It’s almost irrelevant what is really going on. The parallel universe is somewhat like the multiverse or the advanced space aliens. People who have no other religion need them to exist. And the outcome somehow makes it way into a science journal.
Physics
At Forbes: Ethan Siegel offers to tell us how the universe popped into existence from nothing
If we leave physical constraints behind, we are certainly not operating in the only universe we know. But thanks to Ethan for an entertaining close to the evening.
Artificial intelligence cannot produce a Theory of Everything
Gary Smith concludes, “Computers are much better than humans at curve fitting but still far worse at devising models that help us understand and predict the world.”
Can a big enough computer come up with a Theory of Everything? Eric Holloway says yer dreamin’…
Bottom line: The rigorously proven No Free Lunch theorem shows that physicists will always be needed to determine the correct questions. No computer will do all our thinking for us.
Dark matter and dark energy as 21st century Ptolemaic epicycles? – Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts
Why can’t they find dark matter, despite much search? Sheldon: The old joke is that a man is looking under a lamppost one night. The policeman asks what he is doing. “Looking for my keys” he replies. “Did you lose them here?” “No, but the light is better over here.” (And the funding is better for some research than for others.)
At Quanta: Are we looking at the end of physics?
Ah yes, the problem of dead-endedness that Sabine Hossenfelder often writes about. As does Columbia mathematician Peter Woit, on the subject of string theory. But surely much of the nonsense around string theory and the multiverse is in part due to a practical failure—the inability to find even a single particle of dark matter or similar evidence for dark energy.
At Science mag: “Really weird” gravity would be needed to explain away dark matter
What do we do when the situation is untenable but so are the alternatives?
The quantum world underlies our universe but follows its own “rules”
Enrique Blair: Very tricky, those photons.
At Forbes: Hawking’s black hole paradox is NOT solved
Ethan Siegel looks at the limitations: But we’re still a long way away from determining exactly where that information goes, and how it gets out of a black hole. Theorists disagree over the validity and soundness of many of the methods that are currently being employed to do these calculations, and no one has even a theoretical prediction for how this information should be encoded by an evaporating black hole, much less how to measure it.
So what’s been making the fast radio bursts?
Not aliens. We are told that they are made by magnetars, a type of neutron star.
Room temperature superconductivity achieved (but at huge, crushing pressures)
From Nature: Published: 14 October 2020Room-temperature superconductivity in a carbonaceous sulfurhydrideElliot Snider, Nathan Dasenbrock-Gammon, Raymond McBride, Mathew Debessai, HiranyaVindana, Kevin Vencatasamy, Keith V. Lawler, Ashkan Salamat & Ranga P. Dias Nature 586, 373–377(2020) One of the long-standing challenges in experimental physics is the observation of room-temperature superconductivity1’2. Recently, high-temperature conventional superconductivity in hydrogen-rich materials has been Read More…
Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is being labelled “anti-science”
Also, let this sink in: Despite believing in determinism, Hossenfelder believes we should “decide” against a new particle collider… We can decide? On that account, to other naturalists, she is “anti-science.” Naturalism is weird like that. Eats its own.
Spagettification of a star caught by a black hole
Starry starry fright.
Physicist Rob Sheldon checks out astrophysicist Ethan Siegel for ridiculing Nobelist Roger Penrose
Sheldon: The politicization of science evidently started before Ethan’s graduate schooling, as Hoyle and his post-doc Chandra Wickramasinghe tell in their biographical writings.
Researcher: We need a new Theory of Everything, one with no “things”
We’d have to guess that Stephen Wolfram’s attempt at a Theory of Everything didn’t solve all the problems. At any rate, by the time we get down to “a theory of every thing requires that one not start with a thing,” it’s not easy to distinguish science from Zen. But then maybe that’s the idea.