Siegel: “… if the theory of inflation is a good one, and the data says it is, a multiverse is all but inevitable.” Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon writes to offer a response.
Tag: Rob Sheldon
Rob Sheldon weighs in on the fundamental building blocks of nature – particles, fields, or …
Sheldon: It is curious that the author of this Aeon article has frozen Wheeler at his second stage, neglecting to mention his final conclusion.
Was the universe “made for us”? Sabine Hossenfelder weighs in. Rob Sheldon comments
The question, addressed by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, is more complicated than it appears at first.
Human body mass has some very interesting properties. Rob Sheldon riffs
So we are finally back to why neurons in the brain and galaxies in the universe are fractals–they are optimum solutions to connecting volumes with 1-D wires.
Rob Sheldon on the recent dark matter claims
Those [theories] that haven’t been disproven yet are the ones that are the least lumpy. Let’s just say that the data are consistent with there being no dark matter lumps at all.
Rob Sheldon responds to News’s recent Salvo article, “War on Math”
Sheldon: Talking to a retired St Louis public high school math teacher, the battle was first enjoined 30 years ago over Geometry–eliminating it from the curriculum. Why? Because it was the only course that taught logic, he said.
Dark matter and dark energy as 21st century Ptolemaic epicycles? – Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts
Why can’t they find dark matter, despite much search? Sheldon: The old joke is that a man is looking under a lamppost one night. The policeman asks what he is doing. “Looking for my keys” he replies. “Did you lose them here?” “No, but the light is better over here.” (And the funding is better for some research than for others.)
At the BBC: Should “killing nature” be a crime? Rob Sheldon responds
Sheldon:The contribution of humans to ecosystems is stability. And we get to choose what that stable state will look like. Nature is too chaotic to tell us. Even if we were to ask.
Did the black hole paradox really come to an end? Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts
Sheldon: Black Holes are a theoretical and empirical disaster. Given two possible assumptions to Schwarzschild’s solution of Einstein’s gravity equation, nearly everyone has taken the discontinuous, unphysical, “event-horizon” assumption leading to “Black Holes”. One of the many predictions of BH, is that they cannot have magnetic fields, and they destroy anything that falls into them, converting all that matter into “Hawking radiation”. What about all that data showing high density objects at the center of our galaxy and neighboring galaxies?
Did a recent meteor hit bring us closer to the origin of life on Earth?
Friends had some doubts, reading this story…
Pushback at StatNews against politicizing science. Rob Sheldon weighs in
Sheldon: The editors of Science and Nature compromised their scientific objectivity years ago. They promoted papers that big pharma wanted, they suppressed papers that made big pharma look bad. They were complicit in the coverup of not just tobacco and sugar lobbies, but vaccines and Darwinism and global warming… So of course this produced cognitive dissonance, since it violated some of the very basic tenets of objective science.
And now… New Scientist tells us herd immunity is “bad science”… Rob Sheldon responds
Rob Sheldon: We have the data to improve our models and the much-attacked Greater Barrington declaration suggests that we should, since the DATA from Sweden show that lockdowns are neither necessary nor even helpful. But this author suggests that the models are perfect, and therefore the data must be rejected in the name of science, of course. He is displaying, even in his own scientific subfield, the same TRUST in science, that we disparaged in Nature. The disease of deification begun by Darwin is far more pervasive than anyone wants to admit. You might say that herd immunity hasn’t yet been reached.
Physicist Rob Sheldon checks out astrophysicist Ethan Siegel for ridiculing Nobelist Roger Penrose
Sheldon: The politicization of science evidently started before Ethan’s graduate schooling, as Hoyle and his post-doc Chandra Wickramasinghe tell in their biographical writings.
Rob Sheldon responds to Nature’s decision to go political: Are they really scientists or just political hacks?
Sheldon: My best explanation is that the editors of Nature, SciAm, NEJM are themselves not research scientists, but political hacks—hired under the supposition that good relations with government funders required not science but PR.
Rob Sheldon on Nature’s Screed (on the upcoming US election)
As with many things done today, I always wonder are they extreme cynics or just very stupid? But whatever they are, science will never again regain the status they covet so intensely.