Physics

From science writer Philip Perry at BigThink: If the nature of reality is in fact reducible to information itself, that implies a conscious mind on the receiving end, to interpret and comprehend it. Wheeler himself believed in a participatory universe, where consciousness holds a central role. Some scientists argue that the cosmos seems to have specific properties which allow it to create and sustain life. Perhaps what it desires most is an audience captivated in awe as it whirls in prodigious splendor. Modern physics has hit a wall in a number of areas. Some proponents of information theory believe embracing it may help us to say, sew up the rift between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Or perhaps it’ll aid Read More ›

The Grand Design Here: Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of The Grand Design is that the attempts made to support Hawking’s and Mlodinow’s case are, in many cases, simply unsophisticated, unsupportable, naive, and even fallacious. I believe that in a college class on logic, philosophy, or religion, this book would receive a failing grade. For example, the question is posed, “Are there any exceptions to the laws of physics?” or “Are miracles possible.” The answer given is, “…the modern scientists answer to question two [exceptions to the laws of physics]…is…a scientific law is not a scientific law if it holds only when some supernatural being decides not to intervene.” This is a clear example of the logical fallacy of “begging Read More ›

From Shannon Hall at Nature: The fact that scientists don’t fully understand these cosmological tools is embarrassing, says the latest study’s lead author, Griffin Hosseinzadeh, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “One of the greatest discoveries of the century is based on these things and we don’t even know what they are, really.” It’s not for lack of trying: astronomers have put forth a range of hypotheses to explain how these stellar explosions arise. Scientists once thought that the supernovae were built uniformly, like fireworks in a cosmic assembly line. That changed in the 1990s, when astronomers noticed that some of the supernovae were dimmer than the others. More. Relax. We weren’t asking you guys to be Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: New geochemical research indicates that existing theories of the formation of the Earth may be mistaken. The results of experiments to show how zinc (Zn) relates to sulphur (S) under the conditions present at the time of the formation of the Earth more than 4 billion years ago, indicate that there is a substantial quantity of Zn in the Earth’s core, whereas previously there had been thought to be none. This implies that the building blocks of the Earth must be different to what has been supposed. The work is presented at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Paris. More. Paper presumably to follow. One of the nice things about science, when it actually works, is that it isn’t Read More ›

From Joseph Silk at Nautilus: The strongest tool for discovery of dark-matter particles would be a new particle collider. Fast-forwarding some three decades from now, physicists plan to build a collider with seven times the power of the LHC. Studies are underway both in China and in Europe. Crudely scaling up from the LHC, it would cost $25 billion in today’s dollars. Shared among nations and spread over the decades, that might just be feasible. But it is probably the limit. Even if physicists had unlimited resources, nothing would be gained by building anything larger. At that point, any unknown particle would have to be so massive that, were the particle produced in the same way as its lighter counterparts, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: “We have a pretty good understanding of the overall population of stars in the universe and their mass distribution as they’re born, so we can tell how many black holes should have formed with 100 solar masses versus 10 solar masses,” Bullock said. “We were able to work out how many big black holes should exist, and it ended up being in the millions — way more than I anticipated.” In addition, to shed light on subsequent phenomena, the UCI researchers sought to determine how often black holes occur in pairs, how often they merge, and how long it takes. They wondered whether the 30-solar-mass black holes detected by LIGO were born billions of years ago and took Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The stability of dark matter is usually explained by a symmetry principle. However, in their paper, Dr. Michael Baker and Prof. Joachim Kopp demonstrate that the universe may have gone through a phase during which this symmetry was broken. This would mean that it is possible for the hypothetical dark matter particle to decay. During the electroweak phase transition, the symmetry that stabilizes dark matter would have been re-established, enabling it to continue to exist in the universe to the present day. With their new theory, Baker and Kopp have introduced a new principle into the debate about the nature of dark matter that offers an alternative to the widely accepted WIMP theory. Up to now, WIMPs, or Read More ›

