At Jonathan McLatchie’s Apologetics Academy at 8pm GMT / 3pm EST here. David Snoke is president of the Christian Scientific Society. See also: As if the multiverse wasn’t bizarre enough …meet Many Worlds and Webinar: Paul Nelson on evolution as theory of transformation Follow UD News at Twitter!
Norwegian philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch conveniently sums up the problem at Nautilus: Monism holds that all of reality is made of the same kind of stuff. It comes in several varieties. The most common monistic view is physicalism (also known as materialism), the view that everything is made of physical stuff, which only has one aspect, the one revealed by physics. This is the predominant view among philosophers and scientists today. According to physicalism, a complete, purely physical description of reality leaves nothing out. But according to the hard problem of consciousness, any purely physical description of a conscious system such as the brain at least appears to leave something out: It could never fully capture what it is like Read More ›
From Mike Macrae at ScienceAlert: New Simulations Suggest Dark Energy Might Not Exist 68 percent of the Universe might not exist. Physicists from Loránd University in Hungary and the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii are now questioning if approximations in Einstein’s equations introduced “serious side effects” that gave the illusion of a vast, unknown force pushing space apart. … The thing is, right now it’s little more than an empty box without any other properties to describe the nature of its existence. More. Empty box? That’s what the hamburger poll in the lunchroom here said too. Apart from that, we can’t keep up. Is it possible that the sheer ability to make up theories without consequence is Read More ›
From Philip Ball at Nautilus: The hypothesis of a fifth force is, then, anything but exhausted. In fact it’s fair to say that any observations in fundamental physics or cosmology that can’t be explained by our current theories—by the Standard Model of particle physics or by general relativity—are apt to get physicists talking about new forces or new types of matter, such as dark matter and dark energy. That’s simply the way physics has always worked: When all else fails, you place a new piece on the board and see how it moves. Sure, we haven’t yet seen any convincing evidence for a fifth force, but neither have we seen a direct sign of dark matter or supersymmetry or extra Read More ›
From Adam Frank at Aeon: It is as simple as it is undeniable: after more than a century of profound explorations into the subatomic world, our best theory for how matter behaves still tells us very little about what matter is. Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind, but in modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself. … Some consciousness researchers see the hard problem as real but inherently unsolvable; others posit a range of options for its account. Those solutions include possibilities that overly project mind into matter. Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained Read More ›
In a review of Void: The Strange Physics of Nothing by James Owen Weatherall, Steven Poole writes at Spectator (UK): In an action-packed epilogue, the author describes how the contested field of string theory posits a bogglingly large number of possible kinds of nothingness, and impresses upon the reader how much of physics still depends on intuition and battling ‘interpretations’. The book is not an exhaustive typology of scientific nothings: not directly addressed, for example, is the nothingness that supposedly obtained before the Big Bang. But to regret this is just to emphasise the success of this stylishly written and admirably concise book, at the end of which you will be inclined to agree, along with the author and Freddie Read More ›
From Stuart Clark at New Scientist: The universe’s ultimate speed limit seems set in stone. But there’s good reason to believe it might once have been faster – and may still be changing now Light’s constant, finite speed is a brake on our ambitions of interstellar colonisation. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, and it is more than four years’ light travelling time even to Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the sun and home, possibly, to a habitable planet rather like Earth. More. Oddly, such a position was once widely derided as a young Earth creationist one. It’s getting harder to be a respectable bigot these days. Just pounding the lectern in favor of a rock hard position Read More ›
From Dennis Overbye at New York Times: There is a crisis brewing in the cosmos, or perhaps in the community of cosmologists. The universe seems to be expanding too fast, some astronomers say. Recent measurements of the distances and velocities of faraway galaxies don’t agree with a hard-won “standard model” of the cosmos that has prevailed for the past two decades. The latest result shows a 9 percent discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number called the Hubble constant, which describes how fast the universe is expanding. But in a measure of how precise cosmologists think their science has become, this small mismatch has fostered a debate about just how well we know the cosmos. “If it is real, Read More ›
