Cosmology

In “Shuttles’ end stirs doubts about U.S. space program,” Irene Klotz (News Daily, 2011/07/06) reports

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida, July 6, 2011 (Reuters) — As the clock ticks down to this week’s final space shuttle launch, there is a mounting sense of uncertainty about future U.S. dominance in space.

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… veteran former astronauts say the space program is in “disarray” and fear the end of the shuttles could mean a permanent decline in U.S. space leadership as well. Read More ›

At New Scientist (29 June 2011) we learn from Ken Croswell that “Dying stars hold the promise of alien life”:

WELCOME to Procyon B, a nearby star that’s light years away from the sun, and not only in distance terms. Unlike the healthy star we circle, Procyon B is dim and dying. Having thrown off its outer layers, it is puny compared with the sun. And it is so dense that were you able to scoop up a spoonful of its material, it would weighs tonnes. So unlike our sun is Procyon B, in fact, that those seeking extraterrestrial life have long overlooked the star’s potential.

University of Washington astronomer Eric Agol thinks we are too ready to dismiss such places. Read More ›

At Discovery Magazine (July 1, 2011), Ian O’Neill tells us that “We May Not Live in a Hologram after All”. Hard to say who’ll be more shocked, those who thought we did and those who never supposed that anyone had even considered the idea, but

In a nutshell, GEO600 — a mindbogglingly sensitive piece of kit — started to detect what particle physicist Craig Hogan interpreted as quantum “fuzziness.” This fuzziness, or blurriness on the smallest possible scales, could be interpreted as evidence for the “holographic universe” hypothesis.

This hypothesis describes the 3-dimensional universe we live in as a projection from a 2-dimensional “shell” at the very edge of the universe. As with any projection, the projected “pixels” will become fuzzy the closer you zoom in on them. The quantum fuzziness GEO600 seemed to detect could be evidence for this projection effect. The Universe is therefore a hologram, so the idea goes.

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However, Read More ›

For example, Tufts University cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, of whom William Lane Craig* notes, Vilenkin and, more famously, James Hartle and Stephen Hawking have proposed models of the universe that Vilenkin candidly calls exercises in “metaphysical cosmology.” In his best-selling popularization of his theory, Hawking even reveals an explicitly theological orientation. He concedes that on the Standard Model one could legitimately identify the Big Bang singularity as the instant at which God created the universe. Indeed, he thinks that a number of attempts to avoid the Big Bang were probably motivated by the feeling that a beginning of time “smacks of divine intervention.” He sees his own model as preferable to the Standard Model because there would be no edge of Read More ›

Inventor of string theory Leonard Susskind, for one:

If, for some unforeseen reason, the landscape turns out to be inconsistent—maybe for mathematical reasons, or because it disagrees with observation . . . [then] as things stand now we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature’s fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the ID critics.

– as quoted by Amanda Gefter in New Scientist Magazine, December 17, 2005.

Here Bill Dembski notes that Susskind told Alan Guth Read More ›

Including prominent molecular biologist Eugene Koonin:

Despite considerable experimental and theoretical effort, no compelling scenarios currently exist for the origin of replication and translation, the key processes that together comprise the core of biological systems and the apparent pre-requisite of biological evolution. The RNA World concept might offer the best chance for the resolution of this conundrum but so far cannot adequately account for the emergence of an efficient RNA replicase or the translation system.The MWO version of the cosmological model of eternal inflation could suggest a way out of this conundrum because, in an infinite multiverse with a finite number of distinct macroscopic histories (each repeated an infinite number of times), emergence of even highly complex systems by chance is not just possible but inevitable. Read More ›

Also, from Stephen Battersby (New ScientistJune 21, 2011), we learn: , “Largest cosmic structures ‘too big’ for theories”: We know that the universe was smooth just after its birth. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), the light emitted 370,000 years after the big bang, reveal only very slight variations in density from place to place. Gravity then took hold and amplified these variations into today’s galaxies and galaxy clusters, which in turn are arranged into big strings and knots called superclusters, with relatively empty voids in between. On even larger scales, though, cosmological models say that the expansion of the universe should trump the clumping effect of gravity. That means there should be very little structure on scales Read More ›

Catching up with the news from outer space, from New Scientist’s Vanessa Thomas and Richard Webb (June 13, 2011), we learn that spiral galaxies are a headscratcher for cosologists: Easy as these spiral beauties are on the eye, for cosmologists they are becoming something of a headache. As we survey the spiral galaxies around us more closely, nagging doubts are creeping in that some of the largest, most luminous examples in fact look rather too perfect. What’s more, many of them seem to be in entirely the wrong place. How can a galaxy be in the “wrong” place? Doesn’t anyone enforce our rules out there? – (Registration required)

In “Quantum Magic’ Without Any ‘Spooky Action at a Distance” (ScienceDaily, June 25, 2011), we learn:

Quantum mechanical entanglement is at the heart of the famous quantum teleportation experiment and was referred to by Albert Einstein as “spooky action at a distance.” A team of researchers led by Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences used a system which does not allow for entanglement, and still found results which cannot be interpreted classically.

