http://bryanappleyard.com/physics-supers...llegories/

EXCERPT: The greatest story of our time may also be the greatest mistake. This is the story of our universe from the Big Bang to now with its bizarre, Dickensian cast of characters – black holes, tiny vibrating strings, the warped space-time continuum, trillions of companion universes and particles that wink in and out of existence.

It is the story told by a long list of officially accredited geniuses from Isaac Newton to Stephen Hawking. [...] But it is a story that many now believe is pointless, wrong and riddled with wishful thinking and superstition. [...] The equations on the blackboard may be the problem. Mathematics, the language of science, may have misled the scientists.

“The idea,” says physicist Lee Smolin, “that the truth about nature can be wrestled from pure thought through mathematics is overdone… The idea that mathematics is prophetic and that mathematical structure and beauty is a clue to how nature ultimately works is just wrong.”

And in an explosive essay published last week in the science journal nature astrophysicists George Ellis and Joe Silk say that the wild claims of theoretical physicists are threatening the authority of science itself.

“This battle for the heart and soul of physics,” they write, “is opening up at a time when scientific results — in topics from climate change to the theory of evolution — are being questioned by some politicians and religious fundamentalists. Potential damage to public confidence in science and to the nature of fundamental physics needs to be contained by deeper dialogue between scientists and philosophers….The imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is testable. Only then can we defend science from attack.”

Unger and Smolin have also just gone into print with a monumental book – The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time – which systematically takes apart contemporary physics and exposes much of it as, in Unger’s words, “an inferno of allegorical fabrication.” The book says it is time to return to real science which is tested against nature rather than constructed out of mathematics. Physics should no longer be seen as the ultimate science, underwriting all others. The true queen of the sciencer should be history – the biography of the cosmos.

So when did it all go so horribly wrong? The critics would say in 1984 when a new idea – superstrings – suddenly seemed to offer physicists an escape from a dead end left behind by Einstein.....

http://www.futurity.org/extraterrestrial...on-773862/

RELEASE: A new book by David Weintraub, an astronomy professor at Vanderbilt University, takes a closer look at what the world’s major religions have to say about extraterrestrial life.

“When I did a library search, I found only half a dozen books and they were all written about the question of extraterrestrial life and Christianity, and mostly about Roman Catholicism, so I decided to take a broader look,” Weintraub says.

The book, Religions and Extraterrestrial Life, describes what religious leaders and theologians have to say about extraterrestrial life in more than two dozen major religions, including Judaism, Roman Catholicism, the Eastern Orthodox churches, the Church of England and the Anglican Communion, several mainline Protestant sects, the Southern Baptist Convention and other evangelical and fundamentalist Christian denominations, the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Seventh Day Adventism and Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), Islam and several major Asian religions including Hinduism, Buddhism, and the Bahá’í Faith.

“Very few among us have spent much time thinking hard about what actual knowledge about extraterrestrial life, whether viruses or single-celled creatures or bipeds piloting intergalactic spaceships, might mean for our personal beliefs [and] our relationships with the divine,” Weintraub writes.
One million exoplanets

The remarkable progress astronomers have made at detecting exoplanets gives the issue of extraterrestrial life a new sense of immediacy.

In 2000, astronomers had detected 50 planets orbiting other stars. Today, the number has grown to more than 1,000. If the rate of discovery keeps up its current pace, astronomers will have identified more than a million exoplanets by the year 2045.

“If even one exoplanet shows signs of biological activity–and those signs should not be hard to detect, if living things are present–then we will know Earth is not the only place in the universe where life exists,” Weintraub points out.

“Although it is impossible to prove a negative, if we have not found any signs of life after a million exoplanets have been studied, then we will know that life in the universe is, at best, exceedingly rare.”
Christianity and beyond

Public opinion polling indicates that about one fifth to one third of the American public believes that extraterrestrials exist, Weintraub reports. However, this varies considerably with religious affiliation.

55 percent of Atheists
44 percent of Muslims
37 percent of Jews
36 percent of Hindus
32 percent of Christians

Of the Christians, more than one third of the Eastern Orthodox faithful (41 percent), Roman Catholics (37 percent), Methodists (37 percent), and Lutherans (35 percent) professed belief in extraterrestrial life. Only the Baptists (29 percent) fell below the one-third threshold.

Asian religions would have the least difficulty in accepting the discovery of extraterrestrial life, Weintraub concludes. Some Hindu thinkers have speculated that humans may be reincarnated as aliens, and vice versa, while Buddhist cosmology includes thousands of inhabited worlds.

