Astronomer Brian Keating has a new book out, Losing the Nobel Prize, detailing the rise and fall of an apparent confirmation of cosmic inflation in 2014. From the publisher: In 2014, astronomers wielding BICEP2, the most powerful cosmology telescope ever made, revealed that they’d glimpsed the spark that ignited the Big Bang. Millions around the world tuned in to the announcement broadcast live from Harvard University, immediately igniting rumors of an imminent Nobel Prize. But had these cosmologists truly read the cosmic prologue or, swept up in Nobel dreams, had they been deceived by a galactic mirage? The latter, it would seem. A free excerpt is available at Nautilus: The broadcast from Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics captivated media around the Read More ›

Pos-Darwinista writes to say that Stephen Hawking’s ashes are to be interred beside those of Isaac Newton at Westminster Abby, as reported at BBC: The Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr John Hall, said: “It is entirely fitting that the remains of Professor Stephen Hawking are to be buried in the Abbey, near those of distinguished fellow scientists. “Sir Isaac Newton was buried in the Abbey in 1727. Charles Darwin was buried beside Isaac Newton in 1882.” He added: “We believe it to be vital that science and religion work together to seek to answer the great questions of the mystery of life and of the universe. More. Okay, yes, they’re all Brits. And Hawking did courageously fight off Read More ›

A reader writes to ask, quoting Sabine Hossenfelder at her blog Back(Re)Action: What the particle physicists got wrong was an argument based on a mathematical criterion called “naturalness”. If the laws of nature were “natural” according to this definition, then the LHC should have seen something besides the Higgs. The data analysis isn’t yet completed, but at this point it seems unlikely something more than statistical anomalies will show up. I must have sat through hundreds of seminars in which naturalness arguments were repeated. Let me just flash you a representative slide from a 2007 talk by Michelangelo L. Mangano (full pdf here), so you get the idea. The punchline is at the very top: “new particles must appear” in Read More ›

From Sabine Hossenfelder at her blog Back(Re)Action: It’s a PR disaster that particle physics won’t be able to shake off easily. Before the LHC’s launch in 2008, many theorists expressed themselves confident the collider would produce new particles besides the Higgs boson. That hasn’t happened. And the public isn’t remotely as dumb as many academics wish. They’ll remember next time we come ask for money. … What the particle physicists got wrong was an argument based on a mathematical criterion called “naturalness”. If the laws of nature were “natural” according to this definition, then the LHC should have seen something besides the Higgs. The data analysis isn’t yet completed, but at this point it seems unlikely something more than statistical Read More ›

In “contrast to all the other particle masses in the standard model” From theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (June, 2018), at Back(Re)Action: Yes, I know the headlines said the LHC would probe string theory, and the LHC would probe supersymmetry. The headlines were wrong. I am sorry they lied to you. But the LHC, despite not finding supersymmetry or extra dimensions or black holes or unparticles or what have you, has taught us an important lesson. That’s because it is clear now that the Higgs mass is not “natural”, in contrast to all the other particle masses in the standard model. That the mass be natural means, roughly speaking, that getting masses from Read More ›

In response to growing disquiet with the concept of a multiverse, voiced by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel assures us at Forbes: In short, it’s the idea that our Universe, and all that’s contained within it, is just one small region of a larger existence that includes many similar, and possibly many different, Universes like our own. On the one hand, if our current theories of physics are true, the Multiverse absolutely must exist. But on the other hand, as Sabine Hossenfelder rightly points out, it’s unlikely to teach us anything useful. … Writing in NPR, Sabine Hossenfelder is right to criticize that approach, stating, “Just because a theory is falsifiable doesn’t mean it’s scientific.” But just because Read More ›

Bookmark this for the next airhead invasion of your local Great Ideas discussion group. Further to “Theoretical physicist: Multiverse not based on sound science reasoning,”more from Sabine Hossenfelder at BackRe(action): Eternal inflation is an extrapolation of inflation, which is an extrapolation of the concordance model, which is an extrapolation of the present-day universe back in time. Eternal inflation, like inflation, works by inventing a new field (the “inflaton”) that no one has ever seen because we are told it vanished long ago. Eternal inflation is a story about the quantum fluctuations of the now-vanished field and what these fluctuations did to gravity, which no one really knows, but that’s the game. There is little evidence for inflation, and zero evidence Read More ›

