Cosmology

Imagine if atheistic materialism was actually true and humans are nothing more than biological automatons – complexly programmed and reactive robots that behave and think in whatever manner happenstance chemical interactions dictates at any given time.  Let’s think about what would actually mean. There would be no way for a biological automaton to determine whether or not any statement was in fact true or not since all conclusions are driven by chemistry and not metaphysical “truth” values; indeed, a biological automaton reaches conclusion X for exactly the same reason any other reaches conclusion Y; chemistry.  If chemistry dictates that 1+1=banana, that is what a “person” will conclude. If chemistry dictates they defend that view to the death and see themselves Read More ›

From Dan Falk at Quanta, Many physicists have made peace with the idea of a block universe, arguing that the task of the physicist is to describe how the universe appears from the point of view of individual observers. To understand the distinction between past, present and future, you have to “plunge into this block universe and ask: ‘How is an observer perceiving time?’” said Andreas Albrecht, a physicist at the University of California, Davis, and one of the founders of the theory ofcosmic inflation. Others vehemently disagree, arguing that the task of physics is to explain not just how time appears to pass, but why. For them, the universe is not static. The passage of time is physical. “I’m Read More ›

From Emily Conover at ScienceNews: A beautiful but unproved theory of particle physics is withering in the harsh light of data. For decades, many particle physicists have devoted themselves to the beloved theory, known as supersymmetry. But it’s beginning to seem that the zoo of new particles that the theory predicts —the heavier cousins of known particles — may live only in physicists’ imaginations. Or if such particles, known as superpartners, do exist, they’re not what physicists expected. New data from the world’s most powerful particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider, now operating at higher energies than ever before — show no traces of superpartners. More. Will we accept that or move toward throwing out falsifiability? See also: Supersymmetry Read More ›

From Science Daily: ESA’s Planck satellite has revealed that the first stars in the Universe started forming later than previous observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background indicated. This new analysis also shows that these stars were the only sources needed to account for reionising atoms in the cosmos, having completed half of this process when the Universe had reached an age of 700 million years. More. Paper. (public access) – Matthieu Tristram and Collaboration. Planck intermediate results. XLVII. Planck constraints on reionization history. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2016; DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201628897 Doesn’t that reduce the time for origin of life? See also: Galaxy started forming stars only 200 million years after the Big Bang? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Lee Billings at Scientific American: Whatever dark matter is, it is not accounted for in the Standard Model of particle physics, a thoroughly-tested “theory of almost everything” forged in the 1970s that explains all known particles and all known forces other than gravity. Find the identity of dark matter and you illuminate a new path forward to a deeper understanding of the universe—at least, that is what physicists hope … “The desire is for dark matter to not only exist but also to solve other outstanding problems of the Standard Model,” says Jesse Thaler, a physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Not every new discovery can be a revelation like the Higgs, where afterward theories suddenly fit together much Read More ›

From physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at Aeon: Might nature’s bottomless pits actually be ultra-efficient quantum computers? That could explain why data never dies … Hawking’s discovery of black-hole evaporation has presented theoretical physicists with a huge conundrum: general relativity says that black holes must destroy information; quantum mechanics says it cannot happen because information must live on eternally. Both general relativity and quantum mechanics are extremely well-tested theories, and yet they refuse to combine. The clash reveals something much more fundamental than a seemingly exotic quirk about black holes: the information paradox makes it aptly clear that physicists still do not understand the fundamental laws of nature. But Gia Dvali, professor of physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, believes he’s Read More ›

From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at his blog, Not Even Wrong: The “SUSY Bet” event in Copenhagen took place today, with video available for a while at this site. It appears to be gone for the moment, will put up a better link if it becomes available. An expensive bottle of cognac was presented by Nima Arkani-Hamed to Poul Damgaard, conceding loss of the bet. On the larger question of the significance of the negative LHC results, a recorded statement by Gerard ‘t Hooft (who had bet against SUSY), and a statement by Stephen Hawking (not in on the bet, but in the audience) claimed that if arguments for SUSY were correct, the LHC should have seen something, so they Read More ›

