Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Category

Physics

Regularism as a Metaphysically-Neutral Philosophy of Science

In this presentation, Tom Gilson describes regularism, intended to be a metaphysically neutral philosophy of science to replace methodological naturalism. Regularism is intended to focus on the things that the scientific methodology needs to operate properly rather than assumptions about what it will discover. Find out more information about the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism conference.

The Higgs particle as elephant in room

From Symmetry (Fermilab/SLAC): According to the Standard Model, the most common decay of the Higgs boson should be a transformation into a pair of bottom quarks. This should happen about 60 percent of the time. The strange thing is, scientists have yet to discover it happening (though they have seen evidence). According to Harvard researcher John Huth, a member of the ATLAS experiment, seeing the Higgs turning into bottom quarks is priority No. 1 for Higgs boson research. “It would behoove us to find the Higgs decaying to bottom quarks because this is the largest interaction,” Huth says, “and it darn well better be there.”More. Good thing no one is trying to stop anyone from doing or publishing research on Read More ›

Birds know quantum mechanics?

From Washington Post: “We think they are using quantum mechanics to navigate,” said Daniel Kattnig, a researcher in the chemistry department at Oxford University. Kattnig works in a lab that studies radical pairs — a phenomenon in which atoms acquire extra electrons that are “entangled” with one another, each affecting the other’s motion even though they’re separated by space. It’s a field of science that’s difficult to understand under the best of circumstances; imagine trying to figure out it out with a bird brain. But according to an increasingly popular theory, birds and other animals use a radical pair-based compass to “see” the Earth’s magnetic field, allowing them to undertake great migrations and daring rescues without getting lost. It’s still Read More ›

Particle physics to crack open?

Well, from Michele Redi at RealClearScience: Hints of an unexpected new particle could be confirmed within days—and if it is, the Standard Model could be going down Because? The signal is one of the simplest you can imagine: it represents two high energy photons emerging from the decay of a subatomic particle created in a proton-proton collision. It’s very similar to the signal that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. But this particle is not the Higgs boson: it is six times more massive. Nobody had predicted anything like this. It is shocking to the physicists in the auditorium. People look around, astonished, trying to confirm that their own reactions are reflected in what they see Read More ›

Black holes as only two dimensions?

An intriguing idea is introduced by Neel S. Patel at Inverse: The strangest thing about a black hole is that its edge, known as the event horizon, can’t be observed on account of light not being able to escape the gravitational pull. Physicists don’t really understand how an object just falls into the black hole there’s really no “in.” Everything just gets trapped in the dense gravitational flux of the surface. German physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Theoretical Physics have now created a new estimate of the amount entropy contained with a black hole — and that value suggests black holes are indeed two dimensions and not three. “We were able to use a more complete and richer Read More ›

Supersymmetry now needed to “save physics”

But there is so little evidence to go on. From Columbia math prof Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: Maybe this should have its own entry for This Week’s Hype, but I’ll just mention here that the June Scientific American has The Collider That Could Save Physics. It seems that SUSY [supersymmetry] is needed to “save physics”. Way back when it was LEP that was going to “save physics” by finding SUSY, then it was to be the LHC. This year’s LHC run should put the final nails in that coffin (data is now starting to be collected, see for instance here). Unfortunately the reaction of many SUSY partisans is not to follow the usual norms for how science is Read More ›

How far can we go in the universe?

Even with sci-fi tech, not as far as we might hope, apparently: What’s really unlimited is the human imagination. We can even think up other universes; we just can’t make them exist. See also: Cosmology, the skinny Follow UD News at Twitter!

Why physicists crave a grand unified theory

From Matthew R. Francis at Symmetry magazine: A GUT feeling about physics Linking the different forces into a single theory isn’t easy, since each behaves a different way. Electromagnetism is long-ranged, the weak force is short-ranged, and the strong force is weak in high-energy environments such as the early universe and strong where energy is low. To unify these three forces, scientists have to explain how they can be aspects of a single thing and yet manifest in radically different ways in the real world. Stop, wait. Are they prepared to accept the possibility that everything in the uiverse does not resolve into one single thing? Why not? Some things are only a “mess” if one assumes that a single Read More ›

Earth shatters at new physics find?

