Dan Falk here: Last month, about 60 physicists, along with a handful of philosophers and researchers from other branches of science, gathered at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, to debate this question at the Time in Cosmology conference. The conference was co-organized by the physicist Lee Smolin, an outspoken critic of the block-universe idea (among other topics). His position is spelled out for a lay audience in Time Reborn and in a more technical work, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, co-authored with the philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who was also a co-organizer of the conference. In the latter work, mirroring Elitzur’s sentiments about the future’s lack of concreteness, Smolin wrote: “The future is Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur’s Paradigm Shifters: Suzan Mazur: Do you have a definition for life? Mae-Wan Ho: I would define it as a quantum coherent system. It is a circular thermodynamic system that can reproduce. Suzan Mazur: How do you think about origin of life? Mae-Wan Ho: I think there was an origin of lifel If you look at water, which has been the subject of my research for a number of years – the physic o life depends on wter in a very fundamental way. Water has all the characteristics of consciousness. It’s very sensitive, it’s flexible. It responds to light. Electromagnetic fields, etc. Suzan Mazur: Have you commented about electrons and consciousness? Mae-Wan Ho: It was Alfred North Whitehead’s Read More ›

In an article on the question of bias in policing, from Slate: In practice, though, “peer review” refers to a bewildering array of methods and procedures. At least 1 million peer-reviewed articles are published every year, in at least 25,000 journals. At the narrow, top tier of this ecosystem, where prestigious journals filter out all but the best and most important papers, peer review screens for breakthrough work with airtight methodology and well-founded conclusions. At the bulbous bottom, peer review is less discerning. It’s also amenable to all sorts of chicanery—like rings of scientists who rubber-stamp each other’s work or researchers who invent reviews. The use of peer review varies from one publication to another and between different fields of Read More ›

From Emily Conover at Science: A puzzling mismatch is plaguing two methods for measuring how fast the universe is expanding. When the discrepancy arose a few years ago, scientists suspected it would fade away, a symptom of measurement errors. But the latest, more precise measurements of the expansion rate — a number known as the Hubble constant — have only deepened the mystery.“There’s nothing obvious in the measurements or analyses that have been done that can easily explain this away, which is why I think we are paying attention,” says theoretical physicist Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University. If the mismatch persists, it could reveal the existence of stealthy new subatomic particles or illuminate details of the mysterious dark energy Read More ›

Possibly struggling to survive, New Scientist claims there is a 2500 year struggle between God and the multiverse: Modern physics has also wrestled with this “fine-tuning problem”, and supplies its own answer. If only one universe exists, then it is strange to find it so hospitable to life, when nearly any other value for the gravitational or cosmological constants would have produced nothing at all. But if there is a “multiverse” of many universes, all with different constants, the problem vanishes: we’re here because we happen to be in one of the universes that works.More. The rest is an avoidable paywall. Put simply, the multiverse idea only ever got started because New Scientist types needed a universe that originated randomly. Read More ›

The creationist biology conference See also: Todd Wood: New findings on homo Naledi Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: The maneuvers of flying insects are unmatched by even the best pilots, and this might be due to the fact that these critters don’t obey the same aerodynamic laws as airplanes, a team of New York University researchers has found. “We’ve known for quite a while that the aerodynamic theory for airplanes doesn’t work so well in predicting the force of lift for flapping wings,” says Leif Ristroph, an assistant professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences who directed the study. “We found that the drag or wind resistance also behaves very differently, and we put together a new law that could help explain how insects move through the air.” “To double its flight speed, an airplane Read More ›

Someone found out that lichens involve more than one fungus with the algae?: “The findings overthrow the two-organism paradigm,” says Sarah Watkinson from the University of Oxford. “Textbook definitions of lichens may have to be revised.” “It makes lichens all the more remarkable,” adds Nick Talbot from the University of Exeter. “We now see that they require two different kinds of fungi and an algal species. If the right combination meet together on a rock or twig, then a lichen will form, and this will result in the large and complex plant-like organisms that we see on trees and rocks very commonly. The mechanism by which this symbiotic association occurs is completely unknown and remains a real mystery.” More. If that’s Read More ›

