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Rob Sheldon

Hope springs eternal: Are new particles hiding “in plain sight?”

The Large Hadron Collider just keeps confirming the Standard Model, almost as if there was some basis for believing it to be correct. Rob Sheldon thinks the current mood is desperation: If you don't know where you are going, you will certainly arrive. Information is finite, ignorance infinite. Read More ›

Rob Sheldon: The real reason there is a crisis in cosmology

Nearly everything that has failed about the Big Bang model has been added because of bad metaphysics, a refusal to accept the consequences of a beginning. The remaining pieces of the Big Bang model that are failing and which can't be attributed to bad metaphysics, were added from sheer laziness. Read More ›

Rob Sheldon: Here’s why physicists are surprised by the universe’s increased expansion rate

The two methods differ in that one is "direct" and the other "indirect". Clearly one or both of them is making a mistake. Since it is hard to find (and people have looked) a reason why the direct method is failing, the feeling is that the indirect method must have a mistake in its model. Read More ›

Is space really “the final illusion”? Rob Sheldon comments

As far as I can tell, Smolin sees this as a Darwinian solution to The Multiverse Problem. I think I'd call it "The Multiphysics Solution". I suppose this falls under the dictum, "Fight fire with fire." My own estimation is "garbage in, garbage out." Read More ›

RNA is no longer “worthless junk”; today’s revelations “unthinkable 20 years ago”

Rob Sheldon responds, “I think this is more than enough justification for the last 20 years of ID. Now can we get past the meme that ID isn't science? That's so 2005.” He is referring to the fact that the ID folk never thought it was junk. One reason the ID folk were supposed to be wrong was that junk DNA proved Darwinism. Read More ›

Physicist Rob Sheldon on Paul Davies’ “life writes its own software” claim

Sheldon: If Davies believes that a hierarchy of information can pack more information in, and possibly explain the incredible information content of biology, then there must be something "outside" or "above" the biology that is responsible for the compression algorithm. The only thing Davies hasn't done is name this attribute. Should we suggest a name? How about … intelligent design? Read More ›

Rob Sheldon responds to cosmologist Sean Carroll’s 19 True Facts of Cosmology

Sean Carroll, an avowed atheist in the "scientism" camp of Bill Nye and Jerry Coyne, has made a list of apologia for the Big Bang (hereafter BB). You might wonder why there needs to be any apology at all if, as he himself says, "We have overwhelming evidence that it is true." Read More ›

Physicist: Is Darwinian natural selection a “force of nature” like gravity?

What, the “single best idea anyone ever had” (philosopher Daniel Dennett on Darwin ) is now comparable to gravity? Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon would take issue with that. Yes, a psychologist seems to think Darwinian natural selection is indeed a force of nature like gravity: Natural selection, one of the fundamental processes of evolution, has something in common with gravity: A public relations problem. At one level of analysis, natural selection, like gravity, looks like a chump. When you’re looking up close at the tiny bits of stuff that go into making humans—the sequences of DNA that constitute the human genome—and how they came to be arranged in the manner that they are, natural selection doesn’t seem to have done Read More ›

Rob Sheldon: Did humans see the color blue before modern times?

Perhaps we should say, we cannot discriminate "blue" without a word for it? For sure. This is the property of language. As linguists will say, a word excludes more than it includes. And if we don't have a word, we lack the ability to discriminate (or, as Aristotle shows us, we make up a word on the spot, we "categorize".) Read More ›