From CERN researcher Pauline Gagnon at Aeon: Physics is on the verge of an Earth-shattering discovery The Higgs boson filled in the last missing piece of the Standard Model, but this model is itself clearly incomplete. None of its particles has the properties of dark matter, a mysterious entity that is five times as prevalent as all the ordinary matter (everything made of atoms, which in turn are built from quarks and electrons) visible in the stars and galaxies. The Standard Model also does not explain the wide range of masses of the fundamental particles, nor why antimatter seems to have nearly completely disappeared, leaving the Universe filled almost exclusively with matter. That is why, after spending nearly 60 years building Read More ›

What biology could learn from physics

But can’t, for psychological reasons. First, why the divorce? From Philip Ball at Nautilus: [Ernst] Mayr made perhaps the most concerted attempt by any biologist to draw clear disciplinary boundaries around his subject, smartly isolating it from other fields of science. In doing so, he supplies one of the clearest demonstrations of the folly of that endeavor. His characterization of physics as rigid, notes Ball, was “thoroughly flawed, as a passing familiarity with quantum theory, chaos, and complexity would reveal.” Of course, that defect deepens the mystery of why his view dominated, largely unchallenged. Most people with even a passing interest in science are aware of quantum effects. Again, from Ball, But Mayr’s argument gets more interesting—if not actually more Read More ›

Why Einstein didn’t get a Nobel for relativity?

It was Henri Bergson’s fault, and the issue was time, says Jimena Canales at Nautilus: According to Einstein, philosophy had been used to explain the relation between psychology and physics. “The time of the philosopher, I believe, is a psychological and physical time at the same time,” he explained in Paris. But relativity, by focusing on very fast phenomena, had shown just how off-the-mark psychological perceptions of time really were. Psychological conceptions of time, Einstein insisted, were not only simply in error, they just did not correspond to anything concrete. “These are nothing more than mental constructs, logical entities.” Because of the enormous speed of light, humans had “instinctively” generalized their conception of simultaneity and mistakenly applied it to the Read More ›

Theoretical Physicist On the Implausibility of the Multiverse

Barbara Drossell is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Darmstadt in Germany.  In this article she talks about the origin of the universe, the fine tuning argument and the implausibility of the multiverse theory. The fine-tuning argument is not proof. It is not science to conclude that God exists because the Universe appears to be finely tuned. But it’s a very convincing philosophical interpretation of the observation of fine-tuning. . . . If you start with the assumption that there is no God, then matter and natural laws are the ultimate reality. Therefore, it is not unnatural to conclude that there is a multiverse. It is always dangerous to attribute motives to other people, but I think Read More ›

First dark matter, now “dark life”?

From ScienceNordic: There may be a whole invisible galaxy in the middle of the Milky Way, with dark suns and planets, and maybe even dark life. … Perhaps galaxies are full of a substance that is invisible, but that still has gravity? This, in fact, is what the majority of today’s physicists believe. They believe 80 per cent of the fabric of the universe is made of dark matter. If galaxies are located inside spherical clouds of invisible dark matter, this explains why they can spin as fast as they do without sending all their stars flying off into the universe. And in recent years, observations have confirmed the existence of dark matter. For example, we can see traces of Read More ›

New physics? Conflict in universe’s expansion data

From Nature News: Much of what scientists know about the relative contributions of dark matter and dark energy comes from the relic radiation left behind from the Big Bang, called the cosmic microwave background. The most exhaustive study of it — essentially a portrait of the young Universe at about 400,000 years of age — was done in recent years by the European Space Agency’s Planck observatory. Based on Planck’s measurements, cosmologists can predict how that young Universe will evolve, including how fast it expands at any point in its history. For years, those predictions have disagreed with direct measurements of the current rate of cosmic expansion — also known as the Hubble constant. But until now the error margins Read More ›

Nature prefers hexagons, but why?

Says Philip Ball at Nautilus: The ancient Greek philosopher Pappus of Alexandria thought that the bees must be endowed with “a certain geometrical forethought.” And who could have given them this wisdom, but God? According to William Kirby in 1852, bees are “Heaven-instructed mathematicians.” Charles Darwin wasn’t so sure, and he conducted experiments to establish whether bees are able to build perfect honeycombs using nothing but evolved and inherited instincts, as his theory of evolution would imply. More. Note how in pop science culture, a simple question like Why hexagons? turns into a hymn of praise to Darwin vs. others. You know, the author of the single greatest idea anyone ever had. Incidentally, this kind of thing is what makes Read More ›