Responding to “Theoretical physicist: Multiverse not based on sound science reasoning,” Edward Sisson offers some thoughts, from his training and experience as a lawyer: The “multiverse” proposal is just a way to escape the entire field of mathematical statistics. Yet our legal system relies on mathematical statistics in making one category of its most important decisions, profoundly affecting the lives of individuals: convictions of serious crimes using DNA statistics evidence to identify the one individual on planet earth who could have been present at the scene of a crime, by leaving DNA evidence. The DNA found at the crime scene is analyzed, and then a statistical analysis done, leading to the conclusion that there is a “one in X billion Read More ›

From Sabine Hossenfelder, author of the forthcoming Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (June, 2018), at NPR: For centuries, progress in the foundations of physics has been characterized by simplification. Complex processes — such as the multitude of chemical reactions — turned out to arise from stunningly simple underlying equations. And simplicity carried us a long way. According to physicists’ best theories today, everything in our universe emerges from merely 25 elementary particles and four types of forces. So, yes, simplicity — often in the form of unification — has been extremely successful. For this reason, many physicists want to further simplify the existing theories. But you can always simplify a theory by removing an assumption. Like the assumption that Read More ›

From Sabine Hossenfelder at Quanta: Twenty-five particles and four forces. That description — the Standard Model of particle physics — constitutes physicists’ best current explanation for everything. It’s neat and it’s simple, but no one is entirely happy with it. What irritates physicists most is that one of the forces — gravity — sticks out like a sore thumb on a four-fingered hand. Gravity is different. Unlike the electromagnetic force and the strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity is not a quantum theory. This isn’t only aesthetically unpleasing, it’s also a mathematical headache. We know that particles have both quantum properties and gravitational fields, so the gravitational field should have quantum properties like the particles that cause it. But a Read More ›

We feared this would happen. From Sabine Hossenfelder at BackRe(action): Sometimes I believe in string theory. Then I wake up. But then I got distracted by a disturbing question: Do we actually have evidence that elegance is a good guide to the laws of nature? The brief answer is no, we have no evidence. The long answer is in my book and, yes, I will mention the-damned-book until everyone is sick of it. The summary is: Beautiful ideas sometimes work, sometimes they don’t. It’s just that many physicists prefer to recall the beautiful ideas which did work. And not only is there no historical evidence that beauty and elegance are good guides to find correct theories, there isn’t even a Read More ›

Because it pays. From physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at BackReaction: To the end of producing popular papers, the best tactic is to work on what already is popular, and to write papers that allow others to quickly produce further papers on the same topic. This means it is much preferable to work on hypotheses that are vague or difficult to falsify, and stick to topics that stay inside academia. The ideal situation is an eternal debate with no outcome other than piles of papers. You see this problem in many areas of science. It’s origin of the reproducibility crisis in psychology and the life sciences. It’s the reason why bad scientific practices – like p-value hacking – prevail even though they Read More ›

From theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at her blog Back(reaction): On the one hand, I understand the concerns about breaking with centuries of tradition. We used to followed up each hypothesis with experimental test, and the longer the delay between hypothesis and test, the easier for pseudoscience to take foothold. On the other hand, I agree that speculation is a necessary part of science and new problems sometimes require new methods. Insisting on ideals of the past might mean getting stuck, maybe forever. Even more important, I think it’s a grave mistake to let anyone define what we mean by doing science. Because who gets to decide what’s the right thing to do? Should we listen to Helge Kragh? Peter Woit? Read More ›

Via Wuthrich at philosophy of physics blog Taking Up Spacetime, Workshop: “Naturalness, Hierarchy, and Fine-Tuning” Workshop Description: The requirement of naturalness has long served as an influential constraint on model-building in elementary particle physics. Yet there are many ways of understanding what, precisely, this requirement amounts to, from restrictions on the amount of fine-tuning that a model can exhibit, to prohibitions on sensitive dependence between physics at different scales, to the requirement that dimensionless parameters defining the Lagrangian of a theory all be of order one unless protected by a symmetry. This workshop aims to clarify the relationships among these concepts of naturalness and their connection to the hierarchy problem, as well as to assess arguments for and against imposing Read More ›

From our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon: — a) Classical information is local. It is like beans in a bag, one, say, for each bushel of wheat. They are not connected to each other, each is independent of the other. b) Quantum information is non-local. It depends on the orientation of the other beans. It is like beads on an abacus, or digits “in the 100’s column” that count differently than digits “in the one’s column”. The information in (a) is calculated by combinations. The information in (b) is calculated with permutations. If I have 3 identical beans, then the number of combinations is 0, 1, 2, 3, so it represents 2 “bits” of base-2 information. But if the positions Read More ›