theory as well. A google search for the late prof's name returns a .ir website at the top of the result for some reason. It's a tragic loss for the world and his loved ones as are the victims of the brown incident.
My prediction is that it was a random home invasion robbery committed by someone with multiple previous felonies who had no idea that the person living in the house they were trying to rob was a MIT professor.
But I have no more information than anyone else does, I'm making a low-confidence educated guess, and at some point in the near future it's very likely that the professionals whose job it is to investigate serious crimes will have a better idea of what actually happened than anyone posting in this thread.
Unlikely. He was killed in the foyer [1] of his building in an exceedingly safe city (Brookline, MA).
In a neighborhood with mixed SFHs and condos, it makes little sense to target a condo. Makes even less sense for someone to break in, but to shoot the victim outside, in the foyer.
Yea even in the US where there's a rather lot of home invasions (~million/yr), even amongst the ones where the occupier is injured-or-worse (~250k/yr), very very few of them are fatal (<500/yr).
Other possibility; a disgruntled investor who poured millions into dead-end fusion research and now wishes they had invested in AI research instead? Blames the professor for persuading them to invest in fusion.
This basically never happens, about 100 people die a year in the US during a “burglary gone wrong”. People think it’s common, though; it’s the go-to cover story in almost any Dateline episode.
I am horrified about the huge amount of break-ins.
And even more horrified about the thread on homepage about surveilance cameras. I knew that shoplifting and car theft is essentially decriminalized in US. And now I learn that home invasions are also.
This logic does not follow from or to "That's 100 times more than I thought." You can be both horrified at something and also understand that it is thing that happens.
Tangential but I think that's a terrible way of making your point because intuitively we don't look at digits of a numbers and think log scale. That looks more like 1/3 instead of 0.000029%.
If we are doing random predictions based on scant evidence, mine is a professional hit. Neighbor said he heard 3 shots. If it was a "pop pop...pop", that's 2 in the body, 1 in the head. Professional assassin.
My prediction: time traveler. Guy goes back in time to prevent an unspeakable tragedy that happened in the future. The simplest solution to alter the course of human history was this attack. We'll never find the killer because as soon as his work was completed, he vaporized into the ether as his timeline was culled.
It's a reasonable guess, but 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery. Usually they're committed during the day when people are at work, and if not that then deep in the night for maximum cover. 8:30 is almost like the ideal time if you actually want someone to be there and answer the door at an hour where it wouldn't cause enough alarm for them to answer the door with a weapon.
When it comes to small-scale crime like this, the smartest thing is typically not to do it at all. So the people who do it will generally not be very smart.
When BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) came to Pleasanton CA my fox-news brainwashed racist aunt and uncle and their neighbors where legitimately convinced black people from Oakland were going to come take BART out from Oakland and steal their TVs. And this was back in the day of the giant bulky heavy-backed rear-projection TVs. I was like... first of all they drive cars now and second of all who is going to take BART to come rob you and third of all who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing!! And if they were going to take your 150lb TV they would need a truck and a dolly, not take public transit to do so.
Pleasanton remained safe and bland despite allowing evil public transit.
BART service started in Pleasanton in 1997. In 1992 or 1993 I had a glass CRT TV stolen during a burglary at our house in exurban Connecticut. There's no reason to claim that TV theft is some myth. It was a crime that did in fact happen.
Did the thief take transit, though? We had a similar NIMBY argument in the area where some totally-not-racist people said thieves were going to bike from a predominantly black neighborhood 15 miles away to steal TVs, and it was so blatantly wrong that the local chief of police noted that the burglars they catch use stolen trucks or SUVs for the cargo capacity.
I only addressed "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing" because that's the only part of the comment I objected to. By now it seems like everyone is reading it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing for the duration of a light rail ride" whereas I read it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing at all" and I'm the odd one out.
The little but wealthy town of Los Altos Hills next to Palo Alto had Flock come in and install their camera surveillance after a string of burglaries and one or two home invasion style robberies, it's a mostly rural/suburban area. Believe it or not there are also still folks who come from cultures where they do not believe in banks in the USA, so there is a lot of cash and gold in those people's homes.
Indeed, 8:30p is no different from 2p or 10a for the act.
It's most likely a matter of happenstance. It happened to be the warmest time of the day (even though it was evening). Maybe the thinking was someone was home to help them find the valuables, maybe not.
> 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery.
The assertion that there is some optimization for some specific imagined motivation, is literal fantasy.
Flagged. The post is about someone just murdered, yet most of the HN comments on this post are strangely insensitive and dumb. HN ranks highly in Google, so friends and family members may see these comments.
