Cosmology

A fine tuning and multiverse advocate, Martin J. Rees, today won the 2011 Templeton Prize. The astrophysicist with no religion won the Prize originally “for Progress in Religion.”
The 2011 Templeton Prize was announced today.

LONDON, APRIL 6 – Martin J. Rees, a theoretical astrophysicist whose profound insights on the cosmos have provoked vital questions that speak to humanity’s highest hopes and worst fears, has won the 2011 Templeton Prize.
Rees, Master of Trinity College, one of Cambridge University’s top academic posts, and former president of the Royal Society, the highest leadership position within British science, has spent decades investigating the implications of the big bang, the nature of black holes, events during the so-called ‘dark age’ of the early universe, and the mysterious explosions from galaxy centers known as gamma ray bursters. Read More ›

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 at the Big Bang doesn’t indicate a beginning to the universe, only an end to our theoretical comprehension. It may be that this moment does indeed correspond to a beginning, and a complete theory of quantum gravity will eventually explain how the universe started at approximately this time. But it is equally plausible that what we think of as the Big Bang is merely a phase in the history of the universe, which stretches long before that time – perhaps infinitely far in the past. The present state of the art is simply insufficient to decide between these alternatives; to do so, we will need to formulate and test a working theory of quantum gravity.

Fine tuning? Read More ›

“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, which interact only weakly with normal matter but annihilate on contact with each other, creating a spray of energetic particles.[ … ]

But Read More ›

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 and age of the universe would indicate that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis is inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it.

He offers a solution he says his critics have been unable to refute.

First, he rejects the idea that humans may simply be the first intelligent beings to explore outer space, arguing that humans “along with every other form of life” evolved by natural selection and are not special”: “Why, then, would it even be conceivable that earthlings are destined to be the very first species to make a noticeable mark on the universe?”

(The logic here escapes me. Earthlings could just happen to be first to explore because 1 is the first natural number. Indeed, absent prejudice, his first option is far more reasonable than what follows.)

He then finds himself stuck between:

2. There have been others before us, but all of them, without exception, have chosen—or somehow been forced—to expand in such a way that they are presently undetectable by our most sophisticated instruments. ?

3. There have been others, but all of them, without exception, have run into a cosmic roadblock that either destroys them or prevents their expansion beyond a small radius.

Well, he rejects 2 because it is unreasonable to suppose that millions of advanced civilizations before us chose or were forced to avoid detection by ourselves.

Again, I don’t follow because we cannot establish the definite existence of even one of these millions of secretive civilizations, which makes it premature to dispute their motives. However, unless one is paranoid (“Secret groups are hiding critical information from me”), one must agree with him.

That leaves proposition 3: Read More ›

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 60 kilometres per second per megaparsec or less. (One megaparsec is 3.26 million light years.) That was within the possible error of previous measurements, but the new, more precise measurements give an expansion rate of 74 kilometres per second per megaparsec, plus or minus 2.4. “It looks more like it’s dark energy that’s pressing the gas pedal,” says Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University in Read More ›

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 of evidence a bit more in depth.

Of course, the question of what might constitute evidence for the existence of God is nothing new in the never ending atheism/theism debate. The more outspoken atheists such as those of the so-called “new” atheist variety (i.e. Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Dennett et.al.) make quite a fuss about saying that there is no evidence for any sort of God or gods at all. Indeed, Dawkins now well-known diatribe against theism, The God Delusion, is a tour de force of proclaiming the lack of any sort of scientific evidence for the existence of God. Hence anyone still clinging to such a belief is doing so sans evidence and is thus suffering a ‘delusion’. But is that really the case? Read More ›

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 the abstract for her article with the breathtaking title “The non-epistemology of intelligent design: its implications for public policy”, Bar writes:

Intelligent design creationism (ID) is a religious belief requiring a supernatural creator’s interventions in the natural order. ID thus brings with it, as does supernatural theism by its nature, intractable epistemological difficulties.

