Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Topic

Ethan Siegel

At Forbes: The real reason we haven’t found dark matter

According to astrophysicist Ethan Siegel: Personally, I don’t expect these direct detection attempts to be successful; we’re stabbing in the dark hoping we hit something, and there are little-to-no good reasons for dark matter to be in these ranges. But it’s what we could see, so we go for it. If we find it, Nobel Prizes and new physics discoveries for everyone, and if we don’t, we know a little more about where the new physics isn’t. But just as you shouldn’t fall for the hyper-sensationalized claims that dark matter has been directly detected, you shouldn’t fall for the ones that say “there’s no dark matter” because a direct detection experiment failed. We are after the most fundamental stuff in Read More ›

The fight over the universe has turned ugly, with accusations of “cheating”

We are told: “Wherever you look in the cosmos, things don’t seem to add up.” And now physicists like Sabine Hossenfelder are accused of cheating: Ethan Siegel, astrophysicist-blogger behind Forbes’ Starts With a Bang! blog, responded with a post titled “There’s A Debate Raging Over Whether Dark Matter Is Real, But One Side Is Cheating.” He wrote that, in order to win favor from the public, Hossenfelder and McGaugh were setting up a false narrative by treating the fight as an even one, even though the support for a dark matter particle far outweighs the opposing side. Naturally, McGaugh and Hossenfelder were not happy to be called cheaters. McGaugh argued that he’s published far more scientific papers than Siegel has. Read More ›

How to talk yourself into believing in a multiverse

It’s becoming obvious that post-modern science will have its multiverse irrespective of evidence from nature and will prefer it and its component beliefs to evidence from nature. That is why some of us think that the multiverse is science’s assisted suicide. Read More ›

Startling admission about the science (i.e., non-science) basis for the multiverse

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: So why do so many theoretical physicists write papers about the multiverse? About parallel Universes and their connection to our own through this multiverse? Why do they claim that the multiverse is connected to the string landscape, the cosmological constant, and even to the fact that our Universe is finely-tuned for life? Because even though it’s obviously a bad idea, they don’t have any better ones. … As I’ve explained before, the Multiverse is not a scientific theory on its own. Rather, it’s a theoretical consequence of the laws of physics as they’re best understood today. It’s perhaps even an inevitable consequence of those laws: if you have an inflationary Universe governed by quantum physics, Read More ›

At Forbes: Maybe fine-tuning doesn’t matter as much as some claim. Many planets might support life…

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: Based on everything we know, it seems like the conditions that make life possible are a lot more diverse and flexible than most people would expect. … Take Earth’s large moon, for example. The gravitational forces from it keep our planet rotating on the same axis over time. Our present axial tilt is 23.5 degrees, but this will vary over very long timescales between 22.1° and 24.5°. A world like Mars, on the other hand, has almost the same axial tilt as Earth: around 25°. But over tens of millions of years, this will vary by ten times as much as it does on Earth: from a minimum of 13° to a maximum of 40°. Read More ›