Well, according to some at the BBC. From Philip Ball: Only a handful of physicists and philosophers have embraced retrocausality. Most consider backwards causality “too high a price to swallow”, says Wharton. But he feels that we only resist this idea because we are not used to seeing it in daily life. “The view that the past does not depend on the future is largely anthropocentric,” says Wharton. “We should take apparent backwards causation more seriously than we usually do. Our intuition has been wrong before, and this time symmetry on quantum scales is a reason to think we could be wrong again.” If time’s arrow is not quite as one-way as it seems, that raises one last question: why Read More ›

From Adrian Cho at Science: For nearly 20 years, physicists have known that the expansion of the universe has begun to speed up. This bizarre acceleration could arise because some form of mysterious dark energy is stretching space. Or, it could signal that physicists’ understanding of gravity isn’t quite right. But a new study puts the screws on a broad class of alternative theories of gravity, making it that much harder to explain away dark energy. The study is also path setting because it exploits an effect called weak lensing in which the gravity from closer galaxies distorts the images of more distant ones. “That’s the future,” says Bob Nichol, an observational cosmologist at the University of Portsmouth in the Read More ›

During the past two weeks, over at Evolution News and Views, Professor Michael Egnor has been arguing that it is the capacity for abstract thought which distinguishes humans from other animals, and that human language arises from this capacity. While I share Dr. Egnor’s belief in human uniqueness, I have to take issue with his claim that abstraction is what separates man from the beasts. Why the distinction between humans and other animals is real, but hard to express I have written over a dozen articles in the past, arguing that there is a real, qualitative difference between the minds of humans and other animals. As I’ve argued here, there appear to be several traits which are unique to human Read More ›

But you knew that, didn’t you? From Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, : I’ve jumped to the final (summary chapter, offered by Neil Spurway), because it is one of the more dramatic examples of just how far theistic evolution can go. Here we finally see someone willing to essentially throw in the towel. For starters, he offers “for me a naturalistic account of any aspect of being human is, quite simply, the only sort of account which can be correct.” He emphasizes that many of the things we believe make humans an exception to the animal kingdom (what has been called a “revolution” rather than an “evolution”) are simply points along Read More ›

Linguist Noel Rude on Tom Wolfe: Just read Tom Wolfe’s The Origins of Speech: In the beginning was Chomsky. It was so interesting and so well written I couldn’t put it down. Michael Denton, you might remember, enlisted Noam Chomsky in his recent critique of Darwin, even as now Tom Wolfe sees Daniel L. Everett as demolishing Chomsky. American linguistics–which in the 20 th century pretty much meant world linguistics– was dominated on the one side by structuralism and on the other by functionalism (the terms generally have mutated into cognitive; linguistics). Denton shows biology to have been similarly split in the 19th century. And, as Denton also reminds us, the biological functionalists supported Darwin whereas the structuralists doubted this Read More ›

From Johns Hopkins U: Johns Hopkins University researchers are the first to glimpse the human brain making a purely voluntary decision to act. Unlike most brain studies where scientists watch as people respond to cues or commands, Johns Hopkins researchers found a way to observe people’s brain activity as they made choices entirely on their own. The findings, which pinpoint the parts of the brain involved in decision-making and action, are now online, and due to appear in a special October issue of the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics “How do we peek into people’s brains and find out how we make choices entirely on our own?” asked Susan Courtney, a professor of psychological and brain sciences. “What parts of Read More ›

From Alex Berezow and Tom Hartsfield at LA Times: The Journal of the American Medical Assn. recently published a very unusual article: a scientific study authored by a sitting president of the United States. That’s never happened before. In a sense, it’s cool that President Obama cares enough about science to want to publish a paper in one of the world’s leading medical journals. But JAMA has set a bad precedent. The article, on healthcare reform in the United States, is problematic not only in its content but in the threat it poses to the integrity of scientific publishing. Let’s set aside the debate on whether the specific numbers in the article are factual. (Of course, there is certainly room Read More ›