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Cosmology

Sabine Hossenfelder: The big problem with quantum theory is chaos

Hossenfelder: "... the chaotic motion of Hyperion tells us that we need the measurement collapse to actually be a physical process. Without it, quantum mechanics just doesn’t correctly describe our observations. But then what is this process? No one knows. And that’s the problem with quantum mechanics." Read More ›

Ghostly ‘mirror world’ might be cause of cosmic controversy 

University of New Mexico: New research suggests an unseen ‘mirror world’ of particles that interacts with our world only via gravity that might be the key to solving a major puzzle in cosmology today – the Hubble constant problem. Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder on the closest we have to a theory of everything

She argues that the principle of least action is the closest we have to a theory of everything but, of course, along comes quantum mechanics and… Quantum mechanics keeps the world interesting and reminds us that this is not a deterministic world after all. Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder asks, did the W-boson break the Standard Model?

Hossenfelder: Is it correct? I don’t know. It could be. But in all honesty, I am very skeptical that this result will hold up. More likely, they have underestimated the error and their result is actually compatible with the other measurements. Read More ›

Theoretical physicist on why she stopped working on black hole information loss

Hossenfelder: .... no one can tell which solution is correct in the sense that it actually describes nature, and physicists will not agree on one anyway. Because if they did, they’d have to stop writing papers about it. Read More ›

A search for the most complex thing in the universe?

At IAI.TV: "This synthesis of biology and cosmology required a shift away from reductionism and the belief that all systems can be understood by breaking them down into their constituent elements. Instead, the new way of thinking makes sense of complex systems and their evolution by considering the number of possible future states those systems could take." Read More ›

Physicist David Snoke: Living systems must obey the same rules as Maxwell’s demons

Snoke: I argue that information and entropy are objective physical quantities, defined for systems as a whole, which allow general arguments in terms of physical law. In particular, I argue that living systems obey the same rules as Maxwell’s demons. Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder tells us who’s killing physics

Hossenfelder: But this illusion of progress is the minor problem. Worse is that they seem resigned to the idea that foundational work in physics is detached from experiment and technological application. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Does information have mass? An experimental physicist weighs in

Rob Sheldon notes that the more real-world information we have, the less the bits weigh until, at very large amounts of information, they weigh almost nothing. Read More ›