At Nautilus: Although it seems like evolutionary determinism, there’s some weight to the idea that cells are constrained to a certain evolutionary path, no matter the environment they appear in.
Physics
Is biology “hiding its deepest mysteries”?
Physics was “hiding its deepest mysteries” thousands of years ago too before anyone uncovered laws for how it works. There are still mysteries in physics, of course, but they are now more basic. The laws are now known. Let’s hope the same proves true for biology.
At Forbes: What we are getting wrong about Schrodinger’s cat
Siegel: In other words, pretty much everything you’ve ever heard about Schrödinger’s cat is probably a myth, with the sole exception of the fact that quantum systems actually are well-described by a probabilistically weighted superposition of all possible, allowable states, and that an observation or measurement will always reveal one and only one definitive state.
Theoretical physicist: Physics has made huge strides, but has not upset free will
George Ellis: If you seriously believe that fundamental forces leave no space for free will, then it’s impossible for us to genuinely make choices as moral beings. We wouldn’t be accountable in any meaningful way for our reactions to global climate change, child trafficking or viral pandemics. The underlying physics would in reality be governing Read More…
At Gizmodo: A black hole collides with something that “shouldn’t exist”?
Dvorsky: Astronomers are puzzling over observations that show a black hole smashing into a mystery object of unusual size.
What are the alternatives to the endless search for dark matter?
Skibba: Today’s seeming dominance of dark matter wasn’t inevitable. The processes through which scientists develop theories are heavily influenced by all sorts of historical and sociological factors,…
Rob Sheldon on the mirror universe supposedly hiding in spacetime
Sheldon: Refreshing honesty at the beginning and the end. A very rare sight indeed.
Black holes are—no surprise—full of surprises
At Quanta: In the latest surprise, that link turns out to exemplify a general fact about nature. In a paper published in March in Physical Review Letters, Goon and Riccardo Penco broadened the lessons of the earlier work by proving a simple, universal formula relating energy and entropy. The newfound formula applies to a system such as a gas as well as a black hole.
At Nature: Bold push for a supercollider. But has the age for this sort of thing passed?
From sponsors: “We don’t have an equivalent, rock-solid prediction now — and that makes knowing where and how to look for answers more challenging and higher risk.”
A fourth law of thermodynamics as nature’s steepest entropy ascent?
Beretta;: every non-equilibrium state of a system or local subsystem for which entropy is well defined must be equipped with a metric in state space with respect to which the irreversible component of its time evolution is in the direction of steepest entropy ascent compatible with the conservation constraints.
At Quanta: How gravity differs from the other three fundamental forces
Your experiment to get to the bottom of gravity collapses into a black hole? Well, that’s just gravity’s way of declining an interview. Suck it up. 😉
Missing matter of the universe FOUND? Rob Sheldon says, hold on a minute…
Sheldon:Well, like most astronomy press releases in the past decade, it is 3/4 hype, and 1/4 data, and it has nothing to do with dark matter. Since many people never read beyond the headline, the title is written to be as provocative as possible without outright lying.
At Forbes: The Universe is not purely mathematical
Maybe a universe that was completely explainable and provable couldn’t exist.
Rob Sheldon dishes on dark matter and dark energy
Rob Sheldon: My takeaway is that dark energy is “pathological science,” using the words of Irving Langmuir to describe N-rays or polywater. It is science at the edge of messy data, finding what one is looking for by using poor statistical methods. It is precisely what astronomers are trained NOT to do, and therefore this whole Nobel Prize thing is a corruption of what had been a relatively unstained field.
L& FP41: Dawkins, Krauss and trying to pull a world out of “no-thing”
As Cardinal Pell has been recently cleared, perhaps some may be willing to learn from this telling vid: No, Virginia, you do not get a world from no-thing. END