The New York Times reports this week on the rising rates of papers appearing in peer-refereed journals that are being withdrawn. You withdraw a paper for two reasons generally. You either made a mistake in your scientific reasoning or someone caught you lying. It appears that it’s the latter reason and not the former that is on the rise. Why is this happening? According to one expert: “Several factors are at play here, scientists say. […]
Quantum Entanglement should be an incredibly useful tool for communications. Though it won’t ever become an ansible, or even the basis for subspace radio, the ability to communicate through entangled pairs of quantum particles would, in theory, create a situation where no third party could intercept the message. Which means that we’d finally have unbreakable secure communications. In theory at least. There are a number of practical problems. One of the problems is that it’s […]
Well, this is interesting… Just when cosmologists were starting to arrive at a consensus about the reality of Dark Matter and a sense of how it drives cosmic evolution, observations of Abell 520 completely contradict what people expect. The Dark Matter seems to be having no gravitation effect on galactic trajectories at all.
The possibility that the Higgs won’t be found is worth reflecting on. Because the furor that would result shows the difference between the scientific method and religious practice. Science is always striving to find new and more successful ways to view the world. And when something is wrong, it means that whole existing edifice is supposed to be tossed aside and a new one created. Woe to any philosophy or theology that depends on the structures being discarded.
If Wikipedia wasn’t blacked out today, I’d suggest you first go and read up on the idea of the “Music of the Spheres”. It’s an idea that had it genesis in the writings of Pythagoras, who discovered the mathematical relationships between musical tones. The idea was further developed by Plato who suggested that since music and planetary motion both involved mathematical relationships between pairs and triads, that there must be a kind of planetary music […]
The Independent is reporting that a team of Italian scientists who have been investigating the Shroud of Turin for years have finally managed to duplicated the particular characteristics of the “negative” image seen on the linen. But… “… they only managed the effect by scorching equivalent linen material with high-intensity ultra violet lasers, undermining the arguments of other research, they say, which claims the Turin Shroud is a medieval hoax. Such technology, say researchers from […]
Having published results earlier this Fall that neutrinos were observed apparently traveling faster than the speed of light, the CERN has made some modifications to their setup based on others critiques and re-run their experiment. They observe the same effect. BBC News – Neutrino experiment repeat at Cern finds same result: The initial series of experiments, comprising 16,000 separate measurements spread out over three years, found that the neutrinos arrives 60 billionths of a second […]
I’ve developed quite a love of philosophy. It comes, surprisingly enough, not from my interest in Theology but from my background in Physics. To tell the truth, my interest in Theology grew out of my interest in Philosophy. I first really encountered the joys of Philosophy when my graduate school advisor challenged a group of us who were complaining about the imprecision in the Heisenberg Inequality to tackle the question of measurement in more rigorous […]
Any student who has ever taken an Astronomy course should remember how important standard candles are to Astronomy. We can only directly measure the distance to a star if it’s within a few 10’s of lightyears from us. Further out than that and geometric calculations (parallax) stop being measurable. So we use standard candles – which are objects where we know how intrinsically bright they are. Using simple geometry, if we know how bright something […]
The New York Times has a very well done summary of what’s going. (They even include mention of the comic that Paul linked to here yesterday. Perhaps they’re reading your stuff Paul…) The article describes the skepticism of the international physics community as it was seen during the press conference to formally announce the results yesterday: “And the assembled CERN physicists were only too happy to oblige, diving in, after Samuel C. C. Ting, an […]
