(in addition to Darwin’s Doubt)
Further to “Retract that, sir, or face the consequences! Er, maybe”, “Gag order? Intelligent design? Will “design” stop being a swear word if we just keep using it?” and “Top ten stories of 2013 from science news media, here are some other lists found, with callouts of stuff we might prefer to lumps of coal or even cans of chocolate biscuits:
From Andrew Zimmerman Jones at About.com Physics
5. Time Reborn by Lee Smolin
… He argues for treating time as a physically “real” property of the universe and claims that the current approach to time within physics suffers from real conceptual problems which only add to the confusion existing within theoretical physics. This is a fascinating book and well worth the read, but I really can only recommend this to someone who is well-versed in the theoretical physics concepts involved. For the novice, it would be hard to distinguish Smolin’s intriguing speculations and philosophical concerns from claims made based on actual scientific evidence.
That sounds like a masterful way of saying, this is fun but don’t mistake it for science.
6. Beyond the God Particle by Leon Lederman and Christopher Hill
This book presents a detailed explanation of the Higgs boson, by the same author (Nobel laureate Leon Lederman) who coined the term “the god particle.” … As the title suggests, Lederman and Hill project into the future of physics, discussing the possible paths available for future high energy physics research, including the prospects for new particle accelerators, should the United States and other governments find it worthwhile to invest money in research in basic science … which, Lederman and Hill argue, is the only thing which has ever driven economic growth on a large scale.
Interesting argument. Is it true that investing in basic science is the only thing that has ever driven economic growth on a large scale?
From The Independent’s best Christmas books for 2013,
Of course, not all scientific writing focuses on the everyday, and in Lisa-ann Gershwin’s eye-opening book Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean (University of Chicago Press, £19.50), the subject matter is distinctly alien. Although the book is unmistakably aimed at academics it’s the jellyfish themselves that make it fascinating. Our overfishing and pollution of the ocean have created perfect conditions for mass jellyfish spawns and now these creatures, unchanged biologically for half a billion years, are staging a potentially deadly comeback.
The first item in New Scientist’s list is
Big Data: A revolution that will transform how we live, work and think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier
Everything, from where you are sitting right now to how kind you are, can be digitised and “datafied” thanks to cheaper storage, faster processing and better algorithms. And not just your data, but everyone’s. This is important for us all, but for science, it’s a revolution, argue the authors – and one that is coming our way soon.
If so, it’ll be interesting to see how materialist theory fares in a world where information so obviously rules. And expect the mother of all civil rights battles as granny faces off against Nanny.
Number nine in Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten is
… dinosaur fanatic Brian Switek investigates the tension between dinosaurs as scientific objects and pop culture icons as he introduces readers to the giant beasts in My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs. He questions what we’ve long held true about these creatures, as it’s only by piecing together the clues they left behind that we can begin to understand ourselves.
It sounds quite interesting, and we remember Switek from, for example, “Paleontologists chided for ancestor worship. ” Fact is, however, we would get on about the same with understanding ourselves if the dinosaurs had never existed,and the world had been run by reptiles instead.
And Happy New Year!
Happy New Year UD bloggers and posters! 🙂
Seeing as the New Year is almost upon us, I guess I would like to reflect on #5:
Smolin is certainly fighting an uphill battle. Especially with the likes of the following breakthrough:
Of interest to this undermining of the 4-D space-time of General Relativity as the ‘real’ description of the universe, Einstein was asked (by a philosopher):
Einstein’s answer was categorical, he said:
The preceding statement was an interesting statement for Einstein to make since ‘the now of the mind’ has, from many recent experiments in quantum mechanics, undermined the 4-D space-time of Einstein’s General Relativity as to being the absolute frame of reference for reality. i.e. ‘the now of the mind’, contrary to what Einstein thought possible for experimental physics, and according to advances in quantum mechanics, takes precedence over past events in time. Moreover, due to advances in quantum mechanics, it would now be much more appropriate to phrase Einstein’s answer to the philosopher in this way:
i.e.
But I do have sympathies for Smolin’s fretting over the disrespect time has nowadays from physics. We all do live our lives as though time was a real commodity do we not? i.e. time is money?,,, But much like money, methinks that time, as a ‘real’ entity, has far less importance than many people may believe. This quote from a near death experience beautifully sums it up:
As to somewhat clearing up the ‘timeless’ physics of Quantum Mechanics and the Space-Time of Relativity, what the physics of relativity does show us is that time, as we understand it temporally, would come to a complete stop at the speed of light. To grasp the whole ‘time coming to a complete stop at the speed of light’ concept a little more easily, imagine moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light. Would not the hands on the clock stay stationary as you moved away from the face of the clock at the speed of light? Moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light happens to be the same ‘thought experiment’ that gave Einstein his breakthrough insight into e=mc2.
Also of note; It is also very interesting to point out that the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, reported in many Near Death Experiences(NDEs), is also corroborated by Special Relativity when considering the optical effects for traveling at the speed of light. Please compare the similarity of the optical effect, noted at the 3:22 minute mark of the following video, when the 3-Dimensional world ‘folds and collapses’ into a tunnel shape around the direction of travel as a ‘hypothetical’ observer moves towards the ‘higher dimension’ of the speed of light, with the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ reported in very many Near Death Experiences: (Of note: This following video was made by two Australian University Physics Professors with a supercomputer.)
And this effect is also witnessed in NDE’s:
So, although Smolin may want time to be ‘real’, in so far as ‘realness’ can be assigned to temporal time (or even space for that matter) Smolin will have to settled for temporal time being a mere subset of a ‘more real’ eternal time:
Verse and Music
On The Nature And Origin Of The Universe…
Classical Science Replaced By 2013 Gravity Comprehension !!!
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New Science 2013 versus classical science
http://universe-life.com/2014/02/24/gravity/
Attn classical science hierarchy ( including Darwin and Einstein…)
“I hope that now you understand what gravity is and why it is the monotheism of the universe…DH”
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Gravity is the natural selection of self-attraction by the elementary particles of an evolving system on their cyclic course towards the self-replication of the system. Period
( Gravitons are the elementary particles of the universe. RNA genes and serotonin are the elementary particles of Earth life)
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( ????????? ??? ????? ????? ?? ?????. ?????, ???????????? ?? ????? ??????????? ?????????? ?? ???????? ???????? ?? ??? ???? ????) Dov Henis (comments from 22nd century)
http://universe-life.com/2013/.....s-science/
http://universe-life.com/2013/.....ed-theory/