Category: Physics
Is there a crisis inside the physics of time?
| September 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Did Carlo Rovelli, start a fashion for debunking time with The Order of Time? Here’s science writer Marcia Bartusiak, author of Dispatches from Planet 3, asking whether it is time to just get rid of time: You might say that quantum mechanics introduced a fuzziness into physics: You can pinpoint the precise position of a […]
Experiment to probe the weak points of the Standard Model of our universe
| September 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Better known as Big Bang cosmology, it is not very popular in some quarters: Developed in the 1960s and ’70s, the standard model has some sizable holes: It can’t explain dark matter — an ethereal substance so far detected only by its gravitational effects — or dark energy, a mysterious oomph that causes the cosmos […]
The cat is back: Is quantum theory dead, alive, AND contradicting itself?
| September 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
No, we wouldn’t pay any attention either except that the story is from Nature and they don’t do April 1 in September: In the world’s most famous thought experiment, physicist Erwin Schrödinger described how a cat in a box could be in an uncertain predicament. The peculiar rules of quantum theory meant that it could […]
UChicago Researchers: Those extra dimensions ain’t out there
| September 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Not if you go by results from the gravitational waves collision. While last year’s discovery of gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars was earth-shaking, it won’t add extra dimensions to our understanding of the universe—not literal ones, at least. University of Chicago astronomers found no evidence for extra spatial dimensions to the universe based on […]
“Perhaps physics has slipped into a post-empirical era…”
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy, Physics |
Science writer David Appell suggests this, in all seriousness, in his review of Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at Physics World: Hossenfelder confronts physicists to ask them why their ideas aren’t working. Michael Krämer, who heads the new-physics group at the LHC and works on supersymmetry, tells her that he is “honestly […]
Quantum mechanics: Pushing the “free-will loophole” back to 7.8 billion years ago
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Mind, Physics |
Philip Cunningham writes to tell us of an interesting experiment by quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger and colleagues that pushed the “free-will loophole” back to 7.8 billion years ago, using quasars to determine measurement settings: Abstract: In this Letter, we present a cosmic Bell experiment with polarization-entangled photons, in which measurement settings were determined based on real-time […]
Rob Sheldon comments on the “dirtiest fight in physics”
| September 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Culture, Naturalism, Physics, Science |
Recently, we noted the dirtiest fight in physics, over the nature of the universe. Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts: A great story on the level of confusion in the world of astronomy and particle physics. My own view is: they’re both wrong. Dark Matter WIMP proponents postulate an invisible particle that […]
At Scientific American: Quantum theory does not require a conscious observer
| September 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Mind, Philosophy, Physics, Science |
Science writer Anil Ananthaswamy Intro of surveys current theories: If nothing else, these experiments are showing that we cannot yet make any claims about the nature of reality, even if the claims are well-motivated mathematically or philosophically. And given that neuroscientists and philosophers of mind don’t agree on the nature of consciousness, claims that it […]
Carlo Rovelli: The present is a localized rather than global phenomenon
| September 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Carlo Rovelli, author of The Order of Time, that there is neither space nor time: A present that is common throughout the whole universe does not exist. Events are not ordered in pasts, presents, and futures; they are only “partially” ordered. There is a present that is near to us, but nothing that is “present” […]
Does the sheer size of the universe prove that nature is all there is?
| September 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Physics |
Frank Turek takes on the size of the universe: Many atheists think that the universe has a lot of “wasted space” and this is in some way evidence against theism. Note: “Naturalism” means the claim that nature is all there is, often called “materialism,” Hat tip: Ken Francis See also: What is “dualism” and why is […]
Actually, “dark photons” probably don’t exist
| September 8, 2018 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Yesterday, we noted the hunt for a mysterious fifth force of the universe involving dark photons. Here’s an item from last April that suggests the hunt may prove a disappointment: But the most precise measurement yet of the fine structure constant — which determines how strongly electrons and photons interact, or “couple” — has eliminated […]
Suarez: Quantum nonlocal correlations come from outside space-time
| September 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Physics |
Philip Cunningham writes, I just happened to check quantum physicist and philosopher Antoine Suarez‘s youtube channel. He loaded a new video a few months ago after being silent for a few years. Quantum nonlocal correlations come from outside space-time, they cannot be explained exclusively by material links. If the experimenter has free will, then there […]
Will increasingly sophisticated computer simulations “end” theoretical physics as we know it?
| August 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Computing, AI, Cybernetics and Mechatronics, Cosmology, Mathematics, Physics |
Hossenfelder: Perhaps one day, rather than doing calculations, we will just use observations of simplified systems to make predictions.
Karl “falsification” Popper was dogmatic, but was that such a bad thing?
| August 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Physics |
Science writer John Horgan well remembers going to interview Popper, who had strong views on subjectivism in physics: Words poured from him so rapidly and with so much momentum that I began to lose hope that I could ask my prepared questions. “I am over 90, and I can still think,” he declared, as if […]
And now black holes can be ghosts…
| August 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Naturalism, Philosophy, Physics, Science |
From previous universe: In Penrose and similarly-inclined physicists’ history of space and time (which they call conformal cyclic cosmology, or CCC), universes bubble up, expand and die in sequence, with black holes from each leaving traces in the universes that follow. And in a new paper released Aug. 6 in the preprint journal arXiv—apparent evidence […]
How Roger Penrose proposes that the universe can be eternal
| August 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Physics |
For all practical purposes. From the author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at her blog BackRe(Action) According to Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology, the universe goes through an infinite series of “aeons,” each of which starts with a phase resembling a big bang, then forming galactic structures as usual, then cooling down as […]
Reader asks physicist: Is there a universe in every particle?
| August 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
The physicist who answers is Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018) and she responds, saying (among other things) If you want every elementary particle to each have a universe inside, you need to explain why we only know 25 different elementary particles. Why aren’t there billions of them? An […]
Researchers: Either dark energy or string theory is wrong. Or both are.
| August 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Dark energy. Even the name is intriguing. Isn’t it a line of cosmetics already? But the evidence base is getting murkier all the time. The conjecture, if true, would mean the density of dark energy in our universe cannot be constant, but must instead take a form called “quintessence” — an energy source that will […]
Decidedly unDarwinian admissions re proteins
| August 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Design inference, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Philip Cunningham writes to note for us such moments in the literature: Abstract: (open access) Why life persists at the edge of chaos is a question at the very heart of evolution. Here we show that molecules taking part in biochemical processes from small molecules to proteins are critical quantum mechanically. Electronic Hamiltonians of biomolecules […]
At Nature: For now, “uncertainty seems the wisest position” on the implications of quantum mechanics
| August 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Physics |
In a review of science writer Anil Ananthaswamy’s Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality, science writer Philip Ball captured the essence of the sheer oddity of quantum mechanics: What’s odd is that the interference pattern remains — accumulating over many particle impacts — even if […]
