Her view: “Personally I think that the motivations for the holographic principle are not particularly strong and in any case we’ll not be able to test this hypothesis in the coming centuries. ” And in our next post, experimental physicist Rob Sheldon replies.
Physics
Rob Sheldon on why astronomers believe in dark matter
“Most, if not all the hype you read, is looking for more and more exotic particles, all the while ignoring mundane macroscopic things like comets and asteroids.”
At The Conversation: Why DO astronomers believe dark matter exists?
Is dark matter the Higgs boson, hard to find but eventually found, or the ether, once believed to pervade the universe? If twenty years pass with no dark matter, unfortunately, the needle will tilt a bit more toward the ether.
Sean Carroll: Physicists don’t even want to understand quantum mechanics
Carroll wants a multiverse out of any new findings, one suspects. One question many might have is, apart from the lack of a multiverse, how bad is the current situation in physics? What, besides that, is going wrong?
How scientists slowly convert to the idea that the universe itself is alive
Remember as you read about Gaia and “life’s ability to shape the universe,” that this op-ed appeared in Scientific American, not Mystic Waters News. Listen carefully and, somewhere in the background, you will hear Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne crooning, “I fought Woo-WOO and woo-WOO won.” Some North American readers will recognize a musical snatch here. In fairness, we warned them. ID isn’t the big enemy. ID proposes to reform evolution studies along real-world lines, not to dump the canon of science.
Have researchers found a way to harness time?
“Even if the experiment can never be done, the study is relevant for future technologies,” Dr Costa said. The theory is, it will help quantum computers work faster. Let’s see it closer to home first.
Physics: No one said finding truth is easy, but need it be impossible?
In Scientific American: We are told that many physicists have “gotten interested in consciousness. Hard to see how the Hard problem of Consciousness will help.
The ever-cycling universe cycles back to town
Rob Sheldon: What is really recycling is not the universe, but this theory.
Will quantum biology help solve some of life’s greatest mysteries?
Quantum mechanics can solve mysteries but only if they are mysteries of certain sort. The temptation is to try to shoehorn a mystery – they mentioned human consciousness – into that mold in order that quantum theory might solve it. But we haven’t yet established the role of quantum processes in much more basic biology so they might want to wait on that fuzzier stuff.
Muons, alas, vindicate Einstein’s special relativity
Apparently, time dilation that we can observe is to blame. The only reason for the “alas” is that the conflict between major theories that are all well-supported must leave some wishing that at least some of the contenders could be less well-supported. 😉
Physicists need courage to confront the Collider dilemma, says boson pioneer
Could the great age of particle physics be coming to an end? That is, not so much a crisis as the beginning of a long, slow decline? That happened to science in many former civilizations. There were high points and then somehow things slowed down. How would we know?
Has a recent find brought us closer to understanding why time goes only one way?
Wolchover: The researchers have discovered simple, so-called “universal” laws governing the initial stages of change in a variety of systems consisting of many particles that are far from thermal equilibrium.
Extreme black hole shows Einstein was right
Of course, there is so much talk these days of a crisis in physics that one is tempted to wonder if vindicating Einstein is regarded as just as positive an event as it would have been decades ago. Good stuff anyway.
Panpsychism: Scientists who believe that the universe is conscious
Some prominent physicists and neuroscientists who cannot accept the idea of a separate immaterial reality (dualism) turn to the simplest alternative, that the whole universe participates in consciousness (panpsychism).
Will the debate over the expansion of the universe “unravel” physics?
Well, they do seem to be taking it seriously.