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.
Cosmology
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.”
Sabine Hossenfelder: New evidence against the Standard Model of cosmology
Hossenfelder: “… the evidence is mounting that the cosmological principle is a bad assumption to develop a model for the entire universe and it probably has to go. It increasingly looks like we live in a region in the universe that happens to have a significantly lower density than the average in the visible universe.”
Dark matter as Fermi balls? Rob Sheldon offers a question
Sheldon: Quite surprisingly, such a theory is readily available for testing. Remember, dark matter avoids the center of galaxies, but neither does it condense into stellar-sized black holes (we looked). So if it is little balls created in the Big Bang, then it is indistinguishable from Primordial Black Holes that have been proposed for decades…
Is dark matter the Fermi balls forged in the Big Bang?
Physicist: Dark matter — the mysterious substance that exerts gravity but doesn’t interact with light — might be made of tiny black holes permeating the universe.
Why do they need Einstein to be wrong?
It’s been a while though. What would replace Einstein’s theories? The war on math?
At Mind Matters News: Quantum physicist shows how consciousness may create reality
In his argument against physicalism (physical nature is all there is), Tim Andersen draws from the 19th-century philosopher Schopenhauer the concept of Will as the basis of all reality.
Does the next 30 years of astronomy depend on a single report?
Does the next 30 years of astronomy in the U.S. depend on a single report? So they say. And all isn’t well.
Sabine Hossenfelder despairs over vacuum energy. Rob Sheldon responds
These specialty controversies are an interesting backdrop to the current war on math. Sabine Hossenfelder and Rob Sheldon would likely agree that 2 + 2 = 4. But survey the vast degreed hordes for whom such a statement is an instance of white supremacy and colonialism and we will see the real problem facing our civilization: Far too many people have degrees (and grievances!) but no insight into what knowledge is.
Rob Sheldon offers some comments on Karsten Pultz’s “Bicycle” ID thesis
Sheldon: “… in computer science, it is very difficult to make a random number generator. Successive runs of the code should not produce the same numbers. But most generators do.”
Sabine Hossenfelder asks, “Is dark matter real?”
Part of a physics seminar series called “Golden Webinars.”
At Forbes: Could dark energy be a misinterpretation of the data?
Siegel: In the near future, observatories like the ESA’s Euclid, the NSF’s Vera Rubin Observatory, and NASA’s Nancy Roman Observatory will improve that uncertainty so that if dark energy departs from a constant by as little as ~1-2%, we’ll be able to detect it. If it strengthens or weakens over time, or varies in different directions, it would be a revolutionary new indicator that dark energy is even more exotic than we currently think.