>"The theoretical physicist and fusion scientist was known for his award-winning research in magnetised plasma dynamics.
Magnetised plasma dynamics is the study of the state of matter in which the motion of charged particles is influenced by the presence of an external magnetic field, according to Nature.
Loureiro joined MIT's faculty in 2016 and was named director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center in 2024."
Although it may be a total red herring, it may be worth noting that there are (debatably pseudoscientific) theories -- primarily Plasma cosmology[1] and the Electric Universe theory[2] -- that are related to (and potentially in conflict with) this field of research.
Is it true that Brookline had very few murders in the past 5 years? Increases the chance of it being targeted instead of random.
It is a very very safe town.
> Correction 16 December: An earlier version of this story incorrectly defined the kind of plasma that Professor Loureiro researched.
If I get shot and someone writes some libelous bullshit about how I worked with hygienic macro systems, someone kindly jump on that shit ASAP. Thanks in advance!
Would you want your epitaph to say that you worked on implementing dynamic scoping rules?
Could this be related to the Brown shooting?
From ABC -
"Authorities have investigated whether his death could be connected to this weekend's Brown University shooting and, at this point, a senior law enforcement official briefed on both cases told ABC News there is nothing to suggest they’re connected."
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mit-professor-shot-killed-home-bos...
Authorities and the university have also been asking for tips but then flipping the script as soon as they get them: "Accusations, speculation and conspiracies we're seeing on social media and in some news reports are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous."[]
Also worth noting... at one point the arrested the wrong guy.
They have no clue. And become hostile when people try to come up with one. While scrubbing student profiles and simultaneously claiming they have no knowledge of doing so. The whole thing is a total clown show and nothing said by the authorities is to be believed without independent verification.
[] Brown University spokesperson Brian Clark
Without further context, I don’t blame them for being hostile towards “Accusations, speculation and conspiracies…on social media and in some news reports”. Remember the Boston bombing? Tips shouldn’t be public.
Absolutely useless without a name and reputation on the line. It's an absurd to publish that multiple academics killed within an hour drive within one week have "nothing to suggest they're connected".
Are you from Boston / have you lived there? I do, and thank you for your concern. But this is confusing to say the least.
1. No one should be stupid enough to put their name and rep on the line, in a fluid situation, where there’s 0 idea who did the first anyways, for days now.
2. Dunno what you mean by academics, students and professors? Usually academics refers to professors / grad students / has a job at university related to teaching, but Brown victims weren’t professors. Hard to see how that indicates a connection.
3. It’s a real stretch to put Providence to Brookline at a 1 hour drive. In general, it’s two different worlds, so it’s strange to use it as a clear indicator they must be related.
4. If it’s obvious they’re connected, and making any claim of probability re: their connection should require putting your name and reputation on the line, what’s your name?
You are demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of trust. Aaron Katersky and Josh Margolin put their name on the line because without that you wouldn't know the provenance of the information and wouldn't know if you should trust it. Citing an unnamed officer making claims that they have insufficient evidence for is not good journalism, so their reputation takes a hit. The officer also deserves this reputational hit since they are making the unsubstantiated claim.
To be very clear here, the claim is that "there is nothing to suggest the two sets of predmeditated murders within a week within an hour are related". The fact that they're the same demographic, high profile, using the same weapon, close in proximity, and close in time are all concrete things that relate them. It is embarrassing to state otherwise, so the officer was not named. However the reporters are not immune to this, so they take the hit.
I am not stating the positive "they are related", I am refuting the negative "they are unrelated".
And as for my identity: I am not a reporter or public official. You don't need to and shouldn't use me as a source of truth. I am a member of the public applying logic to facts. I am closer to this event than you but I won't say more. As a member of HN who respects privacy I'm sure that should be enough for you.
You aren’t refuting a negative because the statement isn’t “they are unrelated” the statement is “(with current information) there is nothing suggesting they are related”
If you’re close to the situation, and have a substantiated reason to believe the claim that there’s no current information suggesting they’re related is inaccurate, you should be able to back that up. Except we both know you can’t, because you’re attempting to refute something that wasn’t actually said.
> using the same weapon
The same weapon being.. a gun? Hardly a notable connection.
Other comments cover the “logic” being applied here. Dunno who those two names are. I’m genuinely worried about your grip on reality based on your writing, I don’t say that lightly and am very, very, serious, to the point I’d prefer to eat downvotes and offend you than hide that and possibly contribute to you worsening.
I hope you’re extremely close to one of these events and are extremely distraught, even though that’s tragic, because it would indicate you’re not just comfortable disassociated from reality.