From astrophysicist Brian Koberlein at Nautilus: New Evidence for the Strange Idea that the Universe Is a Hologram One of the great mysteries of modern cosmology is how our universe can be so thermally uniform—the vast cosmos is filled with the lingering heat of the Big Bang. Over time, it has cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, but it can still be seen in the faint glow of microwave radiation, known as the cosmic microwave background. In any direction we look, the temperature of this cosmic background is basically the same, varying by only tiny amounts. But according to the standard “cold dark matter” model of cosmology, there wasn’t enough time for hotter and cooler regions of the Read More ›
From physicist Carlo Rovelli, author of Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, interviewed by Cody Delistraty, at Nautilus: You’ve said before that space and time don’t “really exist.” Why say that? We study in school that fixed space is like a table over which things happen and time just passes. We have this quantitative view from Newton. With Einstein we understand that this container is in fact an active thing in the universe. Space and time, as Einstein said, is like a big jellyfish in which we’re immersed. This theory has stood up. So we know that all this dynamical stuff is quantum. We need a quantum description of this jellyfish, but a quantum description Read More ›
From Philip Ball at BBC: Nobody understands what consciousness is or how it works. Nobody understands quantum mechanics either. Could that be more than coincidence? The problem is not that we don’t understand consciousness but that we don’t know how to understand it. And our rules may very well preclude us from finding out. Which is okay if we would prefer to ask questions rather than get answers. In other words, the mind could genuinely affect the outcomes of measurements. It does not, in this view, exactly determine “what is real”. But it might affect the chance that each of the possible actualities permitted by quantum mechanics is the one we do in fact observe, in a way that quantum Read More ›
From Lisa Randall at Nautilus: If we were creatures made of dark matter, we would be very wrong to assume that the particles in our ordinary matter sector were all of the same type. Perhaps we ordinary matter people are making a similar mistake. Given the complexity of the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the most basic components of matter we know of, it seems very odd to assume that all of dark matter is composed of only one type of particle. Why not suppose instead that some fraction of the dark matter experiences its own forces? We can assume whatever we like if we haven’t found any dark matter. Including: Nonetheless, dark life could in principle be Read More ›
From ScienceDaily: Why do the majority of astronomers believe in dark matter: matter whose composition is unknown but which seems to make up 80% of the mass of the galaxies? The concept was invented in the 1930’s by Fritz Zwicky who used it to explain why the galaxies in the Coma cluster are moving much more quickly than can be explained in terms of their known masses. The most decisive step was taken in the 1970’s by the great Vera Rubin, who showed that the outer parts of galaxies are rotating much more quickly than we can explain using the combined masses of their stars, gas, and dust, and the law of gravity of Newton or Einstein. … In spiral Read More ›
From Joseph Silk at Nautilus: Dark matter is as tangible as stars and planets to most astronomers. We routinely map it out. We conceive of galaxies as lumps of dark matter with dabs of luminous material. We understand the formation of cosmic structure, as well as the evolution of the universe as a whole, in terms of dark matter. Yet a decade of sophisticated searches has failed to detect the material directly. We see the shadow it casts, but are completely unaware of what the dark side of the universe may contain. It certainly isn’t any ordinary object or particle—that has long since been ruled out. Theoretical prejudice favors a novel type of particle that interacts only weakly with ordinary Read More ›
From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: Perhaps the most disturbing thing has been seeing the way in which people’s access to information about the larger world has become more and more dominated by what has become known as “Fake News”: stuff which is not true, but which someone with an agenda successfully gets others to believe. This is a problem that goes far beyond obvious nonsense fed to rubes on Facebook, to the point of including what a lot of my well-educated colleagues believe because they read it on the front page of the New York Times. Goodness. For a moment there, we thought he was going to finish the sentence with: to the point of [rubbish Read More ›