Fine tuning

Gravitational waves are thought to be ripples in the fabric of space-time, caused by violent processes. From Davide Castelvecchi at Nature: With a handful of discoveries already under their belts, gravitational-wave scientists have a long list of what they expect more data to bring, including insight into the origins of the Universe’s black holes; the extreme conditions inside neutron stars; a chronicle of how the Universe structured itself into galaxies; and the most-stringent tests yet of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Gravitational waves might even provide a window into what happened in the first few moments after the Big Bang. More. The difficulty is, do gravitational waves exist or are they just today’s phlogiston – an idea that explained Read More ›

From retired nuclear engineer Regis Nicoll at Salvo 44: We know from experience that when an object, like a car, absorbs energy by crashing into another object, it suffers damage. If I want my car repaired, I don’t just let it sit and expect it to return to its original condition by itself. Rather, I take it to a body shop, where it will be restored by the skillful hands of trained technicians. And yet, when one of my desk’s atoms gets damaged from bumping into one of its neighbors, it quickly returns to its original condition, all on its own. This is very strange. Equally strange is the phenomenon of the electrons’ “orbit.” Unlike the Earth, whose orbit is Read More ›

From RJS at Patheos: Ten years ago, when I first started writing on science and faith, Intelligent Design was a hot topic. It was in the news and high on the agenda for many in my local church. Today it has slid into the background, occasionally mentioned, but there are often other fish to fry. Greg Cootsona devotes a case study in his recent book (Mere Science and Christian Faith: Bridging the Divide with Emerging Adults) to the topic of intelligent design but not more than this because it is not one of the major issues for the emerging adults in his target audience.More. Okay, but with respect to the term “emerging adults,” are we talking about Millennials, many of Read More ›

From C. D. McCoy: Abstract: Demarest asserts that we have good evidence for the existence and nature of an initial chance event for the universe. I claim that we have no such evidence and no knowledge of its supposed nature. Against relevant comparison classes her initial chance account is no better, and in some ways worse, than its alternatives. More. Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista See also: (if you have the day off) Does the size of the universe sweep us toward atheism? Philosopher: If there is something rather than nothing, questions around God cannot be ignored Waghorn: “Firstly, that on the most plausible demarcation criterion for science, science is constitutionally unable to show theism to be a redundant hypothesis; the debate Read More ›

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: The controversial idea that our universe is just a random bubble in an endless, frothing multiverse arises logically from nature’s most innocuous-seeming feature: empty space. Specifically, the seed of the multiverse hypothesis is the inexplicably tiny amount of energy infused in empty space — energy known as the vacuum energy, dark energy or the cosmological constant. Each cubic meter of empty space contains only enough of this energy to light a lightbulb for 11-trillionths of a second. “The bone in our throat,” as the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg once put it, is that the vacuum ought to be at least a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times more energetic, because of all the matter and Read More ›

Christopher Graney at the Vatican Observatory Foundation Blog offers some thoughtful comments on the relationship between the Star Wars we all grew up with and the actual universe we are learning about now: Star Wars: On the Wrong Side of History & Science – Episode One: Star Wars is set in a wonderfully imaginative universe that features a profusion of cool planets, cooler alien life forms, and the coolest space ships. But that universe, with Tatooine, Dagobah, Naboo, Jakku, Endor, and all their fantastic creatures and “people”—even the much-maligned Jar Jar Binks—is a well-worn idea, and an idea whose time has passed. Science and history are twin Dreadnoughts closing in on and crushing the Star Wars universe like the First Read More ›

From Natalie Wolchover, reviewing Philip Ball’s Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics Is Different at Nature: Along with the historic discoveries, Ball brings readers up to speed on today’s “quantum renaissance”. This active intellectual period is fuelled by quantum-computing research and the rise of quantum information theory, pioneered by researchers including David Deutsch, Peter Shor and Charles Bennett. Quantum mechanics is now seen as, more than anything, a set of rules about how information can be shared and processed. That, Ball says, is why quantum computing has proved so stimulating: what’s possible and impossible to compute “follow from the same rules that govern what is knowable and what is not”. Additionally, physicists, starting with Dieter Read More ›