Note the difference in your approach this morning versus now, to wit, you this morning: “ We have no info but he was the department head of the MIT PSFC. It's easy to imagine a deranged individual picking a high profile target by browsing MIT's website. Or it was a domestic dispute or road rage or any number of things that would drive someone to shoot someone in their home. We have no information and can only speculate.”
They're only 40 miles apart. Moreover, they're both (apparently) premeditated gun murders targeting academics at famous universities.
edit to add: (For those who weren't aware, the Brown University terrorist is still on the loose).
One was a home invasion that may or may not be related to the victims work on fusion plasma. It is very likely unrelated to that work.
The other was a mass shooting style event that targetted an exam preperation review hall populated by econ students and led by a 21-year-old teaching assistant.
It's a stretch to connect an isolated murder of a field advancing physics researcher and a hall full of students just because all the victims are involved in book learning.
Possible connection, sure. At an improbable stretch.
ChatGPT can certainly knock up a Clancy like novel here, no doubt.
Is there any evidence this murder was related to the professor's work?
put another way, is there any sort of proof that this guy wasn't banging his neighbour's wife, or embezzling funds, or otherwise doing something shady?
In a different state, no less.
My understanding is that the border security between those states is rather lax.
On the off-chance that someone believes that there is border security between US states but that these states are an exception.
The US doesn't have border security between states.
The closest thing to an exception is the "don't bring agricultural products into California" stations. However, there's a bypass lane for folks who stayed within 10 miles of the border, and no one checks whether someone is using that lane inappropriately.
If it is, do you think it’s the Iranians taking revenge on American civilian scientists, or a Ted Kaczynski type?
This is my theory as well. A google search for the late prof's name returns a .ir website at the top of the result for some reason. It's a tragic loss for the world and his loved ones as are the victims of the brown incident.
Here's the local Boston news reporting on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmbmBNre5SQ
My prediction is that it was a random home invasion robbery committed by someone with multiple previous felonies who had no idea that the person living in the house they were trying to rob was a MIT professor.
But I have no more information than anyone else does, I'm making a low-confidence educated guess, and at some point in the near future it's very likely that the professionals whose job it is to investigate serious crimes will have a better idea of what actually happened than anyone posting in this thread.
Unlikely. He was killed in the foyer [1] of his building in an exceedingly safe city (Brookline, MA).
In a neighborhood with mixed SFHs and condos, it makes little sense to target a condo. Makes even less sense for someone to break in, but to shoot the victim outside, in the foyer.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmbmBNre5SQ
Agree. Most killings are not random, but committed by someone the victim knows.
Yea even in the US where there's a rather lot of home invasions (~million/yr), even amongst the ones where the occupier is injured-or-worse (~250k/yr), very very few of them are fatal (<500/yr).
Other possibility; a disgruntled investor who poured millions into dead-end fusion research and now wishes they had invested in AI research instead? Blames the professor for persuading them to invest in fusion.
It's a tough one to find a motive for...
Can you quote 1 other example of a disgruntled investor that has killed an American academic over the last 50 years ?
They normally just have their friend the DA lock them up for "fraud"
This basically never happens, about 100 people die a year in the US during a “burglary gone wrong”. People think it’s common, though; it’s the go-to cover story in almost any Dateline episode.
That's 100 times more than I thought.
You thought only one person a year died during break ins gone wrong? Vending machines kill more than that.
Legalizing vending-machine concealed carry was our first mistake.
you f around with a vending machine and it will f back... usually by falling on the poor shmuck
I am horrified about the huge amount of break-ins.
And even more horrified about the thread on homepage about surveilance cameras. I knew that shoplifting and car theft is essentially decriminalized in US. And now I learn that home invasions are also.
This logic does not follow from or to "That's 100 times more than I thought." You can be both horrified at something and also understand that it is thing that happens.
Genuinely believing that only one person in America dies in a home invasion is hard to take seriously.
I imagine most preteens in America have a better grasp of reality than the one you’re espousing here.
I just checked UK stats and from my reading of ONS's homicide data it's entirely possible it's around zero from burglary gone wrong.
The us is only 5 times bigger
IIRC hand guns are slightly harder to obtain in the UK. And also slightly less legal for civilians to own.
The us has a population of about 340,000,100. Notice where the 1 is.
Tangential but I think that's a terrible way of making your point because intuitively we don't look at digits of a numbers and think log scale. That looks more like 1/3 instead of 0.000029%.
If we are doing random predictions based on scant evidence, mine is a professional hit. Neighbor said he heard 3 shots. If it was a "pop pop...pop", that's 2 in the body, 1 in the head. Professional assassin.
