Robert Sheldon

The bartender says, “We don’t serve neutrinos here” A neutrino walks into a bar. The blogosphere is all abuzz about the CERN neutrino experiment that reported “faster than light” travel for the neutrinos. We all heard the news first from the blogs, and now the arXive pre-print server has the details. This immediate publication is already truly amazing, given the months before the paper copy appears in the library journal. The comments and consequences are flying so thick and fast, one hardly has time to absorb the impact. Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity some 107 years ago, and this has been the first, contradictory laboratory evidence for “superluminal” transport. But already, one day later, the first theorist has chimed Read More ›

I have returned from the annual non-NASA Astrobiology conference, which I attended this year and delivered two papers. After my NASA colleague’s long-delayed paper on the discovery of microfossils in carbonaceous chondrites (meteorites that are widely believed to be extinct comet fragments) was accidentally published in March when Fox News broke the paper embargo that led to 40 million web hits, I had fond hopes that this would be the conference that broke the ice about ET. In fact, my first paper was entitled “More Evidence for Liquid Water on Comets” which recorded the mounting evidence that indeed, comets are natural bio-transporters for moving biology all over the cosmos–sorta like Arthur C. Clarke‘s novel “Rendezvous with Rama“. Curiously, NASA has Read More ›

The idea that it may be possible to penetrate the “Romulan invisibility cloak” has received a boost. Studies of the low-temperature glow left from the Big Bang suggest that several of these “invisibility cloaks” may have left marks on our sky. This “Romulan presence” idea is popular in modern physics, but experimental tests have been hard to come by. The preliminary work, to be published in Unphysical Review D, will be firmed up using data from the Planck telescope. For now, the team has worked with seven years’ worth of data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which measures in minute detail the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the faint glow left from our Universe’s formation. ‘Mind-blowing’ The theory that Read More ›

The NSF has been taking polls of students for decades, asking whether they believed in Evolution and The Big Bang. They dropped that question this year, because it was getting too many “false negatives”, people who were well-educated but didn’t believe in one or the other. This drives some science educators nuts, who want naturalism and science to be equated to each other. The reluctance to buy into evolution is well-documented, but perhaps you are a bit fuzzy about the Big Bang reluctance. A news item this week reveals just how uncertain these cosmology theories are, but don’t tell that to the NSF. Here’s the scoop on the Big Bang. Back when Einstein was alive, he wanted his field equations Read More ›

One of the comments on the previous post caused me to do some further analysis, which I had said I wouldn’t post, but have reconsidered. The comment was: This seems like an odd tact on Dennis’ part and I don’t understand the point. If, Dennis’ position (I’m going to call it “Agnostigner” – someone who is agnostic about the Designer) is correct and the Designer is irrelevant, then what does ID bring to any table scientifically? If the Designer is irrelevant, what does the explanation of design tell us about the world/universe? Does it impact any other scientific explanation in anyway and if so, how? So let’s start by analyzing the “odd tact” of Dennis, which seemed odd to me Read More ›

I recently found a very nice blog post on the definition of “Intelligent Design” by non-theist Dennis Jones. If you have ever wondered what Intelligent Design is about, or whether ID is a scientific enterprise, or even if ID is making any headway in the scientific establishment, then read this blog. It’s better written than anything I’ve ever blogged about on the subject (yeah, faint praise.) Dennis, however, wants to go beyond ID, and talk about some of the other implications of ID. For example, does ID have something to say about cosmology, or thermodynamics or quantum mechanics? The thread that connects all these other scientific disciplines with ID is “information”. ID purports to discover information, the kind made by Read More ›

Cornelius Hunter just posted a wonderful blog about the “debate” between Newton and Laplace about the origin of the solar system. Newton remained a committed Deist theist to his dying day, believing that God created the planets in their orbits, but had to fix them occasionally to keep them in line. Laplace, on the other hand, “had no need for that hypothesis” and in the original “god-of-the-gaps” argument, reduced God’s job requirements by one. No, make that two, because Laplace (1796) also formulated a “Nebular Hypothesis” explanation of the creation of the solar system, so God didn’t actually have to create the planets either. Immanuel Kant really liked that nebular hypothesis, and wrote quite a long treatise on it early Read More ›

