Category: Cosmology
About ravens, we told you. They caused a mysterious glitch in LIGO data
| April 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
😉 From Emily Conover at Science News: The source of a mysterious glitch in data from a gravitational wave detector has been unmasked: rap-tap-tapping ravens with a thirst for shaved ice. At the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, in the desert of Hanford, Wash., scientists noticed a signal that didn’t look like gravitational […]
Laszlo Bencze on the current campaign against Karl Popper’s falsification criterion for science
| April 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Culture, Intelligent Design, Science |
Recently, we noted a piece by astrophysicist Adam Becker at Aeon, asking whether “fetish for falsification and observation” holds back science. Essentially, multiverse cosmologists have been trying for some time to undermine basic principles of science such as the requirement for evidence and the capacity for falsification, in order to get their evidence-free theories accepted […]
Does physics deconstruct our sense of time?
| April 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Physics |
From Andrew Jaffe at Nature, reviewing Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time: According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, much more is illusory, including Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally ticking clock. […]
Sabine Hossenfelder revisits Jim Baggott’s Farewell to Reality
| April 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Culture, Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Naturalism |
Sabine Hossenfelder reflects on British science writer Jim Baggott’s 2013 book Farewell to Reality at her blog, Back(re)action: I largely agree with Baggott’s assessment, though I am less critical of research on the foundations of quantum mechanics and I could quibble with his take on black hole evaporation, but it seems somewhat besides the point. […]
Independent scientists cast doubt on dark matter signal
| April 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: One of the oldest and biggest experiments hunting for dark matter particles, DAMA is alone in claiming to see them. It purports to pick up on rare interactions between the hypothesized particles and ordinary atoms. But if these dalliances between the visible and invisible worlds really do produce DAMA’s data, […]
“Opaque research” has some astronomers concerned.
| April 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Cosmology, Peer review |
From Sarah Wild at Physics Today: Irreproducibility and the black box nature of machine learning plague many fields of science, from Earth observation to drug discovery. But astronomy represents a notable case study because the quantity of data is burgeoning at an unprecedented rate. The installation of new data-churning telescopes, combined with marked improvements in […]
Dark matter find due to “less than perfect” optics
| April 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Design inference, Intelligent Design |
Darn. From Andrew Masterson at Cosmos: This was an exciting find. The separation of dark matter from “normal” visible matter is predicted in cosmology – but only if dark matter interacts with additional forces as well as gravity. The Abell 3827 data seemed to provide a strong indication that this was in fact the case, […]
String theory as swamp land
| April 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design |
From mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: Way back in 2005, soon after the emergence of the “String Landscape” and the ensuing debate over whether this made string theory untestable pseudo-science, Cumrun Vafa in response started writing about the “Swampland”. In contrast to the “Landscape” of effective field theories that are low energy limits […]
If dark matter is everywhere why isn’t it detected?
| April 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design |
From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: We do have dark matter in our Solar System, and it ought to have real effects on every other particle of matter around it. If there’s any interaction cross-section between normal matter particles and dark matter particles, then direct detection experiments should have a chance to discover it right here […]
Claim: The multiverse is a logical outcome of the existence of empty space
| March 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Physics |
From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: The controversial idea that our universe is just a random bubble in an endless, frothing multiverse arises logically from nature’s most innocuous-seeming feature: empty space. Specifically, the seed of the multiverse hypothesis is the inexplicably tiny amount of energy infused in empty space — energy known as the vacuum energy, […]
In pursuit of the multiverse’s black hole to infinity
| March 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Multiverse, Physics |
From Philip Perry at BigThink: What’s inside a black hole? In most, there’s something called the singularity—an area of such density and intense gravitational force that not even light can escape. Don’t venture too close. Once you enter the event horizon—the outer rim—it’s all over for you. You’d be shredded to ribbons of atoms that’ll […]
Does eternally inflating cosmology cause probabilities to fail?
| March 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Physics, Probability |
From John D. Norton: (2018) Eternal Inflation: When Probabilities Fail. [Preprint] In eternally inflating cosmology, infinitely many pocket universes are seeded. Attempts to show that universes like our observable universe are probable amongst them have failed, since no unique probability measure is recoverable. This lack of definite probabilities is taken to reveal a complete predictive […]
Astronomer: The Star Wars we grew up with are over. The real universe is lonelier
| March 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Culture, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design |
Christopher Graney at the Vatican Observatory Foundation Blog offers some thoughtful comments on the relationship between the Star Wars we all grew up with and the actual universe we are learning about now: Star Wars: On the Wrong Side of History & Science – Episode One: Star Wars is set in a wonderfully imaginative universe […]
Sabine Hossenfelder: Hawking’s final theory is just one of “some thousand” speculations
| March 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Culture, Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Naturalism |
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 […]
Admitted? We may never know for sure how everything began?
