Robert Sheldon

The firestorm ignited by Ijjas, Loeb & Steinhardt’s blog post in Scientific American,  is very much worth your time reading. It engages Peter Woit’s string-theory criticism on his blog. But the scientists do not divide into sides very rationally, as Woit notices, “This is getting very weird. It’s not normal to respond to a scientific argument by enlisting letter writers on your behalf, even less normal to put your university press office to work on a response..” Abraham Loeb is a cosmologist age 55 at Harvard who came from a Jewish farming community in Israel. He is known for creativity and writing on many sides of an issue. Paul Steinhardt is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist age 65 at Princeton, Read More ›

It’s gone viral–the one man a cappella production of “Bohemian Gravity”. It’s a good thing he included the lyrics, because otherwise you might not notice it is a parody of Queen.  For most people who know of string theory, it’s a hoot. For the select few who actually understand string theory, it’s a riot. And for those of us who resent string theory, its somewhere between Sharknado and Oklahoma City. Yeah, I’m the guy you never want to take to a movie theater. But let me explain why I might be the only one who had high blood pressure after watching this video. Although I know a few of the terms from string theory, there’s a large contingent of physicists Read More ›

“Someone has (I think quite condescendingly) just told me that “Multiverses are suggested by pure math.. They are not ‘made up’.” (Obviously, the key word here is “suggested”. But in what sense might this be considered a true statement?)” Math holds a special place in the heart of most Modernists or Materialists, because math is entirely unmaterial, unphysical, and yet seems to partake of pure truth. If you speak to a mathematician, he will undoubtedly tell you he is a Platonist, that Math is something you discover, not something you invent. So when a materialist wants to tell you that something is absolutely, unalterable true, he has no better place to go than Math. That is why your friend is Read More ›

It’s all over the news. Evolution promotes altruism, evolution rejects selfishness. I suppose other than this being a slow-news summer, this falls into the category of “man bites dog.” Weren’t we all taught that Darwinism was all about my survival, my selfishness? So what is this paper talking about? About game theory. Variations on the “prisoner’s dilemma” game where two or more players are facing a hostile interviewer. If they rat on the other they get $10 (and the other guy none), but if they keep mum, both of them split $30.  One can do this with people, or with computers, and many games are played to find the “cost” of keeping mum, etc. Various strategies are tried against each Read More ›

Abstract:   In Sewell’s discussion of entropy flow, he defines “Entropy-X”, which is a very useful concept that should clarify misconceptions of entropy promulgated by Wikipedia and scientists unfamiliar with thermodynamics. Sewell’s important contribution is to argue that one can and should reduce the “atom-entropy” into a subsets of mutually exclusive “entropy-X”. Mathematically, this is like factoring an N x M matrix into block diagonal form, by showing that the cross terms between blocks do not contribute to the total. Each of the blocks in the diagonal then correspond to a separately computed entropy, or “Entropy-X”.  This contribution not only clarifies many of the misunderstandings of laypersons, it also provides a way for physicists to overcome their confusion regarding biology. – Read More ›

In response to this blog, I answer that it is true that all attempts at inventing life randomly have come up short, as have all attempts at creating life lawfully. The paradox is that neither chance nor order can explain what we observe. Yet this does not mean that OOL research is “flatlined”, for we are learning a great deal, even as we discover what doesn’t work–as Edison famously said. Darwin undoubtedly believed in the fecundity of primordial ooze, yet 150 years of study have shown both the complexity and fragility of that polysaccharide glycopeptide. The biologist Jacques Monod may claim that his OOL research has led him to the Abyss of meaninglessness where a faith in Man’s existence was Read More ›

As atheists scientists like Stephen Hawking or Leonard Susskind are confronted with the undeniable twin improbabilities of both Darwinist Evolution (DE) and the chance Origin of Life (OOL), they have floundered about like passengers on the Titanic, clinging to every piece of driftwood as if it were a lifeboat. Somehow they think that if life is so incredibly unlikely in our universe, multiplying by an infinite number of universes will solve their problem. I am reminded of the man who said he started a company selling widgets at a loss, but he’s planning to make up for it in volume. With all due respect, the concept of infinity has caused more than one person to go insane. The paradoxes multiply Read More ›

COMPLEXITY =/=> EVOLUTION Many Darwinists equate complexity with evolution. They see the fossil record of increasing complexity with time as precisely what defines Evolution. But is increasing complexity always a good thing? The history of computers is instructive. Your iPhone and laptop computer are constructed using base-2, principally because flip-flops and early binary circuits were easy to make, even the earliest electronic memory based on circular ferrites was two-state. This base-2 necessity led to an explosion in the study of Boolean Algebra and binary logic in the 1950’s, which demonstrated that everything you could do in base-10 could be done in base-2. By the late 50’s, the Russians were falling further and futher behind the US in computer technology, and Read More ›

