Fine tuning

The opportunity is open and it is time to seize the day. So, I think a comment in a discussion with GP and Dionisio should be headlined: >>My observation is those who are closed minded, indoctrinated and hostile will simply flare up in anger at anything that threatens their favoured evolutionary materialistic scientism or their comfortable fellow-traveller views calibrated not to get them in hot water with the domineering atheists. The issue then is, how well cultured they are. The cultured play at subtle rhetorical games pivoting on evasions and how could you concern trolling which provide more or less respectable “good cop” cover. Then come the “bad cops” who try to run riot, bully, intimidate, slander and stalk. I Read More ›

From Elizabeth Howell at Space.com: Our solar system may be an oddball in the universe. A new study using data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope shows that in most cases, exoplanets orbiting the same star have similar sizes and regular spacing between their orbits. By contrast, our own solar system has a range of planetary sizes and distances between neighbors. The smallest planet, Mercury, is about one-third the size of Earth — and the biggest planet, Jupiter, is roughly 11 times the diameter of Earth. There also are very different spacings between individual planets, particularly the inner planets. … “The planets in a system tend to be the same size and regularly spaced, like peas in a pod. These patterns Read More ›

From The Economist: Persistence in the face of adversity is a virtue, of course. And, as all this effort shows, physicists have been nothing if not persistent. Yet it is an uncomfortable fact that the relentless pursuit of ever bigger and better experiments in their field is driven as much by belief as by evidence. The core of this belief is that Nature’s rules should be mathematically elegant. So far, they have been, so it is not a belief without foundation. But the conviction that the truth must be mathematically elegant can easily lead to a false obverse: that what is mathematically elegant must be true. Hence the unwillingness to give up on GUTs and supersymmetry. New theories have been Read More ›

From philosopher of science Bruce Gordon at Journal of Biblical and Theological Studies: Divine Action and the World of Science: What Cosmology and Quantum Physics Teach Us about the Role of Providence in Nature Introduction: The Intelligible Cosmos: For science to be possible there has to be order present in nature and it has to be discoverable by the human mind. But why should either of these conditions be met? Albert Einstein (1879-1955) famously remarked that “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility…. [t]he fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.” If there were no sufficient cause explaining why the universe exists, if it were taken as a brute fact, there would indeed be no reason to Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Water is unique, as it can exist in two liquid states that have different ways of bonding the water molecules together. The water fluctuates between these states as if it can’t make up its mind and these fluctuations reach a maximum at -44°C. It is this ability to shift from one liquid state into another that gives water its unusual properties and since the fluctuations increase upon cooling also the strangeness increases. “What was special was that we were able to X-ray unimaginably fast before the ice froze and could observe how it fluctuated between the two states,” says Anders Nilsson, Professor of Chemical Physics at Stockholm University. “For decades there has been speculations and different theories to Read More ›

Yes, yes, it’s Friday night. Philip Cunningham offers us some notes on the subject. We rather suspect he agrees. 😉 A single sand grain harbours up to 100,000 microorganisms from thousands of species.” Your visit to the beach will never be the same. The sand you sit on, build sand castles with and bury yourself in is crawling with germs. But not to worry; they’re good germs. They’re doing you and the world a favor by helping keep the ocean clean and keep earth’s nitrogen and carbon cycles going…. You travel to Antarctica. Now are you germ-free? No;… Surprisingly, the same kinds of bacteria live at both poles…. Bacteria Rule the Earth – David F. Coppedge, December 14, 2017 Information Read More ›

You shouldn’t exist either. But the people saying so in this case are not population bombers or jihadis. From Philip Perry at BigThink: What CERN scientists say as a result of their latest experiment is: the universe itself is a miracle, as it shouldn’t exist at all. This is of course taken in reference to the Big Bang theory. Though the prevailing one, it’s not the only theory to explain how all and everything came into being. Still, in this view, it all starts with the singularity. We all pretty much know by now that naturalists (nature is all there is) hate th ig Bang and the only question is, how much will they twist science to discredit its significance. Read More ›

A mere desire to support the notion that we are nothing special. At 1:00 pm ET, December 14 (yesterday), we were told by NASA: NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EST Thursday, Dec. 14, to announce the latest discovery made by its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analyzing Kepler data. More. We finally caught up with our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon, and he is astounded at why this eighth Kepler planet is supposed to be a big deal: That’s it??? A inside-Mercury-orbiting rock that is over 800 degrees hot? And the Google AI angle was just Read More ›

Facebook and YouTube, he says. Columbia mathematician and string theory skeptic Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: The Youtube video he found makes the standard tenuous argument that the CMB provides evidence for inflation, inflation should be eternal, thus there should be a multiverse. As I explained in detail here, the models of inflation one supposedly has “evidence” for are not models that lead to the kind of multiverse of different physical laws that Coyne needs for his argument with religion. I should make it clear that I’m on Coyne’s side in the argument of evolution vs. religion, but scientists arguing on the basis of science should take care that they’re using good science if they don’t want to discredit Read More ›

We typically think of eyes as having one or more lenses for focusing incoming light onto a surface such as our retina. However, light can also be focused using arrays of mirrors, as is commonly done in telescopes. A biological example of this is the scallop, which can have up to 200 reflecting eyes that focus light onto two retinas. Palmer et al. find that spatial vision in the scallop is achieved through precise control of the size, shape, and packing density of the tiles of guanine that together make up an image-forming mirror at the back of each of the eyes. More. The authors dare to use the term “fine-tuned,” with all its career-limiting damage? The pecten scallop uses mirrors Read More ›

From Andrew Griffin at The Independent: “All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist,” explained Christian Smorra, the author of a new study conducted at CERN. “An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is. What is the source of the symmetry break?” The latest possibility was matter and anti-matter’s different magnetism. But new research shows that they are identical in that way too – lending further mystery to the question of why the universe is still around at all. More. Persons who find that this situation seriously interferes with their lifestyle could try complaining to the UN. See also: Read More ›

From Michael Denton, in Wonder of Water: Whether the remarkable instances in which various properties of water work together to serve a vital end—such as the suite of properties involved in eroding rocks, or the suite of thermal properties involved in temperature regulation—are actually the result of design or not, there is no doubt that they convey a compelling impression of design. Every bit as remarkable, and also highly suggestive of design—perhaps even more so—are those instances where one vital property of water or set of properties is only useful because of another property or set of properties. We have seen many such instances in the previous chapters, and I have referred to them variously as a teleological sequence or Read More ›

Sources See also: Philip Cunningham’s critique of methodological naturalism

From Michael Denton’s new book, Wonder of Water: This wonder fluid is fit for life on Earth in an absolutely stunning number of ways. It is fit for the formation of proto-planetary discs, for the formation of the planets, for the formation of the oceans, and for their subsequent preservation. Water is uniquely fit for the hydrological cycle, the tectonic cycle, and the temperature regulation of the human body. The properties of water play a critical part in the formation of the great oceanic currents, which circulate crucial nutrients throughout the world ocean. Those currents play a key role in global temperature regulation and moderation and in controlling the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Water is superbly and uniquely fit Read More ›

From Rachel Feltman and Matthew R. Francis at Popular Science: The main reason some physicists obsess over the beginning of the universe is because so much evidence points to there being one. But what if our universe grooved within an ageless multiverse—like a patch of ground from which countless flowers bloom. In this model, each universe has a big bang and keeps its own time. In the most popular version, each universe might even have its own version of physics too. Infinite possibilities yield infinite results: Some say this theory explains life itself. We’d have to be extremely lucky for a single big bang to create a universe with the perfect conditions for life as we know it, but if Read More ›