Category: Physics
At Nature: How gravitational waves might help explain fundamental cosmology. But do they exist?
| April 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Fine tuning, Intelligent Design, Physics |
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 […]
Quantum entanglement nears visibility
| April 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Information, Intelligent Design, Physics |
From Emily Conover at Science News: Quantum entanglement has left the realm of the utterly minuscule, and crossed over to the just plain small. Two teams of researchers report that they have generated ethereal quantum linkages, or entanglement, between pairs of jiggling objects visible with a magnifying glass or even the naked eye — if […]
Physics needs Darwin? Ken Miller should hear this
| April 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Physics |
From Michael Price at the Evolution Institute, interviewing independent scholar John Campbell, author of several books on universal Darwinism, John O. Campbell, an independent scholar from British Columbia, has published several works [1-4] describing his version of universal Darwinism. This framework proposes that Darwinian selection explains what exists not just biologically but in many other realms as […]
At Scientific American: “Inexplicable lab results may be telling us we’re on the cusp of a new scientific paradigm”
| April 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Mind, Naturalism, Physics |
From computer engineer Bernardo Kastrup at Scientific American: It turns out, however, that some predictions of QM are incompatible with non-contextuality even for a large and important class of non-local theories. Experimental results reported in 2007 and 2010 have confirmed these predictions. To reconcile these results with the current paradigm would require a profoundly counterintuitive […]
About ravens, we told you. They caused a mysterious glitch in LIGO data
| April 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
😉 From Emily Conover at Science News: The source of a mysterious glitch in data from a gravitational wave detector has been unmasked: rap-tap-tapping ravens with a thirst for shaved ice. At the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, in the desert of Hanford, Wash., scientists noticed a signal that didn’t look like gravitational […]
Does physics deconstruct our sense of time?
| April 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Physics |
From Andrew Jaffe at Nature, reviewing Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time: According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, much more is illusory, including Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally ticking clock. […]
Independent scientists cast doubt on dark matter signal
| April 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: One of the oldest and biggest experiments hunting for dark matter particles, DAMA is alone in claiming to see them. It purports to pick up on rare interactions between the hypothesized particles and ordinary atoms. But if these dalliances between the visible and invisible worlds really do produce DAMA’s data, […]
Claim: The multiverse is a logical outcome of the existence of empty space
| March 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Physics |
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, […]
In pursuit of the multiverse’s black hole to infinity
| March 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Multiverse, Physics |
From Philip Perry at BigThink: What’s inside a black hole? In most, there’s something called the singularity—an area of such density and intense gravitational force that not even light can escape. Don’t venture too close. Once you enter the event horizon—the outer rim—it’s all over for you. You’d be shredded to ribbons of atoms that’ll […]
Does eternally inflating cosmology cause probabilities to fail?
| March 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Physics, Probability |
From John D. Norton: (2018) Eternal Inflation: When Probabilities Fail. [Preprint] In eternally inflating cosmology, infinitely many pocket universes are seeded. Attempts to show that universes like our observable universe are probable amongst them have failed, since no unique probability measure is recoverable. This lack of definite probabilities is taken to reveal a complete predictive […]
Need the struggle to reconcile classical with quantum mechanics end in science’s assisted suicide?
| March 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Physics |
From some thoughts on by Peter Woit at : Part of the problem with this good vs. evil story is that, as the book itself explains, it’s not at all clear what the “Copenhagen interpretation” actually is, other than a generic name for the point of view the generation of theorists such as Bohr, Heisenberg, […]
From Philip Cunningham: Copernican Principle, Agent Causality, and Jesus Christ as the “Theory of Everything”
| March 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Physics, Religion |
Here. Paper. See also: Film night with Philip Cunningham: Atheists’ reasons for not believing in God are not scientific, and more…
Is there something about quantum theory that we are missing?
| March 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Fine tuning, Intelligent Design, Physics |
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 […]
In what sense is Stephen Hawking equivalent to Isaac Newton?
| March 22, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Physics |
Pos-Darwinista writes to say that Stephen Hawking’s ashes are to be interred beside those of Isaac Newton at Westminster Abby, as reported at BBC: The Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr John Hall, said: “It is entirely fitting that the remains of Professor Stephen Hawking are to be buried in the Abbey, near those […]
After the multiverse, the… multiworse?
| March 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
From Sabine Hossenfelder at her blog Back(Re)Action: It’s a PR disaster that particle physics won’t be able to shake off easily. Before the LHC’s launch in 2008, many theorists expressed themselves confident the collider would produce new particles besides the Higgs boson. That hasn’t happened. And the public isn’t remotely as dumb as many academics […]
The speakers list for the CSS meeting on quantum mechanics and religion, April 6-7
| March 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Here. Robert Griffiths, Otto Stern University Professor of Physics at Carnegie-Mellon University, Ph.D. Princeton University, member of the National Academy of Sciences, author of Consistent Quantum Theory. Erica Carlson, Professor of Physics, Purdue University, Ph.D. Cal Tech, Fellow of the American Physical Society. Erica is a well known author in condensed matter physics theory. Andrew […]
Five Christian experts in quantum mechanics, one venue, Pittsburgh April 6-7
| March 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Physics |
The cat may or may not attend.
CSS Annual Meeting April 2018: Quantum Mechanics and Religion
| February 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Physics, Religion |
From David Snoke at the Christian Scientific Society: Quantum mechanics is a strange theory, and it has been used to justify all manner of religious claims such as extra-sensory perception. This year we bring together five experts on the physics of quantum mechanics to discuss what we know and what we don’t know. We will […]
Theoretical physicist: The Higgs mass is not “natural”
| February 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Design inference, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Physics |
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 […]
Rob Sheldon: Why human beings cannot design a conscious machine
| February 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Mind, Naturalism, Physics |
Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts: — Some have suggested that we could replace the neurons in a human brain one at a time with, say, electronic circuits. Size shouldn’t be an issue, but even if it is, we can imagine thin silver wires connecting the electronics cabinet with the brain under […]
