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Cosmology

Mark Steyn remembers the 1995 Apollo 13 movie because …

… Apollo 18 is set to launch in theatres: “There’s a reason we’ve never gone back to the moon.” (Yes. Speculation is cheaper, and the public doesn’t care any more. But that’s no thriller plot.) Here’s Mark on Apollo 13 (02 September 2011): The scenes in space are great, simultaneously claustrophobic and panoramic: a pokey module with a vast, silent blackness pressing against the windscreen. Better still are the earthbound moments at Cape Kennedy, with Ed Harris in superb form hustling the boffins to improvise DIY oxygen kits for the astronauts, made from the polythene wrappers of their spaceship manuals. Is Hanks really Lovell or Bacon Swigert? Who cares? The film works as a tense techno-thriller pitting a crew of Read More ›

So, this is the best pop science TV show since Cosmos?

Calling Peter “Not Even Wrong” Woit, right this minute: In “Morgan Freeman Goes From God to Science” ( New York Times, August 26, 2011) Alex Pappademas writes what sounds like a parody of pop science TV – but takes it seriously: In the hands of a goofier host — and let’s face it, anyone other than Freeman would by definition be a goofier host — the series could have been “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” with string theory, or a bottomless can of mind-Pringles for freshman-dorm Castanedas. (Representative episode titles include “Does Time Really Exist?” and “Beyond the Darkness”; presumably, the producers are saving “Have You Ever Looked at Your Hand — I Mean, Really Looked at It?” and “No, Read More ›

Large Hadron Collider proves physics still meaningful: Dumps string theory

At BBC News (August 27, 2011), Pallab Ghosh reports “LHC results put supersymmetry theory ‘on the spot’” : Results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have all but killed the simplest version of an enticing theory of sub-atomic physics. Researchers failed to find evidence of so-called “supersymmetric” particles, which many physicists had hoped would plug holes in the current theory. Promising: “The fact that we haven’t seen any evidence of it tells us that either our understanding of it is incomplete, or it’s a little different to what we thought – or maybe it doesn’t exist at all,” he said. Relax, Nash. If you’re willing to admit that maybe it doesn’t exist at all, you know you are doing physics. Read More ›

How the multiverse stays in business

Skeptical mathematician Peter Woit explains here (Not Even Wrong, August 18, 2011): The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton announced today that Jim Simons and Charles Simonyi will donate $100 million to the Institute, in the form of matching funds for a $200 million campaign mainly aimed at increasing the endowment. For some idea of previous fund-raising by the IAS, see here. Simons and Simonyi have donated significant sums to the IAS in the past, including $6 million from Simonyi to endow a professorship for Witten. The IAS has about 25 permanent professors, with salaries reaching above $300K/year. To get some idea of the scale of the new endowment funds, if they all went to new permanent professorships (unlikely), the Read More ›

Cosmology: Superstring theorists now “fairly discouraged,” soon to be “enormously depressed.”

Says skeptical mathematician Peter Woit, after hearing Talks at the KITP (Not EvenWrong, August 12, 2011). The multiverse that makes all nonsense true just ain’t out there. While it’s true that SUSY was in trouble pre-LHC, there’s psychologically a big difference between indirect effects not showing up, and directly looking for something and finding it’s just not there. The discussion with the audience is quite interesting, with some audience members a lot more worried about SUSY. One of them reminded people that SUSY is supposed to solve naturality problems, so relatively light squarks were expected, but now “those models are being screwed.” Someone else (Lisa Randall, I think) reacted to Reece’s mentioning R-parity violating models as one way to evade Read More ›

Black holes no free lunch either?

New study suggests that information could escape from black holes after all/iStockphoto

From “Escaping Gravity’s Clutches: Information Could Escape from Black Holes After All, Study Suggests” (ScienceDaily, Aug. 11, 2011), we learn:

Conventional thinking asserts that black holes swallow everything that gets too close and that nothing can escape, but a new study suggests that information could escape from black holes after all.

Read More ›