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Fine tuning

Exact values of constants said to drive physicists crazy

Further to “Water’s unique sense of time” (amazing, these accidental freaks of nature,) we also learn, this time from Aeon, about the conundrum of universal constants, like the speed of light: Light travels at around 300,000 km per second. Why not faster? Why not slower? A new theory inches us closer to an answer Electromagnetic theory gave a first crucial insight 150 years ago. The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell showed that when electric and magnetic fields change in time, they interact to produce a travelling electromagnetic wave. Maxwell calculated the speed of the wave from his equations and found it to be exactly the known speed of light. This strongly suggested that light was an electromagnetic wave – as was Read More ›

Water’s unique sense of time

From ScienceDaily: Using innovative ultrafast vibrational spectroscopies, the researchers show why liquid water is unique when compared to most other molecular liquids. (Actually, usage note: To be unique, water must survive comparison with all other molecular liquids. But let’s get on with the story.) Water is a very special liquid with extremely fast dynamics. Water molecules wiggle and jiggle on sub-picosecond timescales, which make them undistinguishable on this timescale. While the existence of very short-lived local structures — e.g. two water molecules that are very close to one another, or are very far apart from each other — is known to occur, it was commonly believed that they lose the memory of their local structure within less than 0.1 picoseconds. Read More ›

Only New Scientist could come up with this

Every publication should be special right? From New Scientist: Earth’s composition might be unusual for a planet with life Is Earth the odd planet out? Many of our galaxy’s habitable planets probably have a chemical composition that is quite different from Earth’s. More. So let’s get this straight: The only planet that we know has life (because we are awash in it) has a different chemical composition from planets that some people believe might have life (but maybe not, or we’ll never find out)? So it comes down to fact vs. speculation. In which business would you invest your pension? How did pop science get to be just SOOO nuts? See also: Copernicus, you are not going to believe who Read More ›

Team finds Earth’s mineralogy is unique in cosmos

From ScienceDaily: New research predicts that Earth has more than 1,500 undiscovered minerals and that the exact mineral diversity of our planet is unique and could not be duplicated anywhere in the cosmos. Wouldn’t that b bad news to the cosmos-a-minute/fund us!! crowd? Minerals form from novel combinations of elements. These combinations can be facilitated by both geological activity, including volcanoes, plate tectonics, and water-rock interactions, and biological activity, such as chemical reactions with oxygen and organic material. Nearly a decade ago, Hazen developed the idea that the diversity explosion of planet’s minerals from the dozen present at the birth of our Solar System to the nearly 5,000 types existing today arose primarily from the rise of life. More than Read More ›

Good and bad arguments for fine-tuning?

Canadian cosmologist Don Page has written, “In summary, I think the evidence from fine tuning is ambiguous, since the probabilities depend on the models.” Some have questioned this, and I asked physicist Rob Sheldon who writes to say, Don Page is exactly correct. Many, though not all, of these fine-tuning arguments have no way to measure the domain, and without that, specifying the range doesn’t turn it into fine tuning. Let us suppose that your name is Robert Green, and you Google your name and find out that there are exactly 256 Robert Greens in the phone book. Is this evidence of fine tuning or not? You know the range–256–but you don’t know the domain–the number of potential Robert Greens Read More ›

Following up Bostrom’s argument from simulation of universes . . .

That is, why inferring design on functionally specific, complex organisation and associated information, e.g.: and equally: . . . makes good sense. Now, overnight, UD’s Newsdesk posted on a Space dot com article, Is Our Universe a Fake? The article features “Philosopher Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.” I think Bostrom’s argument raises a point worth pondering, one oddly parallel to the Boltzmann brain popping up by fluctuation from an underlying sea of quantum chaos argument, as he discusses “richly detailed software simulation[s] of people, including their historical predecessors, by a very technologically advanced civilization”: >>Bostrom is not saying that humanity is living in such a simulation. Rather, his “Simulation Argument” seeks to show Read More ›

Not sure why galaxies “should not exist”

If they do: Astronomers are constantly uncovering the “most distant,” “most massive” or “most energetic” objects in our universe, but today, researchers have announced the discovery of a truly monstrous structure consisting of a ring of galaxies around 5 billion light-years across. … Astronomers believe these GRBs (and therefore the galaxies they inhabit) are somehow associated as all 9 are located at a similar distance from Earth. According to its discoverers, there’s a 1 in 20,000 probability of the GRBs being in this distribution by chance – in other words, they are very likely associated with the same structure, a structure that, according to cosmological models, should not exist. Where have we heard this before? Copernicus, you are not going Read More ›

Oops. New Kepler planet NOT like Earth?

