Category: Physics
If quantum mechanics were a researcher, she’d be fired
| November 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Physics |
And have to leave academic science. Factually correct answers do not matter now if they are not politically correct. In a review of Adam Becker’s What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Basic Books, 2018), mathematician and physicist Sheldon Lee Glasgow tells us No one can doubt that quantum mechanics is […]
Physicists: New approach to antimatter offers promising results
| November 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
According to the Standard Model of our universe, beginning with the Big Bang, there is no difference between matter and antimatter (although they annihilate each other on contact). Why then do we see all matter, no antimatter? A group of physicists decided to test a new theory: From ScienceDaily: About ten picoseconds after the Big […]
Rob Sheldon: If Hubble’s Law changes its name, will “Darwinian” evolution be next?
| November 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
What about Alfred Russel Wallace? Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon on the Hubble’s Law name change, to recognize “Big Bang” priest, Fr. Georges Lemaitre: — The misappropriation of laws is a well-known institution in science. Avogadro had nothing to do with his constant. The French just didn’t want to name it after the Austrian […]
Rob Sheldon on the “grave doubts” about the Nobel-winning gravity waves
| November 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon has this to say: — I’ve been a skeptic of the gravity wave observations from the very beginning. The noise is ONE MILLION times stronger than the signal, which in every other field of science, pretty much excludes the opportunity of seeing the signal. Making this worse, no one knows […]
New Scientist: LIGO gravitational waves discovery in grave doubt
| November 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
The 2015 find may have been an illusion: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory collaboration, better known as LIGO, switched on its upgraded detectors on 12 September 2015. Within 48 hours, it had made its first detection. It took a few months before the researchers were confident enough in the signal to announce a discovery. Headlines […]
For better results, search for dark matter should unite particle physics and astronomy, says physicist
| November 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Dark matter was first theorized a century ago and yet “ super-sensitive underground labs that can detect a particle just one-trillionth of one-trillionth of a square centimeter” haven’t found it. Some now think that the problem is that two different approaches to the search are in conflict: There are two methods that physicists use to […]
Quantum biology: Did researchers produce quantum entanglement in living organisms?
| October 31, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
The researchers claim it is a first: … a new paper from a group at the University of Oxford is now raising some eyebrows for its claims of the successful entanglement of bacteria with photons—particles of light. Led by the quantum physicist Chiara Marletto and published in October in the Journal of Physics Communications, the […]
Neutrinos test the Standard Model of particle physics
| October 31, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
“Tested and verified with ever increasing precision,” the Standard Model is a a remarkably elegant way of understanding the relationships between particles and their interactions.” But then there are the neutrinos: In the Standard Model, neutrinos come in three kinds, or flavors: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos. This mirrors the other matter particles […]
Larry Krauss cites physics to fight back against sex harassment charges
| October 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Culture, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Readers will remember celebrity atheist physicist Larry Krauss. We first heard the story about the sexual harassment charges at Buzzfeed in February. Krauss announced his retirement last week but has also offered a lengthy rebuttal to the accusations. Among other things, he says the physics of some of the allegations doesn’t hold up: One piece of […]
Remembering ether, the substance that just had to be there
| October 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Yes, that ether that thinkers assumed to pervade otherwise empty space right into the modern era: In the 18th and 19th centuries, as physicists grappled with light, there was some debate over whether it was a wave or a particle. (Trick question—we now know it has properties of both.) Scientists thought that if light were […]
Would backwards time travel unravel spacetime?
| October 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics, Science fiction |
Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel offers two scenarios where it wouldn’t: The second way out is to assume that the past isn’t written, and your actions do matter. The Universe, as it exists today, is not bound to the state its in right now if you travel back to the past. In a way, every action you […]
Many worlds, many problems… one of them serious
| October 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Physics |
To hear the multiverse enthusiasts tell it, many worlds theory offers no problems. But you probably sensed that that wasn’t very likely: It says that our unique experience as individuals is not simply a bit imperfect, a bit unreliable and fuzzy, but is a complete illusion. If we really pursue that idea, rather than pretending […]
Findings from the first stars bode trouble for dark matter theory
| October 22, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, tells us of one solution that would eliminate the need for dark matter: To explain the EDGES [Experiment to Detect the Global Epoch of Reionization Signature] result, dark matter would need a stronger interaction with normal matter than presently assumed. If so, that could […]
Moonmoons
| October 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Astronomy, Physics |
You read the title right. Recently, some astronomers thought they had spotted an “exomoon,” a moon orbiting an exoplanet. There are, of course, bound to be some. But now Gizmodo introduces us to the concept of the moonmoon, a submoon orbiting a moon. One research team is taking on the possibility: The team’s short analysis […]
Electron’s nearly perfect roundness stymies the search for “new physics”
| October 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Matter: atoms, Physics |
The Standard Model of physics holds that electrons should be almost perfectly round. As it happens, The electron gets its shape from the way that positive and negative charges are distributed inside the particle. The best theory for how particles behave, called the standard model of particle physics, holds that the electron should keep its […]
Researchers: Bizarre Antartic particles might shatter modern physics
| October 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Recent cosmic ray activity in Antartica is provoking question and speculation: Physicists don’t know what it is exactly. But they do know it’s some sort of cosmic ray — a high-energy particle that’s blasted its way through space, into the Earth, and back out again. But the particles physicists know about — the collection of particles that […]
The quantum world remains weird: Remembering the doomed “pilot wave”
| October 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
French physicist Louis de Broglie (1892-1987) hoped that quantum mechanics could be brought within the same frame as classical physics via pilot wave theory, which envisioned “concrete particles, always with definite locations, that are guided through space by real pilot waves.” Apparently not. But a series of bouncing-droplet findings since 2015 has crushed this dream. […]
Co-author: Hawking’s last paper left the information paradox unresolved
| October 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Uniting gravitation with the other forces of nature still eludes us: What we have done recently is to discover a gap in the mathematics that led to the idea that black holes are totally bald. In 2016, Stephen, Andy and I found that black holes have an infinite collection of what we call “soft hair”. […]
Nuclear physicist: True quantum magic only starts with multiple particles
| October 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
From the Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences The world of quantum phenomena is full of paradoxes incomprehensible to human intuition and inexplicable to classical physics. This is the thesis we almost always hear when it comes to quantum mechanics. Here are some examples of phenomena that are commonly […]
Cosmologist: String theory is incompatible with dark energy
| October 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Rob Sheldon mentioned a story going the rounds earlier today, about whether dark energy was “even allowed.” Here’s the story, from ScienceDaily: In string theory, a paradigm shift could be imminent. In June, a team of string theorists from Harvard and Caltech published a conjecture which sounded revolutionary: String theory is said to be fundamentally […]