Gets better: Read More ›

Umberto “Name of the Rose“ Eco (not the person you’d immediately expect to not like Stephen Hawking’s latest effort, The Grand Design) apparently doesn’t like it. That’s according to Vox Day’s translation from the Italian.

Yes, for one  thing, Eco thinks the book was mostly written by co-author Cal Tech physicist Leonard Mlodinow:

the book is fundamentally a work of the second author, whose qualifications are described on the cover as having written some episodes of “Star Trek”.UD News would pay no attention to such speculations, but for the fact that Eco is a writer by trade (and a very accomplished one), and writers excel at picking apart different voices in a multi-authored work.

Anyway, Eco has a number of more germane beefs:  Read More ›

Douglas and Dine and their co-workers have taken the first steps in finding the statistical rules governing different string vacua. I can’t comment usefully on this, except to say that it wouldn’t hurt in this work if we knew what string theory is. – Nobelist Steven Weinberg, The Nature of Nature , p. 550 A second step? In the same book (which you can win in our most recent contest), ID-friendly cosmologist Bruce Gordon offers a brief explanation, which shows that he doesn’t think much of string theory, any more than anti-ID Weinberg does. Enter the contest or buy the book. Really.

How’d that work out at a used car lot? In “Wrong Again: Planetologists Embarrassed” (Creation-Evolution Headlines, June 23, 2011), Dave Coppedge comments on getting it wrong about planets: In most careers, being wrong too often is grounds for dismissal. False prophets in ancient kingdoms were stoned or shamed out of town. Only in science, it seems, can experts consistently get it wrong, and not only keep their jobs, but be highly esteemed as experts. Among the guiltiest of the lot are planetary scientists, whose predictions have been consistently wrong for almost every planetary body studied since the dawn of the space age. Their orbital mechanics is solid; they do get their spacecraft to arrive at the right place at the Read More ›

Uh, they did care; response was pretty good. Post here (June 7, 2011).

But, one “Larry Tanner” who self-describes as follows,

“Larry Tanner” is my nom de blog. I am married, a father of three beautiful children, and enjoying life in New England. I work with robotic technologies, teach classes in English literature, and ghostwrite non-fiction books for a rabbi – and I self-identify as an atheist. I’m currently working on a Ph.D. on matters of literature, textuality, and probabilistic reasoning.

was complaining (June 8, 2011):

However, I am surprised that that Carroll’s post has not generated more discussion at UD than it has: only about 23 responses in 24 hours.

Hi, Larry, I’m Denyse O’Leary, and that’s a nom de reality, okay? It’s an easily demonstrated fact that there is no particular relationship between readership and comments. We track both.

Stats? Yeah. Got stats. Read More ›

At Discover Magazine’s blog, “Cosmic Variance,” “Sean” asks “Are Many Worlds and the Multiverse the Same Idea?” (2011/05/26) ,

When physicists are asked about “parallel worlds” or ideas along those lines, they have to be careful to distinguish among different interpretations of that idea. There is the “multiverse” of inflationary cosmology, the “many worlds” or “branches of the wave function” of quantum mechanics, and “parallel branes” of string theory. Increasingly, however, people are wondering whether the first two concepts might actually represent the same underlying idea. (I think the branes are still a truly distinct notion.) Read More ›

At MSNBC’s “Cosmic Log,” Alan Boyle invites the audience to join a citizen science project to help identify future targets for a NASA interplanetary flyby — in this case, for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond. – “Join the search for icy worlds,” (June 21, 2011) Right now, the New Horizons team’s top job is getting ready for the 2015 flyby past Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. But the Southwest Research Institute’s Alan Stern, principal investigator for the $700 million mission, said he and his colleagues are already looking for follow-up targets in the Kuiper Belt, the wide disk of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. Those targets will have to be selected before the Pluto Read More ›