Hossenfelder: Today I comment on the recent claim that the black hole information loss problem is “near its end” and explain why this is nonsense.
Cosmology
Researchers: An amino acid could have formed in space long before stars
The researchers “have shown that it is possible for glycine to form on the surface of icy dust grains, in the absence of energy, through ‘dark chemistry’. The findings contradict previous studies that have suggested UV radiation was required to produce this molecule.” Hmm. This might provide support for the idea that primitive life forms can travel on comets.
Researchers: The human brain and the universe are remarkably similar
Even though the universe is 27 orders of magnitude bigger than a singe human brain, remarkable similarities emerged.
At Forbes: Hawking’s black hole paradox is NOT solved
Ethan Siegel looks at the limitations: But we’re still a long way away from determining exactly where that information goes, and how it gets out of a black hole. Theorists disagree over the validity and soundness of many of the methods that are currently being employed to do these calculations, and no one has even a theoretical prediction for how this information should be encoded by an evaporating black hole, much less how to measure it.
So what’s been making the fast radio bursts?
Not aliens. We are told that they are made by magnetars, a type of neutron star.
Did the black hole paradox really come to an end? Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts
Sheldon: Black Holes are a theoretical and empirical disaster. Given two possible assumptions to Schwarzschild’s solution of Einstein’s gravity equation, nearly everyone has taken the discontinuous, unphysical, “event-horizon” assumption leading to “Black Holes”. One of the many predictions of BH, is that they cannot have magnetic fields, and they destroy anything that falls into them, converting all that matter into “Hawking radiation”. What about all that data showing high density objects at the center of our galaxy and neighboring galaxies?
Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is being labelled “anti-science”
Also, let this sink in: Despite believing in determinism, Hossenfelder believes we should “decide” against a new particle collider… We can decide? On that account, to other naturalists, she is “anti-science.” Naturalism is weird like that. Eats its own.
Spagettification of a star caught by a black hole
Starry starry fright.
At SciAm: There is a 50-50 chance that we are living in a computer sim
That’s presumably how these people cope with the fine-tuning of the universe and Earth for life: Aliens did it.
Physicist Rob Sheldon checks out astrophysicist Ethan Siegel for ridiculing Nobelist Roger Penrose
Sheldon: The politicization of science evidently started before Ethan’s graduate schooling, as Hoyle and his post-doc Chandra Wickramasinghe tell in their biographical writings.
Roger Penrose thinks black holes are left over from a previous universe
It all sounds so much like religion, actually, but maybe that’s the direction in which High Science is heading.
Researcher: We need a new Theory of Everything, one with no “things”
We’d have to guess that Stephen Wolfram’s attempt at a Theory of Everything didn’t solve all the problems. At any rate, by the time we get down to “a theory of every thing requires that one not start with a thing,” it’s not easy to distinguish science from Zen. But then maybe that’s the idea.
Asked at Aeon: What if time doesn’t have a direction?
Can we add “Time has no direction” to the war on math stuff about how 2 + 2 does not equal 4? They seem to fit nicely together.
Rob Sheldon on the latest effort to pretend that nothing is wrong in cosmology
Sheldon: This dashes yet another attempt to find something that the standard model could not explain. Surprisingly, this is what depresses particle theorists, who have yet to find anything new in the last 40 years, despite thousands of publications.
Physicist: The whole universe may be a neural network
Vanchurin: “I see no reason why this process should be confined to a particular length scale and so the claim is that everything that we see around us (e.g. particles, atoms, cells, observers, etc.) is the outcome of natural selection.” It doesn’t take very long for Darwinism to become indistinguishable from magic.