Jonathan Wells’ The Myth of Junk DNA, is a well-written book that manages to accomplish two separate tasks: to silence the Darwinists who had claimed that recent genomic discoveries supported their dystopic version of The Signature in the Cell; and to bring all of us up-to-date on the breath-taking mysteries being decoded from this most ancient script. He begins by picking up where Stephen Meyer left off, telling us that within each cell is this memory chip, this software program that directs everything we are and ever meant to be. When Watson and Crick decoded the DNA, there was great expectation that soon we would find the gene to every talent and attribute we had ever wished we had been Read More ›

We’ve been looking at Victor Stenger’s claim that fine-tuning is a fallacy. In part one, we looked at the two fundamental metaphysical theories of the universe–materialist and theist–recognizing how materialists have been losing ground by being forced to admit to a creation, making multiverse-theory a rear-guard action covering their retreat, which attempts to turn the unwanted creator into an impersonal force. In part two, we discussed the Widow’s Mite fallacy where Stenger uses physical units for a metaphysical property, which like Jesus’ disciples, mistakes a physical quantity for a metaphysical one. The most obvious difference between the two is that physical quantities have units, whereas metaphysical ones are unitless. But in addition, metaphysical quantities are percentages, integrals, they involve a Read More ›

(Part 1 here) The Widow’s Mite Fallacy In his debunking of fine-tuning, Stenger has fallen for the “Widow’s Mite Fallacy”. (I know, we all like to name things so we can use a stigma to beat a dogma.) It is explained in Mk 12:42, where Jesus is standing with his disciples near the entrance to the temple and the collection box. It’s one of those trumpet-shaped devices they have in the grocery store that makes the coins fall for a long time, so a good handful of shekels makes a marvellous racket. The donors are being ostentatious with their shekels, when in comes a poor widow–no husband, black outfit, worn sandals–and drops in two copper coins that barely make a Read More ›

Victor Stenger, a retired physics prof from the University of Hawaii, has given us two books that explain both atheism and “multiverses”, and behold, they are one. Few other proponents of multiverses are quite as forthcoming with their logic, but clearly something besides data must motivate the science of multiverses, because by definition multiverses are not observable. Stenger makes the connection explicit, whereas Hawking or Susskind is a little more coy with their metaphysics. Multiverse-theory is designed for one purpose, and one purpose only, and that is to defend atheism. It makes no predictions, it gives no insight, it provides no control, it produces no technology, it advances no mathematics, it is a science in name only, because it is Read More ›

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) got a big boost from obscure nerddom by the movie Contact starring Jodie Foster. Based on real life, the world’s biggest radio telescope in Puerto Rico would permit a few hours every month for listening for aliens, but it really wasn’t very much time, and after a few decades of not hearing anything, despite the absolutely brilliant innovation of having screensavers around the world processing the SETI data with SETI@Home, Arecibo was giving even less time. So the movie wasn’t just a hit with the box-office, it also was a hit for SETI funding, with multi-billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, chipping in a cool $13M to build forty-two 20-foot radio dishes to listen Read More ›

Strangely enough, “wimpy” was early 20th century British slang for a hamburger, which somewhere in the 1930’s became American slang for an ineffectual person, to the consternation of the OED. My kids, courtesy of Dollar Tree, have been exposed to pre-WWII Popeye cartoons, in which a character named “Wimpy” has a British accent and an addiction to hamburgers. He also accomplishes a lot while appearing quite ineffectual, getting Popeye to do all the hard work for him. If we view Popeye as a stereotype for the US, many of these pre-WWII cartoons can be reinterpreted as complex political commentary. Commentary that now extends to cosmology and astrophysics. When cosmologists could not explain why galaxies formed out of the the hot Read More ›

(Part 3 in three-part series. In Part 1 we discussed how NASA had chosen a schizophrenic approach to life on Mars. In Part 2 we discussed how Hoover’s ET paper destroyed their control of the narrative, as well as discomfitted many Darwinists. In this final part of the series, we look at how NASA has attempted to regain control of the ET narrative while making it comfortable for Darwinists again. But wait, these NASA types are all members of the Mars Society. Why am I confusing them with Darwinists? [You must read CS Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, to understand the connection between planetary “manifest destiny” and a cosmological “social darwinism.” Lewis’ is the best book I know to Read More ›