News

From Sabine Hossenfelder at Back(Re)Action: Yesterday, the media buzzed with the revelation that Stephen Hawking had completed a paper two weeks before his death. This paper supposedly contains some breathtaking insight. About the multiverse (parallel universes). The paper is based on an old idea by Stephen Hawking and Jim Hartle called the “no-boundary” proposal. In the paper, the authors employ a new method to do calculations that were not previously possible. Specifically, they calculate which type of universes a multiverse would contain if this theory was correct. The main conclusion seems to be that our universe is compatible with the idea, and also that this particular multiverse which they deal with is not as large as the usual multiverse one Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Anthropologists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and an international team of collaborators have discovered that early humans in East Africa had — by about 320,000 years ago — begun trading with distant groups, using color pigments and manufacturing more sophisticated tools than those of the Early Stone Age. These newly discovered activities approximately date to the oldest known fossil record of Homo sapiens and occur tens of thousands of years earlier than previous evidence has shown in eastern Africa. These behaviors, which are characteristic of humans who lived during the Middle Stone Age, replaced technologies and ways of life that had been in place for hundreds of thousands of years. Paper. (paywall) – Richard Potts, Read More ›

From Daniel Fanelli at PNAS: Ultimately, the debate over the existence of a reproducibility crisis should have been closed by recent large-scale assessments of reproducibility. Their results, however, are either reassuring or inconclusive. A “Many labs” project reported that 10 of 13 studies taken from the psychological literature had been consistently replicated multiple times across different settings (21), whereas an analysis in experimental economics suggested that, of 18 studies, at least 11 had been successfully replicated (22). The largest reproducibility initiative to date suggested that in psychological science, reproducibility was below 50% (23). This latter estimate, however, is likely to be too pessimistic for at least two reasons. First because, once again, such a low level of reproducibility was not Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Many tame domesticated animals have a different appearance compared to their relatives in the wild, for example white patches in their fur or shorter snouts. Researchers have now for the first time shown that wild house mice develop the same visible changes — without selection, as a result of exposure to humans alone. The significant part of the story is that the mice were not exposed to any kind of selection other than free handouts (although one suspects that mouse predators may have avoided the barn due to the common presence of humans). A team of researchers led by Anna Lindholm from the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at UZH has now also observed this phenomenon Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at ACSH: Their first coordinated campaign against Mr. Neidenbach targeted his Facebook page. Facebook capitulated, temporarily blocking his page and banning Mr. Neidenbach – for the “crime” of promoting biotechnology. His page was soon reinstated, but their success only served to embolden the activists. Their most recent tactic is to try to get Mr. Neidenbach fired from his school, so they have accused him of stealing from his students and mocking people with intellectual disabilities. Of course, neither of these are true, but that hardly matters. As a “public figure” – a middle school teacher with a blog – people can say whatever they want about him with no consequence. That’s why Medium blogger Ena Valikov is Read More ›

From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience, on understanding the Big Bang: “It certainly looks like the universe that we observe around us… definitely had a beginning,” MIT cosmologist Alan Guth, the originator of the theory of cosmic inflation, said in an interview for the PBS show Closer to Truth. “That doesn’t mean that that beginning was necessarily the ultimate beginning of all of reality. There may have been some prehistory to what we’re here calling the beginning.” Fanciful ideas abound to account for that prehistory. Eternal inflation suggests that our universe is but a mere bubble in what physicist Matt Francis described as a “larger froth of inflation” of an even grander universe. Cyclic inflation proffers that our observable universe is Read More ›

From Henry Bodkin at the Telegraph: A final theory explaining how mankind might detect parallel universes was completed by Stephen Hawking shortly before he died, it has emerged. Colleagues have revealed the renowned theoretical physicist’s final academic work was to set out the groundbreaking mathematics needed for a spacecraft to find traces of multiple big bangs. Currently being reviewed by a leading scientific journal, the paper, named A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation, may turn out to be Hawking’s most important scientific legacy. More. This sounds a lot like grief talking but we’ll see. See also: The Universe Hawking Created from Nothing Eric Anderson: Lennox’ analysis of Hawking’s absurd pronouncement isn’t Earth-shattering or particularly difficult to grasp in its own Read More ›

Kalam cosmological argument: The cosmological argument is less a particular argument than an argument type. It uses a general pattern of argumentation (logos) that makes an inference from particular alleged facts about the universe (cosmos) to the existence of a unique being, generally identified with or referred to as God. Among these initial facts are that particular beings or events in the universe are causally dependent or contingent, that the universe (as the totality of contingent things) is contingent in that it could have been other than it is, that the Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact possibly has an explanation, or that the universe came into being. From these facts philosophers infer deductively, inductively, or abductively by inference to the best Read More ›