| March 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design |
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 […]
Did Stephen Hawking discover a means of detecting parallel universes just before he died?
| March 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Culture, Intelligent Design, Multiverse |
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 […]
At Forbes: Science lessons Stephen Hawking never learned
| March 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Culture, Intelligent Design |
Following on the obit for Stephen Hawking, Nobelist (1942–2018), from Ethan Siegel offers an assessment at Forbes: 1.) We still don’t know whether black holes destroy information. A black hole, at its core, can be completely described by only three parameters: its mass, its angular momentum, and its charge. This no-hair theorem seems at odds with […]
After the multiverse, the… multiworse?
| March 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
From Sabine Hossenfelder at her blog Back(Re)Action: It’s a PR disaster that particle physics won’t be able to shake off easily. Before the LHC’s launch in 2008, many theorists expressed themselves confident the collider would produce new particles besides the Higgs boson. That hasn’t happened. And the public isn’t remotely as dumb as many academics […]
New Scientist popularizes a new term: Uglyverse
| March 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
From Daniel Cossins at New Scientist: An almost religious devotion to beauty remains commonplace among theorists of fundamental physics, even if the standards of attractiveness have changed over time. One vision of elegance in particular has surged to the fore: the principle of naturalness. Broadly speaking, it is the belief that the laws of nature […]
Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist, passes on at age 76
| March 14, 2018 | Posted by kairosfocus under Cosmology, UD Newswatch highlights |
Chicago Tribune: >>Stephen Hawking, the British physicist whose body was chained to a wheelchair by the ravages of a degenerative neuromuscular disease, but whose mind soared to the boundaries of the universe and beyond, died Wednesday morning in Cambridge, England. He was 76. His death came from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known […]
Cosmological inflation – a theory proposing that following the Big Bang, the universe initially expanded incredibly rapidly before settling down to a slower expansion – was proposed by Alan Guth and also developed by Andrei Linde.[123] Following a conference in Moscow in October 1981, Hawking and Gary Gibbons organised a three-week Nuffield Workshop in the summer of 1982 on “The Very Early Universe” at Cambridge University, which focused mainly on inflation theory.[124][125][126] Hawking also began a new line of quantum theory research into the origin of the universe. In 1981 at a Vatican conference, he presented work suggesting that there might be no boundary – or beginning or ending – to the universe.[127][128] He subsequently developed the research in collaboration with Jim Hartle, and in 1983 they published a model, known as the Hartle–Hawking state. It proposed that prior to the Planck epoch, the universe had no boundary in space-time; before the Big Bang, time did not exist and the concept of the beginning of the universe is meaningless.[129] The initial singularity of the classical Big Bang models was replaced with a region akin to the North Pole. One cannot travel north of the North Pole, but there is no boundary there – it is simply the point where all north-running lines meet and end.[130][131] Initially, the no-boundary proposal predicted a closed universe, which had implications about the existence of God. As Hawking explained, “If the universe has no boundaries but is self-contained… then God would not have had any freedom to choose how the universe began.”[132]
Hawking did not rule out the existence of a Creator, asking in A Brief History of Time “Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence?”[133] In his early work, Hawking spoke of God in a metaphorical sense. In A Brief History of Time he wrote: “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.”[134] In the same book he suggested that the existence of God was not necessary to explain the origin of the universe. Later discussions with Neil Turok led to the realisation that the existence of God was also compatible with an open universe.[135]
Further work by Hawking in the area of arrows of time led to the 1985 publication of a paper theorising that if the no-boundary proposition were correct, then when the universe stopped expanding and eventually collapsed, time would run backwards.[136] A paper by Don Page and independent calculations by Raymond Laflamme led Hawking to withdraw this concept.[137] . . . . Along with Thomas Hertog at CERN and Jim Hartle, from 2006 on Hawking developed a theory of “top-down cosmology”, which says that the universe had not one unique initial state but many different ones, and therefore that it is inappropriate to formulate a theory that predicts the universe’s current configuration from one particular initial state.[175] Top-down cosmology posits that the present “selects” the past from a superposition of many possible histories. In doing so, the theory suggests a possible resolution of the fine-tuning question.[176][177] >>
It has been said that Hawking was the most famous physicist not to hold a Nobel Prize. END