Okay, so we’re only 2 sentences into the abstract and we can already see that Bar has no clue what ID is about. Read More ›

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 science, and I’ve spent the last few years trying to work out how to make sense of the moment when, in that picture, the universe emerged from a point of infinite density and temperature—what’s known as the initial singularity. I’m exploring the idea that the singularity was not the beginning of time. In this new view, time didn’t have a beginning, and the Big Bang Read More ›

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 part of the universe. “There could be regions with different values for the constants of physics,” Webb says. “We inevitably find ourselves in one that allows us to be here.” If so, we must seek a replacement for the word “constant”. Such large speculations on such tentative findings, and it’s in the top 50 stories. I am glad no one allows cosmologists near stock brokerages Read More ›

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 target stars. Natalie Batalha of San Jose State University in California and her group spotted Kepler 10b, which is about 4.56 times the mass of Earth. Although similar in size to Earth, its orbit lasts just 0.84 days, making it likely that the planet is a scorched, waterless world with a sea of lava on its starlit side. Despite the pop science media’s tendency to Read More ›

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, contrary to state regulations: Read More ›

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 any space-faring alien races out there, “the next question is why haven’t they visited us?” Borucki asked. He responded with: “I don’t know.” I wonder if we’ll ever know. One problem I have with statistics that start with a current sample of one is that it strikes me as difficult to compute the odds that there are two, no matter what the sample size is. Read More ›

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 as practised nowadays is a waste of time and philosophers a waste of space. More precisely, he wrote that philosophy is ‘dead’ since it hasn’t kept up with the latest developments in science, especially theoretical physics. [ … ]Predictably enough the journalists went off to find themselves media-friendly philosophers – not hard to do nowadays – who would argue the contrary case in a suitably Read More ›

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 space agency. Coppedge held the title of “Team Lead” System Administrator on the mission until his supervisors demoted and humiliated him for advancing ideas that superiors labeled “unwelcome” and “disruptive.”

He favoured intelligent design and talked about it, and one superior didn’t like that.

There was no workplace policy that forbid discussing private opinions at work, and claims that Coppedge harassed fellow employees proved unsubstantiated.

Here’s columnist David Klinghoffer on the case:

What did Coppedge do to get himself in trouble? He occasionally chatted with interested colleagues about the scientific case for intelligent design, he passed around a couple of pro-ID DVDs, which made good sense since JPL’s officially defined mission includes the exploration of questions relating to the origin and development of life on earth and elsewhere. His supervisor severely chastised him for this, humiliated and demoted him.

Now he’s been fired. JPL claims it was a cost-cutting measure. … The truth will emerge when Coppedge’s lawsuit comes to trial, but the appearance here certainly suggests a final strike at Mr. Coppedge for his offense of introducing fresh ideas to co-workers.

In the light of this case and the recent, similar Martin Gaskell case, one hardly knows what to make of doubt that Ben Stein was right. There is an Expelled factor. Today, you can doubt anything except Darwin, and you must contrive not to know about or speak of the growing mass of evidence that contradicts the stuff government forces students to learn in tax-funded schools.

But there is no freedom for adults either, it turns out. Darwinism today has nothing to do with the science and everything to do with protecting the cultural status of an icon that has given government everything from compulsory sterilization to scientific racism to … the right of tax-funded institutions like JPL to run inquisitions powered by devotion to that icon.

Sadly, Klinghoffer writes,

It’s bad enough when private universities clamp down on the free exchange of ideas. But public institutions have often seemed to be the worst offenders of all in this respect, and that is something taxpayers have every right to protest.

Klinghoffer suggests that Americans phone: 202-358-1010 or e-mail Charles Bolden, charles.bolden@nasa.gov Yet will they?

I’ve covered ID stories for about a decade now, and on the way, I learned something interesting: What is keeping Darwinism alive right now is not evidence; the evidence is leaning sharply against Darwin’s “information for free” mechanism.

What keeps Darwinism alive is the awful passivity of the taxpayers who doubt it, yet continue to fund its long, persecutory march through the institutions.

Christians are the worst, incidentally.
Read More ›

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 us to sophisticated laboratories around the world where researchers are trying to isolate particles of dark matter. Their best guess is that dark matter is made of WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), which were created at the time of the big bang and are now fiendishly difficult to detect. In the second storyline, we join the hunt for dark energy, which began in the late Read More ›