Rob Sheldon

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon takes exception to my (O’Leary for News)’s post, “The Darwinians’ cowardice before SJW mobs explained in detail: They thought the mob was coming for someone else, ” At least in part. He writes, I thought the Aero article was the most honest I have met in a long while. It is one thing to boast about courage in the faculty lounge, it is quite another in the provost’s office. I have been cursed with both experiences. It is easy to talk about cowardice, but what are you cringing from? If I stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon, and am taunted to move closer to the precipice, is it cowardice to refuse? Some Read More ›

Our physics color commentator, Rob Sheldon, was looking at two physicists’ recent salvos and offers some thoughts: Nicole Yunger Halpern (Theoretical physicist: My field is not going to the dogs vs. The point of view represented by Sabine Hossenfelder (Theoretical physicist: Present phase of physics “not normal” – stagnation, not crisis) and Sarah Scoles (Is cosmology in crisis over how to measure the universe?) Halpern’s response is typical. She’s a young, female, postdoc with jobs at MIT and Harvard. Of course, the future looks bright! Now if it had been a white, male, 40-ish, on his third-postdoc at a 2nd tier school, the story would have been very different. But Halpern is exactly who Sabine Hossenfelder is talking to. What Read More ›

What about Alfred Russel Wallace? Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon on the Hubble’s Law name change, to recognize “Big Bang” priest, Fr. Georges Lemaitre: — The misappropriation of laws is a well-known institution in science. Avogadro had nothing to do with his constant. The French just didn’t want to name it after the Austrian Loschmidt who discovered it. Likewise the Bose-Einstein condensate had little to do with Einstein; Bose couldn’t get his paper published in an English-speaking journal, so he asked Einstein to send it into Zeitschrift fur Physik. Hannes Alfven had no knowledge of “Alfven layers” “Alfven boundaries” and so on. But he was the only plasma physicist to get a Nobel Prize, so he had name recognition. Read More ›

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon has this to say: — I’ve been a skeptic of the gravity wave observations from the very beginning. The noise is ONE MILLION times stronger than the signal, which in every other field of science, pretty much excludes the opportunity of seeing the signal. Making this worse, no one knows what the signal looked like, having never seen a gravity wave before. At best, we make models of what we think it might look like, but how can one be sure? Finally and perhaps the killer, LIGO’s method of signal extraction is borrowed from RADAR analysis, where “matched filters” are used. Only radar engineers actually know what the signal looks like since they sent it, Read More ›

And Christianity too, says our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon. He explains: Proposition: Miracles are violations of natural law. 1. What is natural law; Who invented it? Who enforces it? Who interprets it? a) One argument is that natural law is merely inductive. The sun has risen daily for the past 5000 years of written history, therefore it is a law. But if it did not rise tomorrow, that would only be a 1/1,800,000 event. Are we saying that probabilities < 1:1,800,000 are always certain? Then certain rare forms of cancer should certainly never happen. b) Another argument is that “Nature” operates by laws that we discover. But what is “Nature”? How do we meet “Nature”? If it is inductive, Read More ›

Recently, we looked at the claim that diatoms (one-celled algae with glassy shells) demonstrate the ability to make choices. That seems hard to account for in the absence of a brain (though the researchers were convinced they saw it happen). Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon writes to clarify a point about the diatoms: The article was a bit misleading on the use of “sex,” suggesting that diatoms had to chose between food and sex. So here’s some info about diatom replication. The most common or normal way a diatom multiplies is by asexual binary division. Only the outside of a diatom is made of glass, or more precisely two pieces of glass like a pill box, or two petri Read More ›

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon writes to offer some thoughts on the recent study of bees, which failed to confirm selfish gene thinking as an explanation for communal life: This is really a most interesting study. If you recall, E. O. Wilson got fame and glory for studying ants. The problem he addressed, is why social insects will sacrifice their life for the sake of the hive-for someone else’s genes. Altruism, whether in humans or ants, seemed to contradict Darwin’s dictum “survival of the fittest.” Wilson argued that it was actually the percentage of genes that mattered, and for humans defended a child was more likely than defending a niece, and a niece greater than a 2nd cousin. Dawkins Read More ›

In the story we ran yesterday, “‘Compelling new evidence’ claimed for comets generating phosphates for earliest life,” we noted that our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon thinks that the idea that building blocks of life came from space is plausible and should be demonstrable. He offers his somewhat controversial thesis here: — I’ve argued elsewhere that the presence of cyanobacterial and eukaryotic microfossils on carbonaceous chondrites (comet fragments that land on the Earth), is evidence for ubiquitous cometary transport of life throughout the solar system and galaxy. This makes Darwin’s theory moot, because extraterrestrial transport destroys any “tree of life” that relies only on terrestrial modifications. It may also explain why NASA is adamantly opposed to publishing/acknowledging these discoveries. Every Read More ›

Recently, some readers asked whether the recent Dickinsonia fossil “fats” find from 558 mya featured cholesterol. Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon explains further: Cholesterol was not found by these researchers, nor did they make announcements of soft tissue in a fossil. What they did find were the breakdown products of cholesterol called “sterols”. Plants make phytols that break down similarly. There might be hundreds to thousands of breakdown products of these biochemicals. When these materials are run through a mass spectrometer, the device sorts them by chemical weight. Really good mass specs (like the ones I used to design for NASA) can even separate isotopes of carbon and hydrogen. Then a simple molecule like CH4 might have four or five Read More ›

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers a comment on whether simple probabilities can outweigh “deep learning” (as noted earlier here. ) When neural nets [computer programs that mimic the human brain] were all the rage in physics, some 25 years ago, I spoke with the author of a paper who was using neural nets to predict space weather. After a year of playing with predictive abilities of various 1-level, 2-level and higher node nets, he confided that they reached a certain level of ability and then failed to improve. What made them better, he told me, was having more physics inserted into the model. That is, the nets couldn’t recreate Newton’s Laws, and if presented with just raw data, Read More ›

Recently, we noted the dirtiest fight in physics, over the nature of the universe. Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts: A great story on the level of confusion in the world of astronomy and particle physics. My own view is: they’re both wrong. Dark Matter WIMP proponents postulate an invisible particle that has all the properties a theorist needs to solve the problem. If it needs x-ray vision, goes through walls, and travels faster than a speeding bullet–why no problem, it’s supersymmetric you see. The other side says, no particles are needed. We just need a flexible law of gravity. Let’s replace the straight edge with a French curve drafting tool, and we can explain every galaxy Read More ›

Further to Carlo Rovelli’s views on time travel (only a technological problem, not a scientific one) and the order of time in general,  views, as set out in The Order of Time, our color commentator Rob Sheldon offers, — If I can speculate about what goes on in physicist’s heads, this issue about time is an attempt to force symmetry on the universe. Sorta like the 2-yr old who wants to regularize irregular verbs. “Mommy not home; she goed to the store.” Einstein’s Special Relativity (SR) argued that time was a fourth dimension and should not be treated any differently than height, width, and length. To get the units right, one only needed to multiply time by the speed of light–c*t. Only Read More ›