Essentially, Siegel, the person who has Big Problems with something as widely accepted as the Big Bang, is quite prepared to accept all this far out stuff. That is where the naturalist project is just now.
Cosmology
Theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser: The “Copernican Principle” isn’t science…
We’ve only begun to point huge telescopes at exoplanets. There are too many unknowns to be sure of our status, he thinks.
Mike Keas on the myth that a big universe is a problem for religion
Quoting C. S. Lewis: “If we discover other bodies, they must be habitable or uninhabitable: and the odd thing is that both these hypotheses are used as grounds for rejecting Christianity.”
If dark energy is “neither particle nor field,” what is it?
Siegel: “It is time to take seriously the idea that dark energy might simply be a property inherent to the very fabric of space. Until we learn how to calculate the zero-point energy of empty space itself, or gain some bizarre, surprising, and unanticipated evidence, this will remain one of the biggest existential questions in all the universe.” So this is existentialism for physicists, right? Even Sabine Hossenfelder sounds sort of existential on this one.
Preprint paper by Nobel Prize winner on mind-like processes underlying the order in nature
Josephson: David Bohm suggested that some kind of implicate order underlies the manifest order observed in physical systems, while others have suggested that some kind of mind-like process underlies this order. In the following a more explicit picture is proposed, based on the existence of parallels between spontaneously fluctuating equilibrium states and life processes.
At Mind Matters News: Our Universe Survived a Firing Squad and It’s Just an Accident?
Ola Hössjer: According to the Weak Anthropic Principle, we should not be surprised to live in a universe that harbors life. But I should add that, in our paper, “Cosmological Tuning Fine or Coarse?,” we compute or give an upper bound for the probability of a randomly generated universe to have a certain constant of nature, ending up within its life-permitting interval. We take the Weak Anthropic Principle into account — and still we come up with small probabilities for certain constant of natures or certain ratios or constants of nature.
At Quanta: New find re strong force in physics involves “impossible” particle
Charlie Wood: The tetraquark now presents theorists with a solid target against which to test their mathematical machinery for approximating the strong force.
At Mind Matters News: Was the universe created for life forms to live in? How would we know?
Daniel Díaz: There is a constant attached to the gravitational law. And in that gravitational law, that constant is producing some effect. Were the constant too small, then stars could not be formed.
Cosmologist George Ellis on the philosophical problems of cosmology — and a note from Rob Sheldon
Ellis: Humans have demonstrably contemplated purpose and meaning and ethics for millennia and their existence is data on how things are. The existence of these possibility spaces is part of the deep structure of the cosmos, in the way that I have proposed above. In that sense, meaning is built into the foundations of existence.
At Mind Matters News: The UFOs Carl Sagan was convinced of but couldn’t talk about
Sagan was denied tenure at Harvard for being, according to Zabel, a little too “out there.” But today, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb openly discusses his thoughts on ETs and UFOs in popular science venues. And, in what sounds like a helpful move, NASA is seeking standards for ET life claims, rather than just denying or avoiding them altogether.
Sabine Hossenfelder asks, what’s up with neutrinos?
Hossenfelder has stumbled on a telling fact about science journalism. Often, the genuinely puzzling problem is ignored in favour of some a big whoop de do about an incidental find that doesn’t amount to much and may prove an artifact of data collection.
Rob Sheldon: “It from bit” is winning the cosmology wars
Sheldon: Translating, Ethan is saying that the old 20th century materialism that says “entropy” or “information” emerges from the particles is being replaced by a 21st century view that “entropy” or “information” is fundamental and the material particles emerge from the immaterial field.
At Mind Matters News: Researchers: The universe simulated itself into existence
The paper, which appeared in Entropy in 2020, is open access. The most significant element of this new theory is surely that it is explicitly a theory of “panconsciousness” and non-materialism.
What Steven Weinberg’s “pointless universe” really meant
What it really meant was permission to ignore the significance of the fine-tuning of the universe and of Earth for life. It really amounts to saying that evidence does not matter any more.
Rob Sheldon on the new evidence against the Standard Model in cosmology: “The party’s over.”
Sheldon: “… dark matter and dark energy (aka Λ) have become science fantasy with no shortage of storytellers. It’s time to tell everybody the party’s over.”