From JStor Daily: As late as 1923, a British physicist despaired his coevals were still “ignorant of Einstein’s work and not very much interested in it.” British physicists Ebenezer Cunningham and Norman R. Campbell were at first quite lonely introducing Einstein to their countrymen and challenging the “ethereal” view. Campbell seems to have been the only anti-ether voice from 1905 to 1911.More. Of course, in its day, ether was a reasonable belief as—in its day—was the belief that Earth was the point of the universe down to which all things fell (geocentric system). As anthropologist J. G. Frazer put it The views of natural causation embraced by the savage magician no doubt appear to us manifestly false and absurd; yet Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Associate Professor Dr Joan Vaccaro, of Griffith’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics, has solved an anomaly of conventional physics and shown that a mysterious effect called ‘T violation’ could be the origin of time evolution and conservation laws. “I begin by breaking the rules of physics, which is rather bold I have to admit, but I wanted to understand time better and conventional physics can’t do that,” Dr Vaccaro says. “I do get conventional physics in the end though. This means that the rules I break are not fundamental. It also means that I can see why the universe has those rules. And I can also see why the universe advances in time.” Paper. (public access) More. – Joan Read More ›

From Kelsey Houston-Edwards at PBS: The difference between Lithium-6 and Lithium-7 might not seem like much, but it is poking holes in our understanding of how atoms formed during the Big Bang. … Fortunately, there’s one possible explanation for the discrepancy that hasn’t been ruled out yet—lithium is created and destroyed inside stars. It’s possible that scientists accurately predicted how much 6Li was produced during the Big Bang, and the rest was created later in stars. But for now, lithium is challenging our understanding of the Big Bang, big time. More: See also: National Geographic on the Big Bang “lithium shortage” Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Kirk Durston, in response to Ethan Siegel at Forbes, “Humanity May Be Alone In The Universe” (an unusual commonsensical approach to the question of extraterrestrial civilizations) at Contemplations: From a materialistic, evolutionary perspective, our technologically advanced civilization is almost certainly unique in the universe. Indeed, if the origin of life is so improbable that we should not even be here, then it seems we are faced with an interesting choice. The first option is to grant Koonin’s theory that we won a lottery against mind-staggering odds, requiring a near infinite number of unseen, untestable universes. The second option arises out of our observation that the universe and this particular planet seem to be incredibly fine-tuned to support life. It Read More ›

From Mike Wall at Space.com: “For decades, we’ve known of four fundamental forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces,” Feng added. “If confirmed by further experiments, this discovery of a possible fifth force would completely change our understanding of the universe, with consequences for the unification of forces and dark matter.” … … The Hungarians detected tantalizing evidence of a previously unknown particle just 30 times heavier than an electron — a result they published early this year. More. It would make a heck of a sci fi film See also: Dark matter skeptics wanted Follow UD News at Twitter!

Alongside the proton? From ScienceDaily: The deuteron — one of the simplest atomic nuclei, consisting of just one proton and one neutron — is considerably smaller than previously thought, say researchers who measured the proton and found a significantly smaller value than previous research did, using new experimental methods. … The new measurement of the deuteron’s size has now given rise to an analogous mystery. It is possible that this will lead to an adjustment of the Rydberg constant, a fundamental quantity in physics. Another possible explanation is that a physical force as yet unknown is at work. More. See also: What no new particles means for physics? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Quanta: In the past two years, some theoretical physicists have started to devise totally new natural explanations for the Higgs mass that avoid the fatalism of anthropic reasoning and do not rely on new particles showing up at the LHC. Last week at CERN, while their experimental colleagues elsewhere in the building busily crunched data in search of such particles, theorists held a workshop to discuss nascent ideas such as the relaxion hypothesis — which supposes that the Higgs mass, rather than being shaped by symmetry, was sculpted dynamically by the birth of the cosmos — and possible ways to test these ideas. Nathaniel Craig of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who works on an idea called “neutral Read More ›

From Massimo Pigliucci at Aeon: The broader question then is: are we on the verge of developing a whole new science, or is this going to be regarded by future historians as a temporary stalling of scientific progress? Alternatively, is it possible that fundamental physics is reaching an end not because we’ve figured out everything we wanted to figure out, but because we have come to the limits of what our brains and technologies can possibly do? These are serious questions that ought to be of interest not just to scientists and philosophers, but to the public at large (the very same public that funds research in fundamental physics, among other things). What is weird about the string wars and Read More ›