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.
Tag: Rob Sheldon
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.
Rob Sheldon on Darwinism and the problem of why intelligent women marry less intelligent men
If regression toward the mean is a nearly universal tendency, how could evolution proceed via sexual selection? Outliers would tend to get reabsorbed far more often than not.
Rob Sheldon on the latest effort to pretend that nothing is wrong in cosmology
Sheldon: This dashes yet another attempt to find something that the standard model could not explain. Surprisingly, this is what depresses particle theorists, who have yet to find anything new in the last 40 years, despite thousands of publications.
Rob Sheldon on Scientific American’s foray into politics, backing Joe Biden
I was a devoted SciAm fan growing up. I collected other people’s old copies and had a collection going back to the 60’s. Then SciAm was bought out by some big publishing firm. And my favorite column, the Amateur Scientist by Forrest M. Mims III , was cancelled because Mims was a Christian.
Rob Sheldon on origin of life as a “theoretically fertile dead end”
Sheldon: What hinders the field presently is an unstated reliance on materialism and its attendant mechanism, when information is manifestly non-material. What we need to make progress in OoL are matter-free tools for manipulating information: understanding its flow, its gradients, and its concentration.
Does the answer to the origin of life lie in quantum mechanics?
Sheldon: As a way out of this [origin of life] dilemma, many physicists reach into the religion bag and pull out spooky QM-at-a-distance. But it isn’t a solution, it is an admission of failure. For if they had reached a trifle deeper into the bag they would have pulled out Genesis 1. Instead, they have loosed this uncontrollable “dark matter”, “dark energy”, “dark QM” chaos god on the ordered universe of laws and purpose.
Rob Sheldon on the latest claim that quantum mechanics imperils objectivity
Sheldon: Actually the debate over “the meaning of QM” has been going on since 1935 when Einstein published his EPR paper. It is just that the wiggle-room is getting reduced as our straight-jacket is being cinched tighter.
Is information really the fifth state of matter? Rob Sheldon responds
Sheldon: Throughout history we have examples of these bad physics generalizations. For example, heat was once considered a fluid embedded in the oak log, absorbed from the sun, called phlogiston. As it turned out, heat is not a material substance.