Christmas is early this year. Here are the famous Feynman Lectures on Physics (Vol II is forthcoming) hosted for free by Caltech. A useful point of reference for one and all. Just for fun, note here on on entropy, irreversibility and the rise of disorder: Where does irreversibility come from? It does not come from Newton’s laws . . . . We already know . . .  that the entropy is always increasing. If we have a hot thing and a cold thing, the heat goes from hot to cold. So the law of entropy is one such law . . . . Suppose we have a box with a barrier in the middle. On one side is neon (“black” Read More ›

In a comment to a prior post, “Roy” wrote: Mr Arrington, You wrote that: Darwin thought after further exploration the fossil record would ultimately show the “finely graduated organic chain” his theory predicted. This is false. In the text that follows the section you keep quoting, Darwin went on to explain why geology doesn’t reveal finely graduated chains. He discussed erosion, dissolution of skeletal remains, conditions required for fossil accumulation and the rarity of preservation. And at the end of that discussion, he wrote this: If then there be some degree of truth in these remarks, we have no right to expect to find, in our geological formations, an infinite number of those fine transitional forms which, on our theory, Read More ›

Sad news today.

Yesterday, News put up a post on the mysterious origins of the moon, invoking a classic song on being caught between the Moon and New York City. (Niwrad added a post here on the multiverse that is also worth seeing. Kindly bear in mind this earlier ID Foundations post on fine tuning.) Mahuna aptly comments: “As the number of steps increases, the likelihood of a particular sequence decreases.” OK, so Earth is not merely “very improbable”. It’s very VERY very improbable. I don’t see this as a problem for Earth, which I think we can prove actually exists. I do see it causing a problem for all those “Earth 2″ exo-planets, of which we can subtract 99% (or something) based Read More ›

In a previous post of UD News, Denyse O’Leary rightly defines the multiverses as “one of the many products of methodological naturalism”. Here I want only to focus a bit why this product is quite inconsistent and even worsens the case of atheist cosmology. The multiverse (alias short form for “multi-universes”) supposition (mainly arising from odd interpretations related to mathematical solutions of equations of “strings theories” in modern physics) is that there is a large number of universes beyond ours, each with its own laws, parameters and physical constants. About this number there is no agreement (ranging from 10^500 to 10^10^10,000,000 and beyond), and just this speaks volumes on the reliability of the idea. Anyway let’s call “N” this number. Read More ›