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Category

Cosmology

Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
December 8, 2021
Categorized
Cosmology, Fine tuning, Physics
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Can gravitational waves help account for why there is more matter than antimatter?

Denyse O'Leary
December 8, 2021
Cosmology, Fine tuning, Physics
“not an electric charge, but some sort of charge”? Okay… At least we are still in the world of hard science here. One thing: They had better trademark the name Q-ball. If their idea takes off, they will be glad they did. Go Q-balls! Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
December 1, 2021
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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FYI: In quantum mechanics, time may flow differently

Denyse O'Leary
December 1, 2021
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
At Eurekalert: As pointed out by Giulia Rubino, lead-author of the publication, “although time is often treated as a continuously increasing parameter, our study shows that the laws governing its flow in quantum mechanical contexts are much more complex. This may suggest that we need to rethink the way we represent this quantity in all those contexts where quantum laws play a crucial role.” Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 29, 2021
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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Sabine Hossenfelder explains why antimatter doesn’t fall up

Denyse O'Leary
November 29, 2021
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
Hossenfelder: Inside a neutron and proton there aren’t just three quarks. There’s really a soup of particles that holds the quarks together, and some of the particles in the soup are anti-particles. Why don’t those anti-particles annihilate? They do. They are created and annihilate all the time. We therefore call them “virtual particles.” But they still make a substantial contribution to the gravitational mass of neutrons and protons. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 12, 2021
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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Rob Sheldon on lowering the standard for detecting gravitational waves

Denyse O'Leary
November 12, 2021
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
Sheldon: "So to summarize, the absence of triple coincidences is being withheld from the paper, when in fact, it delegitimizes the entire data analysis pipeline. Now we have 4 Gravity wave detectors, and soon one in space. At what point does the lack of a triple coincidence become fatal? What observation can they make that would disprove the existence of gravity waves?" Note: In media work, we say: It takes three to make a trend. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 11, 2021
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design
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Reflections on Harvard astronomer’s intelligent design without God

Denyse O'Leary
November 11, 2021
Cosmology, Intelligent Design
Stonestreet and Morris: Loeb doesn’t speculate on the identity of our universe’s engineer(s), or the location of the “laboratory” where it came to be. But if his proposal sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Specifically, he’s proposing a form of intelligent design, only one with an infinite number of extra steps. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
October 16, 2021
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Multiverse
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Ethan Siegel: The multiverse (and another you) are “all but inevitable”

Denyse O'Leary
October 16, 2021
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Multiverse
Essentially, Siegel, the person who has Big Problems with something as widely accepted as the Big Bang, is quite prepared to accept all this far out stuff. That is where the naturalist project is just now. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
October 16, 2021
Categorized
Cosmology, Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, Physics
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Theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser: The “Copernican Principle” isn’t science…

Denyse O'Leary
October 16, 2021
Cosmology, Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, Physics
We’ve only begun to point huge telescopes at exoplanets. There are too many unknowns to be sure of our status, he thinks. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
October 12, 2021
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Religion
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Mike Keas on the myth that a big universe is a problem for religion

Denyse O'Leary
October 12, 2021
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Religion
Quoting C. S. Lewis: “If we discover other bodies, they must be habitable or uninhabitable: and the odd thing is that both these hypotheses are used as grounds for rejecting Christianity.” Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
October 9, 2021
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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If dark energy is “neither particle nor field,” what is it?

Denyse O'Leary
October 9, 2021
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
Siegel: "It is time to take seriously the idea that dark energy might simply be a property inherent to the very fabric of space. Until we learn how to calculate the zero-point energy of empty space itself, or gain some bizarre, surprising, and unanticipated evidence, this will remain one of the biggest existential questions in all the universe." So this is existentialism for physicists, right? Even Sabine Hossenfelder sounds sort of existential on this one. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
October 7, 2021
Categorized
Cosmology, Design inference, Intelligent Design
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Preprint paper by Nobel Prize winner on mind-like processes underlying the order in nature

Denyse O'Leary
October 7, 2021
Cosmology, Design inference, Intelligent Design
Josephson: David Bohm suggested that some kind of implicate order underlies the manifest order observed in physical systems, while others have suggested that some kind of mind-like process underlies this order. In the following a more explicit picture is proposed, based on the existence of parallels between spontaneously fluctuating equilibrium states and life processes. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
October 4, 2021
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism
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At Mind Matters News: Our Universe Survived a Firing Squad and It’s Just an Accident?

Denyse O'Leary
October 4, 2021
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism
Ola Hössjer: According to the Weak Anthropic Principle, we should not be surprised to live in a universe that harbors life. But I should add that, in our paper, "Cosmological Tuning Fine or Coarse?," we compute or give an upper bound for the probability of a randomly generated universe to have a certain constant of nature, ending up within its life-permitting interval. We take the Weak Anthropic Principle into account — and still we come up with small probabilities for certain constant of natures or certain ratios or constants of nature. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
September 26, 2021
Categorized
Cosmology, Fine tuning
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At Mind Matters News: Was the universe created for life forms to live in? How would we know?

Denyse O'Leary
September 26, 2021
Cosmology, Fine tuning
Daniel Díaz: There is a constant attached to the gravitational law. And in that gravitational law, that constant is producing some effect. Were the constant too small, then stars could not be formed. Read More ›