From cosmologist George Ellis at Inference Review: THEORETICAL PHYSICS AND cosmology find themselves in a strange place. Scientific theories have since the seventeenth century been held tight by an experimental leash. In the last twenty years or so, both string theory and theories of the multiverse have slipped the leash. Their owners argue that this is no time to bring these subjects to heel. It is this that is strange. … If the multiverse is scientifically problematic, it is always open to philosophers to rescue the multiverse by expanding the margins of science. A theory, so the argument runs, need not be confirmed by empirical evidence. Richard Dawid has argued as much in a paper entitled “The Significance of Non-Empirical Read More ›

From University of Bern at ScienceDaily: Neutrinos and antineutrinos, sometimes called ghost particles because difficult to detect, can transform from one type to another. The international T2K Collaboration announces a first indication that the dominance of matter over antimatter may originate from the fact that neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently during those oscillations. This is an important milestone towards the understanding of our Universe. A team of particle physicists from the University of Bern provided important contributions to the experiment. The Universe is primarily made of matter and the apparent lack of antimatter is one of the most intriguing questions of today’s science. The T2K collaboration, with participation of the group of the University of Bern, announced today in a Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Because all the iron-60 from the Solar System’s formation has long since decayed, Telus’ research, published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, focused on its daughter product, nickel-60. The amount of nickel-60 found in meteorite samples — particularly in comparison to the amount of stable, “ordinary” iron-56 — can indicate how much iron-60 was present when the larger parent body from which the meteorite broke off was formed. There are not many options for how an excess of iron-60 — which later decayed into nickel-60 — could have gotten into a primitive Solar System object in the first place — one of them being a supernova. While her research did not find a “smoking gun,” definitively proving that the Read More ›

From Rebecca Boyle at Quanta: Textbooks say that the moon was formed after a Mars-size mass smashed the young Earth. But new evidence has cast doubt on that story, leaving researchers to dream up new ways to get a giant rock into orbit. In the past five years, a bombardment of studies has exposed a problem: The canonical giant impact hypothesis rests on assumptions that do not match the evidence. If Theia hit Earth and later formed the moon, the moon should be made of Theia-type material. But the moon does not look like Theia — or like Mars, for that matter. Down to its atoms, it looks almost exactly like Earth. Confronted with this discrepancy, lunar researchers have sought Read More ›

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics. His equations suggested that under certain conditions, groups of atoms will naturally restructure themselves so as to burn more and more energy, facilitating the incessant dispersal of energy and the rise of “entropy” or disorder in the universe. England said this restructuring effect, which he calls dissipation-driven adaptation, fosters the growth of complex structures, including living things. The existence of life is no mystery or lucky break, he told Quanta in 2014, but rather follows from general physical principles and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.” Since then, England, Read More ›

From Jesse Dunietz at Scientific American: Scientists aren’t yet certain that electrons and their relatives are violating the Standard Model of particle physics, but the evidence is mounting The evidence comes from electrons and their more massive cousins, muons and tau leptons. According to the Standard Model, these three particles should behave like differently sized but otherwise identical triplets. But three experiments have produced growing evidence—including results announced in just the last few months—that the particles react differently to some as-yet mysterious influence. The findings are not yet conclusive, but if they hold up, “it would be a complete revolution,” says California Institute of Technology theorist Mark Wise. More. Many have been revolting against the Standard Model and the Big Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: String theory, which took root in the 1970s, proposes that “all objects in our universe are composed of vibrating filaments (strings) and membranes (branes) of energy.” That’s the ultimate Cool. It unites general relativity (the physics of the very big) with quantum mechanics (the physics of the very small) in one grand unified Theory of Everything, turning current conflicts into harmony. But string theory offers more. It can undergird the concept of a multiverse: There are more universes than particles in our known universe. Which mean that the theory must be true or we must act as if it is true irrespective of evidence—or at least people must be made to believe Read More ›

From Don Lincoln, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, LiveScience: Dark matter remains a powerfully predictive theory for the structure of the universe. It is not complete and it needs validation by discovering the actual dark matter particle. So, there is still work still to do. But this most recent calculation is an important step toward the day where we will know once and for all if the universe really is dominated by the dark side.More. Dark matter could solve a lot of problems, in the same way that the primordial cell of origin of life studies or the ancestral human of evolutionary psychology could. If only they would exist, and make their existence known. Local bets are on dark matter to Read More ›