Vanchurin: “I see no reason why this process should be confined to a particular length scale and so the claim is that everything that we see around us (e.g. particles, atoms, cells, observers, etc.) is the outcome of natural selection.” It doesn’t take very long for Darwinism to become indistinguishable from magic.
Physics
Ed Feser on theoretical physicist’s new book: “the particle collection that fancied itself a physicist”
Feser: Alfred Korzybski once said, “the map is not the territory.” If only more physicists were capable of seeing what a crackpot linguist could!
Rob Sheldon on the latest claim that quantum mechanics imperils objectivity
Sheldon: Actually the debate over “the meaning of QM” has been going on since 1935 when Einstein published his EPR paper. It is just that the wiggle-room is getting reduced as our straight-jacket is being cinched tighter.
Paper: Modeling biology on physics doesn’t really work
Modeling biology on physics is useful if the biologist wants to pretend to an august Darwinian certainty that is not really available and perhaps not even possible.
A one-paper-size look at what’s wrong with theoretical physics today
Hank Campbell on the paper: You might be able to detect black holes falling into wormholes using gravitational waves if wormholes ever exist and a black hole ever falls into one.
Rob Sheldon on why some are upset that the Higgs boson “refuses to misbehave”
Rob Sheldon: What Blekman didn’t say, but Sabine Hossenfelder does, is that there are not “tens of thousands” but rather an infinite supply of wrong theories. That should keep particle physicists employed until at least the 23rd century or until the oceans rise 30 feet, whichever comes first.
At Scientific American: Could we force the universe to crash?
Does anyone remember when science was distinct from science fiction? But in those days, great discoveries were made. Who needs great discoveries when an active imagination will do just as well?
Eric Holloway: Why engineering can’t be reduced to the laws of physics
He argues that the problem how to account for innovation cannot be solved by anything built upon the laws of physics.
Rob Sheldon on recent claims of dramatic new Higgs boson findings
Sheldon: This required analysis of thousands of decays and Terabytes of data crunching. So it is a triumph of data analysis to be able to see this rare decay against the more common route to stability, but neither unexpected nor revealing of physics “beyond the standard model”.
Rob Sheldon on the recent reduction in the age of the universe
Sheldon: I have long advocated a rewrite of the Big Bang model that converts the cosmic microwave numbers into a Hubble constant. But strangely, like Darwin’s model in biology, we see few cosmologists willing to kill the sacred cow. They would rather change the laws of physics (“new physics”) than change their model.
A striking illustration of the size and other differences between protons and electrons
“If atoms were tennis balls…”
Sabine Hossenfelder: Einstein’s greatest legacy was the thought experiment
She notes that one needs evidence from real experiments to demonstrate that the outcome of a thought experiment is real. But it is significant that the human mind is capable of developing the basis for momentous discoveries even before we commit to stuff that requires a budget.
The time a particle spends in a quantum tunnel has been measured
At Phys.org: According to one theoretical description, he [Steinberg] says, it looks as though a particle “appears on the far side without ever crossing the middle. This is what we’d like to test.”
Released: Largest All Sky Map Ever
From Sloan: “Only with maps like ours can you actually say for sure that there is a mismatch in the Hubble Constant,” says Eva-Maria Mueller of the University of Oxford, who led the analysis to interpret the results from the full SDSS sample. “These newest maps from eBOSS show it more clearly than ever before.”
Are we starting to find out what happened to the universe’s missing baryons?
There are hints that they may be strung out along very long, thin gas filaments