My prediction: time traveler. Guy goes back in time to prevent an unspeakable tragedy that happened in the future. The simplest solution to alter the course of human history was this attack. We'll never find the killer because as soon as his work was completed, he vaporized into the ether as his timeline was culled.
Wish that guy had … well, never mind. Better not to say it.
I don't see how it plausibly could be anything else.
It’s someone he knew. Either a family member or jilted lover. That’s what it always ends up being.
It could be a disgruntled grad student? That is shockingly not unheard of in academia.
It's a reasonable guess, but 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery. Usually they're committed during the day when people are at work, and if not that then deep in the night for maximum cover. 8:30 is almost like the ideal time if you actually want someone to be there and answer the door at an hour where it wouldn't cause enough alarm for them to answer the door with a weapon.
When it comes to small-scale crime like this, the smartest thing is typically not to do it at all. So the people who do it will generally not be very smart.
In this day and age who robs homes any more? You'd be liable to get paid to take a bunch of junk away instead
When BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) came to Pleasanton CA my fox-news brainwashed racist aunt and uncle and their neighbors where legitimately convinced black people from Oakland were going to come take BART out from Oakland and steal their TVs. And this was back in the day of the giant bulky heavy-backed rear-projection TVs. I was like... first of all they drive cars now and second of all who is going to take BART to come rob you and third of all who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing!! And if they were going to take your 150lb TV they would need a truck and a dolly, not take public transit to do so.
Pleasanton remained safe and bland despite allowing evil public transit.
> who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing
BART service started in Pleasanton in 1997. In 1992 or 1993 I had a glass CRT TV stolen during a burglary at our house in exurban Connecticut. There's no reason to claim that TV theft is some myth. It was a crime that did in fact happen.
Did the thief take transit, though? We had a similar NIMBY argument in the area where some totally-not-racist people said thieves were going to bike from a predominantly black neighborhood 15 miles away to steal TVs, and it was so blatantly wrong that the local chief of police noted that the burglars they catch use stolen trucks or SUVs for the cargo capacity.
I only addressed "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing" because that's the only part of the comment I objected to. By now it seems like everyone is reading it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing for the duration of a light rail ride" whereas I read it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing at all" and I'm the odd one out.
Ummm... Something tells me they didn't take the train to come steal your TV.
the did not, no. That's why I did not address that part of the comment, only the part claiming that no miscreant would want to carry a heavy TV.
The little but wealthy town of Los Altos Hills next to Palo Alto had Flock come in and install their camera surveillance after a string of burglaries and one or two home invasion style robberies, it's a mostly rural/suburban area. Believe it or not there are also still folks who come from cultures where they do not believe in banks in the USA, so there is a lot of cash and gold in those people's homes.
> small-scale crime like this
You mean murder?
Indeed, 8:30p is no different from 2p or 10a for the act.
It's most likely a matter of happenstance. It happened to be the warmest time of the day (even though it was evening). Maybe the thinking was someone was home to help them find the valuables, maybe not.
> 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery.
The assertion that there is some optimization for some specific imagined motivation, is literal fantasy.
Fewer crimes are committed when the weather is bad since criminals avoid going out like everyone else.
It's a fantasy that strongly correlates with facts. Home robberies are not evenly committed throughout the day.
I would assume that the most likely options for for "rich person shot in home" are:
* Drug dealer
* Cheating on spouse and someone got jealous
* Suicide
* Drug-addled family member with a history of violence.
This is his ORCID profile, which lists his grants and published works:
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9755-6563
Flagged. The post is about someone just murdered, yet most of the HN comments on this post are strangely insensitive and dumb. HN ranks highly in Google, so friends and family members may see these comments.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46292708
Pros always use silencers - but amateurs instigated/inspired by security services/spies, are meant to be caught and will confess
Turn off the TV and go to bed. Silencers don't silence guns. It's an expensive piece of evidence of limited usefulness.
Also, jewel thieves don't abseil down from the ceiling.
>"The theoretical physicist and fusion scientist was known for his award-winning research in magnetised plasma dynamics.
Magnetised plasma dynamics is the study of the state of matter in which the motion of charged particles is influenced by the presence of an external magnetic field, according to Nature.
Loureiro joined MIT's faculty in 2016 and was named director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center in 2024."
Although it may be a total red herring, it may be worth noting that there are (debatably pseudoscientific) theories -- primarily Plasma cosmology[1] and the Electric Universe theory[2] -- that are related to (and potentially in conflict with) this field of research.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_cosmology
2: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Electric_Universe