Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Topic

Rob Sheldon

Rob Sheldon responds to Sabine Hossenfelder’s loss of faith in science

Sabine says 40 years of lack of progress, with 40 years of wrong predictions is not normal, and we should not normalize it. (The field is losing graduate students, which means the end is nigh.) Read More ›

At Evolution News: How Do We Know the Age of the Universe?

Physicist Rob Sheldon writes: A correspondent asked me recently how we know the age of the universe. The answer is calculated from the inverse of the Hubble constant. That is, if the galaxies are moving away from us at 72 km/s /Mpc, that has units of 1/time, the inverse is the age of the universe (more or less) because it locates the time since everything was at a point. For the universe to be younger, the Hubble constant has to be bigger. In fact, when Hubble first proposed his constant, it gave an age of the universe of about 4 billion years, which is the age of the oldest rocks in the Earth. However every decade saw a decrease in the Hubble Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Does information have mass? An experimental physicist weighs in

Rob Sheldon notes that the more real-world information we have, the less the bits weigh until, at very large amounts of information, they weigh almost nothing. Read More ›

Rob Sheldon: ID types are unfair to panspermia (the hypothesis that life came from space)

Sheldon: The answer to critics of panspermia, is that it is not intended as an origin of life (OOL) theory; rather, it answers the question "Where did life on Earth come from?" So indeed, it is erroneous to accuse panspermia advocates of “kicking the can down the road.” Read More ›

Rob Sheldon: Maybe black holes don’t really exist. Consider the possibilities.

Sheldon: "What I sense is that false premises and bad assumptions have been coloring the entire field of Black Holes (and Big Bangs and quasars ) for decades now. Perhaps we should stop patching the creaking model and consider a new one. " News: "Some of us can’t help wondering if the sheer philosophical pizzazz of the black hole keeps it going in its present state. A glamorous theory is bound to have a long run." Read More ›

Rob Sheldon on the problems with the peptide origin of life hypothesis

Sheldon: It is unlikely life can start with one or a few amino acids, because the full suite is needed to build nano-machines. Although your car has lots of bolts, one cannot build a car out of nothing but bolts. Read More ›

Rob Sheldon on life from the lab: “Information first” is essential

Information first means it can never be random, just as OOL in the lab is not random. But that doesn't mean that info-first cannot produce OOL. I've written a paper on the info-first OOL problem. Read More ›

Rob Sheldon on lowering the standard for detecting gravitational waves

Sheldon: "So to summarize, the absence of triple coincidences is being withheld from the paper, when in fact, it delegitimizes the entire data analysis pipeline. Now we have 4 Gravity wave detectors, and soon one in space. At what point does the lack of a triple coincidence become fatal? What observation can they make that would disprove the existence of gravity waves?" Note: In media work, we say: It takes three to make a trend. Read More ›

Rob Sheldon on the current trend to non-theist intelligent design (ID) theory

When some people wrote privately to protest that this ET>Big Bang stuff is all just one space bunny too far down the cosmic path, I (O’Leary for News) pointed out in response that Neil deGrasse Tyson (here), Martin Rees (here), and Elon Musk (here) have also suggested that very thing. Well, now theoretical physicist Rob Sheldon writes to offer some thoughts on the new-found popularity. Read More ›