Sheldon: This is another example of the crises we encounter when there is a marriage between fake news and speculative theorizing. It isn’t just epidemiology and global warming, but large swathes of the “hard” sciences are misled by junk data.
Tag: Rob Sheldon
Rob Sheldon on the mirror universe supposedly hiding in spacetime
Sheldon: Refreshing honesty at the beginning and the end. A very rare sight indeed.
What is it about the Big Bang these days that is making people nervous?
Sheldon: More and more independent measurements of the Hubble constant (H0), reveal that it is very close to 73.9 km/s/Mpc, which is 6 or so sigma (deviations) from the Planck determination of 67.4 km/s/Mpc using the cosmic ray background radiation (CMBR) and the standard Big Bang (BB) Model.
Missing matter of the universe FOUND? Rob Sheldon says, hold on a minute…
Sheldon:Well, like most astronomy press releases in the past decade, it is 3/4 hype, and 1/4 data, and it has nothing to do with dark matter. Since many people never read beyond the headline, the title is written to be as provocative as possible without outright lying.
At Astronomy Mag: Is the Big Bang in Crisis? Rob Sheldon responds
Sheldon: It is becoming clear to everyone that: (a) cosmology behaves as a degenerative research programme; and (b) the problem lies in the BB model first put together in the 50’s and 60’s.
Rob Sheldon on the prof who challenges evo psych: Covering her tracks carefully…
Sheldon: Did you notice how Smith trashes Evolutionary Psychology because it uses “circular” reasoning? Then she realizes it sounds like an ID criticism, so she rushes to defend the remaining Evolutionary sciences with this paragraph…
Rob Sheldon dishes on dark matter and dark energy
Rob Sheldon: My takeaway is that dark energy is “pathological science,” using the words of Irving Langmuir to describe N-rays or polywater. It is science at the edge of messy data, finding what one is looking for by using poor statistical methods. It is precisely what astronomers are trained NOT to do, and therefore this whole Nobel Prize thing is a corruption of what had been a relatively unstained field.
Sabine Hossenfelder says predictions are overrated; Rob Sheldon responds
Sheldon: … ironically, most of Sabine’s blogs are about the poor predictive power in particle theory, but in this blog she feels she has to reverse herself to defend the good name of global warming. My advice to her is to stick with what she has first-hand knowledge of, because 2nd-hand knowledge always suffers from authoritarian bias.
Researchers: Organic chemicals essential for life found in Martian meteorite; Rob Sheldon responds
Sheldon: The point is that we don’t expect to find nitrate and ammonia in the soil of Mars, not unless some nitrogen fixing bacteria put it there recently, because over time it will all come out of the soil as N2 gas. Claiming that the process goes the other way, from N2 in atmosphere to nitrates in soils, goes backwards, from high entropy to low entropy.
Rob Sheldon on current efforts to explain the universe’s expansion
Sheldon: Yet another example of “curve fitting”, adding free parameters whose only purpose is to get a closer fit to the data. This is why particle physics and cosmology has made no progress over the past few decades as Sabine Hossenfelder warns. No one even faintly understands what a theory is supposed to wear to Stockholm, much less accomplish for posterity.
Rob Sheldon on Darwinian Jerry Coyne’s difficulty in swallowing the new Woke science
“Woke” science is bad science and heavily biassed toward PC answers while abusing the data. What perhaps Coyne doesn’t appreciate, is that the same methods used by woke science are used by Darwinist science, and indeed by any science captured by an ideology.
Has a way been found to test string theory? Rob Sheldon responds
Sheldon: “This article explains precisely why thousands of theoretical physicists have not made any progress in 40 years. One hopelessly ad hoc and unsupported theory (inflation) conflicts with another hopelessly unphysical theory (string theory) and then others purport to resolve the difficulty by resorting to highly questionable phenomena (gravity waves).
Are we living in a vast bubble? Rob Sheldon explains
So now a French cosmologist is supporting the Oxford cosmologist Subir Sarkar in refuting the US-dominated 2011 Nobel prize consensus.
Rob Sheldon on dark energy: Does it exist?
Sheldon, our physics color commentator, writes to say, “I’ve mentioned before that Subir Sarkar at Oxford has questioned the existence of “dark energy” and by implication, the award of the 2011 Nobel prize. Sabine Hossenfelder’s blog links to a 7 minute summary of the Nobel prize and Sarkar’s work: But even more compelling is her Read More…
Rob Sheldon on whether information can be the missing dark matter
Rob Sheldon: The location of the mass has to be “outside” the galaxy in order to account for the dark matter attraction. How does information occupy empty space? Landauer would have said it couldn’t.