It sounded like a great idea, no? Frustrating and weird separately but a breakthrough together? Not this one, it seems.
Cosmology
But do we really need quantum physics to announce that objective reality doesn’t exist?
Wouldn’t making free, legal pot available accomplish the same intellectual goal?
New Scientist: Dark matter’s no-show casts doubt on Big Bang; Rob Sheldon replies
Sheldon: The recent publication of the Italians+Silk paper has now voiced the unspeakable: there is something wrong with the Lambda-CDM Big Bang model, and by inference, the 2011 Nobel Prize. Neither “dark matter” nor “dark energy” seem to exist in a form that makes the model work.
Growing evidence of giant structures connecting the universe?
A large-scale structure is thought to ”transcend local interactions.”
Sabine Hossenfelder asks, How can we test a theory of everything?
Hossenfelder: But there is no reason to think that the forces of the standard model have to be unified, or that all the forces ultimately derive from one common explanation. It would be nice, but maybe that’s just not how the universe works.
Bill Dembski on technology and religion in the face of miracles
In a new book: Accounts of miracles show common patterns, and those patterns are exemplified in this book.
In case you wondered why dark energy is “the biggest unsolved problem in the universe”
Ethan Siegel: Why does empty space have the properties that it does? Why is the zero-point energy of the fabric of the Universe a positive, non-zero value? And why does dark energy have the behavior we observe it to have, rather than any other?
Looking for a mechanism behind the Big Bang…
Interesting. But where did your Big Bang get the flame, guys? No fuel, no flame; no flame, no mechanism. Or have you discovered creation ex nihilo?
Rob Sheldon on whether Quanta mag’s universe is closed or flat
The result [of overspecialization], as everyone here knows, is that all biologists know that Evolution doesn’t work in their specialty, but they believe it works generally for the other specialties. Every astronomer knows about the problems of Lambda-CDM model in their specialty but believes it works in the other specialties.
Slapping Sabine Hossenfelder isn’t going to solve physics’s problems
But the frustration some feel about the situation they are in re gravitational waves tells us a lot.
Well, if the Washington Post agrees that the universe is out of whack…
Johns Hopkins astronomer Adam Riess cautions us against trying to understand what is going on: “We are wired to use our intuition to understand things around us,” Riess said. “Most of the universe is made out of stuff that’s completely different than us.”
Do we need to think beyond current physics to understand nature?
Have we run out of rungs on our current ladder?
Astrophysicist Adam Frank: Materialism is on shaky ground
Frank is an expert on the final stages of evolution of stars like the sun. His computational research group has developed advanced supercomputer tools in order to study how stars form and die. So he would incline to a materialist view, surely? But no, he says, quantum physics blew all that away. And some neuroscientists just haven’t caught up.
Sabine Hossenfelder: There is a crisis in physics and it may spread to other sciences
Many science writers probably like the current state of affairs because nonsense about the multiverse and space aliens is easy to write. Artists might like it because it is easy to illustrate. Only if you cared about physics would you want to spoil the party.
Peering into the origin of time
Via a curious universal pattern of correlated pairs of objects.