Category: Cosmology
Electron’s nearly perfect roundness stymies the search for “new physics”
| October 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Matter: atoms, Physics |
The Standard Model of physics holds that electrons should be almost perfectly round. As it happens, The electron gets its shape from the way that positive and negative charges are distributed inside the particle. The best theory for how particles behave, called the standard model of particle physics, holds that the electron should keep its […]
Researchers: Bizarre Antartic particles might shatter modern physics
| October 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Recent cosmic ray activity in Antartica is provoking question and speculation: Physicists don’t know what it is exactly. But they do know it’s some sort of cosmic ray — a high-energy particle that’s blasted its way through space, into the Earth, and back out again. But the particles physicists know about — the collection of particles that […]
The quantum world remains weird: Remembering the doomed “pilot wave”
| October 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
French physicist Louis de Broglie (1892-1987) hoped that quantum mechanics could be brought within the same frame as classical physics via pilot wave theory, which envisioned “concrete particles, always with definite locations, that are guided through space by real pilot waves.” Apparently not. But a series of bouncing-droplet findings since 2015 has crushed this dream. […]
Co-author: Hawking’s last paper left the information paradox unresolved
| October 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Uniting gravitation with the other forces of nature still eludes us: What we have done recently is to discover a gap in the mathematics that led to the idea that black holes are totally bald. In 2016, Stephen, Andy and I found that black holes have an infinite collection of what we call “soft hair”. […]
Nuclear physicist: True quantum magic only starts with multiple particles
| October 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
From the Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences The world of quantum phenomena is full of paradoxes incomprehensible to human intuition and inexplicable to classical physics. This is the thesis we almost always hear when it comes to quantum mechanics. Here are some examples of phenomena that are commonly […]
Cosmologist: String theory is incompatible with dark energy
| October 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Rob Sheldon mentioned a story going the rounds earlier today, about whether dark energy was “even allowed.” Here’s the story, from ScienceDaily: In string theory, a paradigm shift could be imminent. In June, a team of string theorists from Harvard and Caltech published a conjecture which sounded revolutionary: String theory is said to be fundamentally […]
Rob Sheldon on why so many sciences seem to be devolving – not just social sciences
| October 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Peer review, Physics, Psychology |
Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon, occasioned by the social sciences’ war on empirical fact and objectivity: — Duke University professor John Staddon’s Quillette article is particularly relevant in light of the recent 20-paper hoax on the “grievance studies” division of sociology. As John Ioannidis has observed, many areas of science are suffering from “non-reproducibility.” […]
Stephen Hawking’s final paper, just released, tackled the “information paradox”
| October 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Information, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Quantum theory specifies that information is never lost but what happens to the information when a black hole vanishes? In the latest paper, Hawking (1942-2018) and his colleagues show how some information at least may be preserved. Toss an object into a black hole and the black hole’s temperature ought to change. So too will a […]
Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder shares her self-doubts about exposing nonsense in cosmology
| October 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
One must hope that Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, isn’t too worried about the people who criticize her: Let us leave aside for a moment that you have to skip half the book to not notice I question myself on every other page. Heck, if you ask me to […]
Researchers: Fewer galaxies have formed since the Big Bang than should have
| October 8, 2018 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design |
They hope to be surer of that fact after a couple of years more data. From ScienceDaily: It all started with the measurements of the Planck satellite, which was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) to measure the cosmic background radiation. This radiation is, to some extent, an afterglow of the big bang. It […]
At Forbes: The real reason we haven’t found dark matter
| October 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
According to astrophysicist Ethan Siegel: Personally, I don’t expect these direct detection attempts to be successful; we’re stabbing in the dark hoping we hit something, and there are little-to-no good reasons for dark matter to be in these ranges. But it’s what we could see, so we go for it. If we find it, Nobel […]
New Scientist on the glitch at the edge of the universe
| October 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Mathematics |
The constant 1/137 may be variable after all. This immutable number determines how stars burn, how chemistry happens and even whether atoms exist at all. Physicist Richard Feynman, who knew a thing or two about it, called it “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no […]
Could new galactic measurements “upend current theories” of physics?
| September 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
At Horizons EU we are told, “New efforts to figure out just how fast the universe has expanded since the Big Bang, a speed known as the Hubble constant, could upend current theories of physics , according to some scientists. If current theories were upended, who would know. Consider these stories from this month alone: […]
Discover: Even the best dark matter theories “are crumbling”
| September 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Because the best theories have not identified dark matter after decades: Having been fooled once, scientists have to ask: Is dark matter the new ether? For decades, a few rogue scientists have stood hopefully at the edge of respectability, offering their theory called Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND. Essentially, it says that physics doesn’t work […]
Is there a crisis inside the physics of time?
| September 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Did Carlo Rovelli, start a fashion for debunking time with The Order of Time? Here’s science writer Marcia Bartusiak, author of Dispatches from Planet 3, asking whether it is time to just get rid of time: You might say that quantum mechanics introduced a fuzziness into physics: You can pinpoint the precise position of a […]
Experiment to probe the weak points of the Standard Model of our universe
| September 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Better known as Big Bang cosmology, it is not very popular in some quarters: Developed in the 1960s and ’70s, the standard model has some sizable holes: It can’t explain dark matter — an ethereal substance so far detected only by its gravitational effects — or dark energy, a mysterious oomph that causes the cosmos […]
The cat is back: Is quantum theory dead, alive, AND contradicting itself?
| September 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
No, we wouldn’t pay any attention either except that the story is from Nature and they don’t do April 1 in September: In the world’s most famous thought experiment, physicist Erwin Schrödinger described how a cat in a box could be in an uncertain predicament. The peculiar rules of quantum theory meant that it could […]
UChicago Researchers: Those extra dimensions ain’t out there
| September 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Not if you go by results from the gravitational waves collision. While last year’s discovery of gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars was earth-shaking, it won’t add extra dimensions to our understanding of the universe—not literal ones, at least. University of Chicago astronomers found no evidence for extra spatial dimensions to the universe based on […]
“Perhaps physics has slipped into a post-empirical era…”
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy, Physics |
Science writer David Appell suggests this, in all seriousness, in his review of Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at Physics World: Hossenfelder confronts physicists to ask them why their ideas aren’t working. Michael Krämer, who heads the new-physics group at the LHC and works on supersymmetry, tells her that he is “honestly […]
Quantum mechanics: Pushing the “free-will loophole” back to 7.8 billion years ago
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Mind, Physics |
Philip Cunningham writes to tell us of an interesting experiment by quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger and colleagues that pushed the “free-will loophole” back to 7.8 billion years ago, using quasars to determine measurement settings: Abstract: In this Letter, we present a cosmic Bell experiment with polarization-entangled photons, in which measurement settings were determined based on real-time […]