This one from 2010, sent in by a reader. From John Horgan at Scientific American: Early in his career, the philosopher Karl Popper ,, called evolution via natural selection “almost a tautology” and “not a testable scientific theory but a metaphysical research program.” Attacked for these criticisms, Popper took them back (in approx 1978). But when I interviewed him in 1992, he blurted out that he still found Darwin’s theory dissatisfying. “One ought to look for alternatives!” Popper exclaimed, banging his kitchen table. More. Popper was forced to back down from public expression, of course, because one cannot doubt Darwin and still be Big Cool. Stupidity is much safer and more popular. But life goes on and so does doubt. Read More ›

Science historian Michael Flannery kindly writes to offer a list (in case anyone was tempted to measure achievement by invites to yada yada talk shows): 1) Girolamo Fracastoro (aka Fracastorius) proposed a form of germ theory of disease in his On contagion and contagious disease in 1546 over 300 hears before Pasteur. 2) Josiah Clark Nott suggested that malaria and yellow fever were transmitted by an insect vector in 1848, mocked and derided in its day, Nott’s theory was vindicated by Albert F. A. King’s study in 1883. A word on Nott: At first Nott, a polygenist racist, opposed Darwin’s monogenist evolutionary theory but later came to fully accept it as equally supportive of his racist ideas. 3) When Carlos Read More ›

From Nicolas Geeraert at RealClearScience: However, this isn’t the case. Psychologists have long disproportionately relied on undergraduate students to carry out their studies, simply because they are readily available to researchers at universities. More dramatically still, more than 90% of participants in psychological studies come from countries that are Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic (W.E.I.R.D). Clearly, these countries are neither a random sample nor representative for the human population. … Clearly culture has a massive effect on how we view ourselves and how we are perceived by others – we are only just scratching the surface. The field, now known as “cross-cultural psychology”, is increasingly being taught at universities across the world. The question is to what extent it Read More ›

No, seriously, a sober view from John Horgan at Scientific American: In his Breakthrough essay, Pinker spells out a key assumption of ecomodernism. Industrialization “has been good for humanity. It has fed billions, doubled lifespans, slashed extreme poverty, and, by replacing muscle with machinery, made it easier to end slavery, emancipate women, and educate children. It has allowed people to read at night, live where they want, stay warm in winter, see the world, and multiply human contact. Any costs in pollution and habitat loss have to be weighed against these gifts.” Pinker contrasts the can-do ecomodernist spirit with “the lugubrious conventional wisdom offered by the mainstream environmental movement, and the radicalism and fatalism it encourages.” We can solve problems Read More ›

Here at Uncommon Descent, we never really celebrated Pi Day (March 14) this year because other stuff intervened. But pi is a really important irrational number: Pi has been calculated to over one trillion digits beyond its decimal point. As an irrational and transcendental number, it will continue infinitely without repetition or pattern. While only a handful of digits are needed for typical calculations, Pi’s infinite nature makes it a fun challenge to memorize, and to computationally calculate more and more digits. More. Indeed, In Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, the main character (Ellie Arroway) is told by an alien that certain megastructures in the universe were created by an unknown advanced intelligence that left messages embedded inside transcendental numbers. To Read More ›

A reader writes to ask, quoting Sabine Hossenfelder at her blog Back(Re)Action: What the particle physicists got wrong was an argument based on a mathematical criterion called “naturalness”. If the laws of nature were “natural” according to this definition, then the LHC should have seen something besides the Higgs. The data analysis isn’t yet completed, but at this point it seems unlikely something more than statistical anomalies will show up. I must have sat through hundreds of seminars in which naturalness arguments were repeated. Let me just flash you a representative slide from a 2007 talk by Michelangelo L. Mangano (full pdf here), so you get the idea. The punchline is at the very top: “new particles must appear” in Read More ›

But, a witness says, he said it was too late for him. We’ve all had rammed down our throats past the vomiting point that Theodosius Dobzhansky was a religious Darwinist. That’s a way tenured Darwinians enforce dhimmitude among those who feel the need. His actual view: “Dobzhansky was a religious man, although he apparently rejected fundamental beliefs of traditional religion, such as the existence of a personal God and of life beyond physical death. His religiosity was grounded on the conviction that there is meaning in the universe. He saw that meaning in the fact that evolution has produced the stupendous diversity of the living world and has progressed from primitive forms of life to mankind. Dobzhansky held that, in man, Read More ›