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Topic

Rob Sheldon

Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
August 21, 2020
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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Rob Sheldon on the latest claim that quantum mechanics imperils objectivity

Denyse O'Leary
August 21, 2020
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
August 17, 2020
Categorized
Information, Intelligent Design
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Is information really the fifth state of matter? Rob Sheldon responds

Denyse O'Leary
August 17, 2020
Information, Intelligent Design
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. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
August 10, 2020
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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Rob Sheldon on why some are upset that the Higgs boson “refuses to misbehave”

Denyse O'Leary
August 10, 2020
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
Rob Sheldon: What Blekman didn't say, but Sabine Hossenfelder does, is that there are not "tens of thousands" but rather an infinite supply of wrong theories. That should keep particle physicists employed until at least the 23rd century or until the oceans rise 30 feet, whichever comes first. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
August 5, 2020
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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Rob Sheldon on recent claims of dramatic new Higgs boson findings

Denyse O'Leary
August 5, 2020
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
Sheldon: This required analysis of thousands of decays and Terabytes of data crunching. So it is a triumph of data analysis to be able to see this rare decay against the more common route to stability, but neither unexpected nor revealing of physics "beyond the standard model". Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
July 31, 2020
Categorized
Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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Rob Sheldon on the recent reduction in the age of the universe

Denyse O'Leary
July 31, 2020
Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
Sheldon: I have long advocated a rewrite of the Big Bang model that converts the cosmic microwave numbers into a Hubble constant. But strangely, like Darwin's model in biology, we see few cosmologists willing to kill the sacred cow. They would rather change the laws of physics ("new physics") than change their model. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
July 8, 2020
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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At New Scientist: Reshaping reality via new gravity theory – Rob Sheldon comments

Denyse O'Leary
July 8, 2020
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
June 14, 2020
Categorized
Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design
Tagged
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What is it about the Big Bang these days that is making people nervous?

Denyse O'Leary
June 14, 2020
Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design
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. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
May 28, 2020
Categorized
Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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Missing matter of the universe FOUND? Rob Sheldon says, hold on a minute…

Denyse O'Leary
May 28, 2020
Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
May 14, 2020
Categorized
Evolutionary psychology
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Rob Sheldon on the prof who challenges evo psych: Covering her tracks carefully…

Denyse O'Leary
May 14, 2020
Evolutionary psychology
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… Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
May 14, 2020
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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Rob Sheldon dishes on dark matter and dark energy

Denyse O'Leary
May 14, 2020
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
May 8, 2020
Categorized
Climate change, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science
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Sabine Hossenfelder says predictions are overrated; Rob Sheldon responds

Denyse O'Leary
May 8, 2020
Climate change, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science
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. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
May 7, 2020
Categorized
Extraterrestrial life
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Researchers: Organic chemicals essential for life found in Martian meteorite; Rob Sheldon responds

Denyse O'Leary
May 7, 2020
Extraterrestrial life
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. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
April 30, 2020
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
Tagged
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Rob Sheldon on current efforts to explain the universe’s expansion

Denyse O'Leary
April 30, 2020
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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. Read More ›