Here: Big Bang? One sometimes hears the claim that the Big Bang was the beginning of both time and space; that to ask about spacetime “before the Big Bang” is like asking about land “north of the North Pole.” This may turn out to be true, but it is not an established understanding. The singularity Read More…
Cosmology
Coffee!! : The Yeesh files – dark matter as key to habitable planets in outer space
“Dark matter could make planets habitable” (New Scientist, 30 March 2011), Maggie McKee tells us: No one knows what dark matter is – astronomers merely detect its gravitational pull on normal matter, which it seems to outweigh by a factor of five to one. But many researchers believe it is made of particles called WIMPs, Read More…
Coffee!! One of the few who really care advances a possible law of nature to explain why it looks as though we are alone
In “All alone and no one knows why” former nanotechnology watchdog Mike Treder tells us (Ethical Technology, Mar. 2, 2010) In 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi famously wondered, “Where is everybody?” He was referring to the strange silence in the universe, the apparent lack of any advanced civilizations beyond Earth. Fermi reasoned that the size Read More…
Now we are told that dark energy …
is not an illusion after all (New Scientist16 March 2011): But new, more precise measurements of supernovae, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, clash with the simplest version of the void model. That model could be made to fit previous supernova measurements and other cosmological data, but only if the local expansion rate is about Read More…
A Question of Evidence
Our good friend and fellow UD commentator Denyse O’Leary recently wrote about John Farrel’s recent musings on Forbes on what evidence for God might look like…or least what sort of evidence might make him sit up and take notice. Here I want to go a step further than Denyse did, and look at this question Read More…
The Epistemological Deficiencies of Barbara Forrest
Denyse O’Leary writes about Barbara Forrest’s fact-free attack on Frank Beckwith, which recently appeared in Synthese. While Denyse focused more on Beckwith’s response to Forrest’s scholarly article diatribe, it might be worth taking a closer look not only at Forrest’s article, but the entire issue of Synthese in which it is found. First Forrest. In Read More…
Progress: After 3000 years, we have achieved a mathematical model of how an eternal universe might work
While searching Discover, I ran up against this from Perimeter Institute cosmologist Neil Turok, “Will We Discover That the Universe Had No Beginning and Has No End?” (October 2010): In the conventional picture of the origin of the universe, the Big Bang is the beginning of time. This is one of the greatest mysteries in Read More…
If we could just get rid of those pesky constants, we could …
While rummaging through Discover Magazines Top 2010 stories relevant to our blog’s interests, I sailed into #46: Do Physical Laws Vary From Place to Place? by Tim Folger (January-February special/December 16, 2010) by These tentative findings raise the possibility that the physical laws that allow life to exist may hold true only in our particular Read More…
Nature authors on exoplanets: Earth-sized, not Earth-like
Here’s the abstract of a just-published paper: Nature 470, 438 (24 February 2011) doi:10.1038/470438b NASA’s Kepler mission to find habitable planets orbiting Sun-like stars has turned up its first rocky planet. The project uses the Kepler space telescope to identify extrasolar planets by watching for dips in the intensity of light from up to 170,000 Read More…
Teaching as if the student had a mind
Contrary to the spirit of this catalogue of bitches against critical thinking in the school system, I offered to answer a schoolkid’s questions. I do write children’s science sometimes, but am sure glad I don’t teach for a living. Doubtless there’s some state somewhere in the US where I’d get fired for saying this, below, Read More…
You heard about it here first: Statistically, we just know there is life on other planets
Ian O’Neill tells us, “Milky way stuffed with 50 billion alien worlds” Discover (Feb 19, 2011) Making estimates may sound trivial, but it does put the search for ET into perspective. There’s at least 50 billion worlds, which have fostered the development of basic lifeforms? How many have allowed advanced civilizations to evolve?If there are Read More…
Philosophy is dead files: And then the corpse sat up, right in the middle of the wake, and demanded a swig, and …
At Philosophy Now, Christopher Norris offers more evidence that Stephen Hawking should either take courses in philosophy or refrain from commenting on its supposed uselessness: Stephen Hawking recently fluttered the academic dovecotes by writing in his new book The Grand Design – and repeating to an eager company of interviewers and journalists – that philosophy Read More…
So what will you do when your turn comes?
Nathan Black reports for Christian Post “Intelligent Design Proponent Fired from NASA Lab” (Jan. 26 2011). David Coppedge is an information technology specialist and system administrator on JPL’s international Cassini mission to Saturn, the most ambitious interplanetary exploration ever launched. A division of California Institute of Technology, JPL operates under a contract with the federal Read More…
The 4% solution: The ultimate Copernican revolution is “We’re different”?
In “The challenge of the great cosmic unknowns” ( New Scientist 24 January 2011), Dan Falk reviews Richard Panek’s The 4% Universe: Dark matter, dark energy, and the race to discover the rest of reality: As he nears the present day, Panek weaves together two separate yet closely related storylines. In the first, he takes Read More…
More from the “They Thought the Earth Was Flat” file …
antikythera, main hub (Wiki Commons) Here we learn, A mechanical instrument made from bronze and wood in ancient Greece was a calendar for predicting solar eclipses and the dates of the Olympic Games, scientists have discovered. X-ray analysis of the device, known as the Antikythera Mechanism, has revealed that it marked the timing of sporting Read More…