With all the hype about the successful landing of the $2.5bn Mars Science Laboratory, aka Curiosity, The New Scientist posted that it may just find what we already found in 1976 with the twin Viking landers. Life. Gil Levin‘s “Labelled Release Experiment” on Viking detected the signal of what can only be life. Yet NASA politics kept him from uncorking that champagne for 36 years,  so in his retirement and with a smile as wide as the Cheshire cat, he is setting the record straight. The original labelled release experiment scooped up soil, added a nutrient mix of water and sugars possessing carbon-14, and then monitored the carbon-dioxide gas coming out with a geiger tube radiation counter. If there was Read More ›

British newspaper Nature reports that one of the 9 authors of a paper purporting to show that the HIV virus does not cause AIDS is now being investigated for illegally dissenting from scientific consensus. Now one of the whole purposes of University tenure, was to protect professors from the sort of the witch-hunts that political parties cannot resist engaging in. Unlike UK, UVa, PSU, and most American universities, will Galileo’s old University of Florence be able to resist the allure of political correctness? We will just have to see. But that led to the question, what is it about some topics that seem to attract politicians like flies to honey? Why is it that AIDS research is such a political Read More ›

Sean  M. Carroll, a noted cosmologist, in his first column for Discovery Magazine called Welcome to the Multiverse writes that the progress in cosmology has forced cosmologists “kicking and screaming” to accept the Multiverse, the same theory that caused Giordano Bruno to be burned at the stake in Rome in 1600. Sigh. I sigh because the two pieces of evidence that have dragged him “kicking and screaming” into multiverse theory are “string theory” and “inflation”. And what you should immediately ask, is “What!? Not Bruno’s universalism?” because both of those “theories” have about as much to support them as Bruno did. Carroll knows this, and in a clever twist, argues that like Bruno, we should explore scientific heresies with an Read More ›

When is a theory a theory? Long ago we  commented briefly on the Climategate revelations that the global warming books have been cooked to support the theory. There are a great many blogs dedicated to tracking how that miserable field is regressing, so I have felt no need to beat an obviously dead and cooling horse. But physicist blogger, Lubos Motl, questions why a 2-sigma result (1:20 chance of being accidental) of climate warming (a highly contested result, not supported by data contends Roy Spencer) should cause the American Physical Society to claim “incontrovertible proof” when a 6-sigma result  (1:Million chance of being accidental) from a neutrino detector is doubted by all concerned. In effect,  Motl, makes the old argument Read More ›

If the Physics Nobel went for a metaphysical theory weakly supported by data, the Chemistry Nobel went for strongly supported data that undermined a bad metaphysical theory. The two prizes could not have been more different than night and day. First let’s try to understand the metaphysics that underpins chemistry, and its subtle message about materialist reductionism. (I”m a physicist, so I’m bound to get the nuance wrong since I don’t work in a chemistry but I had organic chem in college and a course on solid state physics taught by a crystallographer in grad school, and since the topic of the Nobel is crystallography, I thought at least I’d get the physics right). Let’s start with the history. Now Read More ›

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Everyone expects the Nobel Peace prize to be a joke. For one thing, the Norwegians who select it are elected officials,I mean what else would you expect from a professional politician? But the Nobel prize in Physics is awarded by the Swedes. It is supposed to be for lifetime achievement, which explains why the Medicine Nobel was given to a fellow who up and died two days before. (No, they aren’t taking it back from his widow.) So you would think the Physics prize would go to a whitehaired professor with baggy trousers and leather elbow patches on his jacket. I mean a whole pile of previous Nobel prize winners vote on Read More ›

A recent blogger has announced that a few million simulated monkeys really could reproduce Shakespeare. This is such a hoary chestnut, that of course, everyone had to go and read just exactly what the fellow actually did, if only to ridicule it. Here’s how he describes his project, Instead of having real monkeys typing on keyboards, I have virtual, computerized monkeys that output random gibberish. This is supposed to mimic a monkey randomly mashing the keys on a keyboard. The computer program I wrote compares that monkey’s gibberish to every work of Shakespeare to see if it actually matches a small portion of what Shakespeare wrote… For this project, I used Hadoop, Amazon EC2, and Ubuntu Linux. Since I don’t have Read More ›