At Quanta: In the latest surprise, that link turns out to exemplify a general fact about nature. In a paper published in March in Physical Review Letters, Goon and Riccardo Penco broadened the lessons of the earlier work by proving a simple, universal formula relating energy and entropy. The newfound formula applies to a system such as a gas as well as a black hole.
Cosmology
At Nature: Bold push for a supercollider. But has the age for this sort of thing passed?
From sponsors: “We don’t have an equivalent, rock-solid prediction now — and that makes knowing where and how to look for answers more challenging and higher risk.”
A fourth law of thermodynamics as nature’s steepest entropy ascent?
Beretta;: every non-equilibrium state of a system or local subsystem for which entropy is well defined must be equipped with a metric in state space with respect to which the irreversible component of its time evolution is in the direction of steepest entropy ascent compatible with the conservation constraints.
What the universe looks like, via X-rays
A different view: This orbiting telescope was launched in July last year and despatched to an observing position some 1.5 million km from Earth. Once commissioned and declared fully operational in December, it was left to slowly rotate and scan the depths of space. eRosita’s first all-sky data-set, represented in the image at the top Read More…
At Quanta: How gravity differs from the other three fundamental forces
Your experiment to get to the bottom of gravity collapses into a black hole? Well, that’s just gravity’s way of declining an interview. Suck it up. 😉
What is it about the Big Bang these days that is making people nervous?
Sheldon: More and more independent measurements of the Hubble constant (H0), reveal that it is very close to 73.9 km/s/Mpc, which is 6 or so sigma (deviations) from the Planck determination of 67.4 km/s/Mpc using the cosmic ray background radiation (CMBR) and the standard Big Bang (BB) Model.
A Nobelist explains: I invented the correct universe
Throw in a multiverse and pop science will believe. Hey. We can’t help that.
Missing matter of the universe FOUND? Rob Sheldon says, hold on a minute…
Sheldon:Well, like most astronomy press releases in the past decade, it is 3/4 hype, and 1/4 data, and it has nothing to do with dark matter. Since many people never read beyond the headline, the title is written to be as provocative as possible without outright lying.
Martin Rees puts in a plug for Darwin
It sounds like he really believes it. Well that might be the world as Martin Rees needs to see it.
The Solar System, to scale, on a dry lakebed
Typical images of the solar system are NOT to scale, showing the planets at grossly exaggerated sizes. Here is a typical case, HT Wikimedia, WP and Planet User: So, some video makers did a little project to show it to scale, out to Neptune . . . beyond, lies vastly more of course, but Pluto Read More…
At Forbes: Wolfram’s new theory “isn’t even science” yet. But wait…
We can tell what’s wrong with science today when we try to take Siegel’s dead-serious explanation of what he thinks a theory in science is and apply it to: Darwinian evolution theory
At Astronomy Mag: Is the Big Bang in Crisis? Rob Sheldon responds
Sheldon: It is becoming clear to everyone that: (a) cosmology behaves as a degenerative research programme; and (b) the problem lies in the BB model first put together in the 50’s and 60’s.
Rob Sheldon dishes on dark matter and dark energy
Rob Sheldon: My takeaway is that dark energy is “pathological science,” using the words of Irving Langmuir to describe N-rays or polywater. It is science at the edge of messy data, finding what one is looking for by using poor statistical methods. It is precisely what astronomers are trained NOT to do, and therefore this whole Nobel Prize thing is a corruption of what had been a relatively unstained field.
Honest question at Space.com: Is string theory worth it?
It hasn’t produced the multiverse that shows there is no design in nature. It actually hasn’t produced much of anything after all these decades. At what point will people begin to wonder if this is really science?
NASA translates Hubble images to music
Well, loosely interpreted, music. See what you think of the sonification. Is there music in the spheres after all?