Further to: NASA says new Earth-like planet found: from Real Clear Science: Another problem is that Kepler-452b is alone. As far as we know, there are no other planets in the same system. This is an issue because it was most likely our giant gas planets that helped direct water to Earth. At our position from the sun, the dust grains that came together to form the Earth were too warm to contain ice. Instead, they produced a dry planet that later had its water most likely delivered by icy meteorites. These frozen seas formed in the colder outer solar system and were kicked towards Earth by Jupiter’s huge gravitational tug. No Jupiter analogue for Kepler-452b might mean no water Read More ›

Pope Francis’ adviser is a science pantheist?

Odd that: Strange, then, that a self-professed atheist and scientific advisor to the Vatican named Hans Schellnhuber appears to believe in a Mother Earth. … In the Gaia Principle, Mother Earth is alive, and even, some think, aware in some ill-defined, mystical way. The Earth knows man and his activities and, frankly, isn’t too happy with him. This is what we might call “scientific pantheism,” a kind that appeals to atheistic scientists. It is an updated version of the pagan belief that the universe itself is God, that the Earth is at least semi-divine — a real Brother Sun and Sister Water! Mother Earth is immanent in creation and not transcendent, like the Christian God. What’s this have to do Read More ›

When soft theory beats hard truth…

In “Hard Truth Against Soft Theory,” Canadian columnist David Warren says, I have been around for some time now, so that the name Paul Ehrlich is familiar to me. I spotted it in media accounts of the latest imposture, in which a “global extinction event” is said to be unfolding, on a scale with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Imagine my non-surprise upon discovering that Ehrlich was among the co-authors. One might actually read the predictions he made in The Population Bomb (1968), or any of his subsequent works, for that matter. Catastrophes he predicted by 1975 have not occurred. The world’s population has doubled, but food production has significantly outstripped this growth, with only modest increases in land under Read More ›

Could we build a really HUGE Earth?

Geek Anders Exoself (yes, we think it is a pseud too) dismisses the hope of finding a huge Earth naturally (“We can do better if we abandon the last pretence of the world being able to form naturally (natural metal microlattices, seriously?)”) and considers the issues around just building a giant habitable planet from scratch: Why aim for a large world in the first place? There are three apparent reasons. The first is simply survival, or perhaps Lebensraum: large worlds have more space for more beings, and this may be a good thing in itself. The second is to have more space for stuff of value, whether that is toys, gardens or wilderness. The third is to desire for diversity: Read More ›

Clarity about dark matter, or something

Further to: Is Is Discover Mag’s blasphemy issue re dark matter really about fine tuning? (Proposing a change to our statements of the laws of gravity in order to eliminate fine tuning as a factor in our universe merely advertises how severe the problem is.) A reader sends in this snippet from The Edge: Priyamvada Natarajan, Professor in Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University, focusing on exotica in the universe—dark matter, dark energy, and black holes. Now I’ve been teaching at Yale for more than ten years, so I’ve had some fantastic students and colleagues who have helped me in refining and shaping how I think. In particular, one of the things that I am after is clarity. Read More ›

Is Discover mag’s “blasphemy” about dark matter really about fine tuning?

It might be. Further to Blasphemy about dark matter: A second career for Torquemada? Or is the whole “denialism” sturm-und-flapdoodle beginning to attract well-deserved mockery?: Note this from the paywalled article: If dark matter is responsible for such uniform rotation speeds, it would require an extraordinarily precise distribution of the invisible stuff – “fine-tuning in the extreme,” as Milgrom calls it. “It’s like taking 100 building blocks and throwing them on the floor, and lo and behold, I see a castle.” MOND offers an explanation he finds more plausible: “You don’t need the hidden mass.” The desired effects can be explained by modifying our understanding of gravity. The two scientists who propose tweaking Newton’s laws of gravity to eliminate the Read More ›

If the planet is intelligently designed…

… and there is considerable evidence of that (Rare Earth Principle*), what difference would that make to global warming, if caused by humans? If not caused by humans? Readers? Re Vince Torley’s Straight talk about global warming: an open letter to the Catholic clergy: As I said here, it is good that someone is trying to come up with the real costs of whatever people say we must DOOOO!! NOWWW!! Usually a recipe for disaster except for a few profiteers. Solyndra, anyone? Oh, and tinpot dictators just love that sort of thing because they can regulate vast new classes of activities without dumping any old ones – and it doesn’t matter if they fail. There are no costs to the Read More ›

But why are “believers” supposed to need “comfort”?

From John Leslie’s review of Nobelist Steven Weinberg’s new book, To Explain the World: Experience has shown that seeking goodness, purpose, signs of a divine plan, is totally unprofitable Despite fine tuning of the universe? All the same, Weinberg gives a rule for what scientists should avoid. Experience has, he thinks, shown that seeking goodness, purpose, signs of a divine plan, is totally unprofitable. It doesn’t mean that he rejects such statements as “Hearts exist so that blood can be pumped”. They are useful if understood in the way Darwin suggested. God didn’t design hearts benevolently, or give living things “an inherent tendency to improve” that would have “ruled out any unification of biology with physical science”. What Darwin instead Read More ›