Kalam cosmological argument: The cosmological argument is less a particular argument than an argument type. It uses a general pattern of argumentation (logos) that makes an inference from particular alleged facts about the universe (cosmos) to the existence of a unique being, generally identified with or referred to as God. Among these initial facts are that particular beings or events in the universe are causally dependent or contingent, that the universe (as the totality of contingent things) is contingent in that it could have been other than it is, that the Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact possibly has an explanation, or that the universe came into being. From these facts philosophers infer deductively, inductively, or abductively by inference to the best Read More ›

A reader writes to ask, quoting Sabine Hossenfelder at her blog Back(Re)Action: What the particle physicists got wrong was an argument based on a mathematical criterion called “naturalness”. If the laws of nature were “natural” according to this definition, then the LHC should have seen something besides the Higgs. The data analysis isn’t yet completed, but at this point it seems unlikely something more than statistical anomalies will show up. I must have sat through hundreds of seminars in which naturalness arguments were repeated. Let me just flash you a representative slide from a 2007 talk by Michelangelo L. Mangano (full pdf here), so you get the idea. The punchline is at the very top: “new particles must appear” in Read More ›

From Daniel Cossins at New Scientist: An almost religious devotion to beauty remains commonplace among theorists of fundamental physics, even if the standards of attractiveness have changed over time. One vision of elegance in particular has surged to the fore: the principle of naturalness. Broadly speaking, it is the belief that the laws of nature ought to be sublime, inevitable and self-contained, as opposed to makeshift and arbitrary. But what if they aren’t? That’s the disquieting possibility being entertained by a growing band of physicists in the aftermath of what should have been the breakthrough discovery of the decade, the snaring of the Higgs boson in 2012. The discovery of the Higgs, at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Read More ›

That’s “cosmopanpsychism.” An earlier version is rocks have minds. From Philip Goff at Aeon: In the past 40 or so years, a strange fact about our Universe gradually made itself known to scientists: the laws of physics, and the initial conditions of our Universe, are fine-tuned for the possibility of life. It turns out that, for life to be possible, the numbers in basic physics – for example, the strength of gravity, or the mass of the electron – must have values falling in a certain range. And that range is an incredibly narrow slice of all the possible values those numbers can have. It is therefore incredibly unlikely that a universe like ours would have the kind of numbers Read More ›

In “contrast to all the other particle masses in the standard model” From theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (June, 2018), at Back(Re)Action: Yes, I know the headlines said the LHC would probe string theory, and the LHC would probe supersymmetry. The headlines were wrong. I am sorry they lied to you. But the LHC, despite not finding supersymmetry or extra dimensions or black holes or unparticles or what have you, has taught us an important lesson. That’s because it is clear now that the Higgs mass is not “natural”, in contrast to all the other particle masses in the standard model. That the mass be natural means, roughly speaking, that getting masses from Read More ›

A friend writes to say, “Some noted medieval theologians were quite wiling to consider that God had created other inhabited worlds. They saw no logical or scientific difficulty in assuming that such worlds might indeed exist.” Our friend cites in evidence: – When Tempier [d. 1279] declared that the omnipotent God could create a vacuum if he so desired, Tempier insisted that God could break any Aristotelian law. God could create life on other worlds if he wished. There could be thousands of other Earths, each teeming with creatures; it was certainly within God’s power, whether Aristotle agrees or not. – Nicholas of Cusa [1401 – 1464] was bold enough to say that God must have done so. The regions Read More ›

From Lisa Grossman at ScienceNews: Not all fundamental forces are created equal. An alternate universe that lacks the weak nuclear force — one of the four fundamental forces that govern all matter in our universe — could still form galaxies, stars, planets and perhaps life, according to calculations published online January 18 at arXiv.org. Researchers have done calculations to that effect. Why? “People talk about universes like they’re very fine-tuned; if you changed things just a little bit, life would die,” Adams says. But “the universe and stars have a lot more pathways to success.” It soon becomes clear that this is a pitch for a multiverse: The paper does not help figure out if the multiverse is real, though. Read More ›

Responding to “Theoretical physicist: Multiverse not based on sound science reasoning,” Edward Sisson offers some thoughts, from his training and experience as a lawyer: The “multiverse” proposal is just a way to escape the entire field of mathematical statistics. Yet our legal system relies on mathematical statistics in making one category of its most important decisions, profoundly affecting the lives of individuals: convictions of serious crimes using DNA statistics evidence to identify the one individual on planet earth who could have been present at the scene of a crime, by leaving DNA evidence. The DNA found at the crime scene is analyzed, and then a statistical analysis done, leading to the conclusion that there is a “one in X billion Read More ›