Weintraub quotes passages in the Qur’an that appear to support the idea that spiritual beings exist on other planets, but notes that these beings may not practice Islam as it is practiced on Earth.

“Islam, like other faiths, has fundamentalist and conservative traditions. All Muslims, however, likely would agree that the prophetically revealed religion of Islam is a set of practices designed only for humans on earth,” Weintraub writes.

Weintraub found very little in Judaic scriptures or rabbinical writings that bear on the question. The few Talmudic and Kabbalistic commentaries on the subject do assert that space is infinite and contains a potentially infinite number of worlds and that nothing can deny the existence of extraterrestrial life.

At the same time, Jews don’t believe the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would have much effect on them. He quotes a Jewish anthropologist and scholar who has addressed this issue and concluded that the relationship between Jews and God would not be affected in the slightest by “the existence of other life forms, newly discovered scientific realities or pan-human behavioral changes.”
ET and salvation

Among Christian religions, the Roman Catholics have done the most thinking about the possibility of life on other worlds, the astronomer discovered. In fact, they have had an on-again, off-again theological debate that has gone on for a thousand years.

The crux of the matter is original sin. If intelligent aliens are not descended from Adam and Eve, do they suffer from original sin? Do they need to be saved?

If they do, then did Christ visit them and was he crucified and resurrected on other planets?

“From a Roman Catholic perspective, if sentient extraterrestrials exist some but perhaps not all such species may suffer original sin and will require redemption,” according to Weintraub.

The inherent diversity of Protestant denominations, where individuals are encouraged to interpret scripture independently, has led to many conflicting approaches to the question of extraterrestrial intelligence. Weintraub determined that the views of Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich appear to represent a viable consensus.

Tillich argued that the need for salvation is universal and the “saving power” of God must be everywhere. At the same time, he maintained that God’s plan for human life need not be the same as his plan for aliens.

Evangelical and fundamental Christians are most likely to have difficulty accepting the discovery of extraterrestrial life, the astronomer’s research indicates. ” . . . most evangelical and fundamentalist Christian leaders argue quite forcefully that the Bible makes clear that extraterrestrial life does not exist.

From this perspective, the only living, God-worshipping beings in the entire universe are humans, created by God, who live on Earth.” Southern Baptist evangelist Billy Graham was a prominent exception who stated that he firmly believes “there are intelligent beings like us far away in space who worship God.”

Weintraub also identifies two religions–Mormonism and Seventh-day Adventism–whose theology embraces extraterrestrials.

In Mormonism, God helps exalt lesser souls so they can achieve immortality and live as gods on other worlds.

And, Ellen White, who co-founded Seventh-Day Adventism, wrote that God had given her a view of other worlds where the people are “noble, majestic, and lovely” because they live in strict obedience to God’s commandments.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/...unbeatable

EXCERPT: It may not win every hand it is dealt, but over time, no one can beat Cepheus, a computer program that scientists claim plays a near-perfect game of poker. Unveiled in Canada on Thursday, the researchers believe that Cepheus is so good that a seasoned poker star could spend their whole life playing against it and still not come out on top. To learn the game, Cepheus spent two months playing the equivalent of more than a billion billion hands of Texas hold’em, which is more poker games than have been played in the entirety of human history.

The feat required the number-crunching power of four thousand computer processors, each handling six billion hands every second. With each game Cepheus played, the program built up a database of cards dealt, betting decisions and outcomes. At the end of the marathon training session, the database contained 11 terabytes of information on calls, raises and folds for every hand a player could have.

Cepheus learns from an algorithm that essentially minimises its regrets: the program reviews every decision made and then learns which moves paid off and which cost it the hand. “For every single possible situation you could get into, it has a description for how you should play,” said Neil Burch, a computer scientist who helped develop Cepheus at the University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group.....

http://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2015/01/...-the-jews/

EXCERPT: Two centuries after the great composer’s birth, his anti-Semitism remains a bitterly contested issue. Perhaps that’s because neither his defenders nor his detractors have come to grips with its, or his, true nature.

[...] [Nathan] Shields leads us, carefully and methodically, into the heart of the matter—the metaphysics of anti-Semitism as heard in [Richard] Wagner’s music. But, at least as far as that music’s aftershocks are concerned, he seems to me overly generous; the historical connections between Wagner and German anti-Semitism are profound.

[...] the Judaic world view opposed by Wagner, and many others with all-engulfing visions, requires more examination and explication than Shields could have given. It is also far from monolithic, so a more thorough exploration would require its own qualifications. (I think, for example, that attitudes toward utopianism and messianism, which have varied over Jewish history, are involved.) But “Wagner and the Jews” reminds us of a too often forgotten fact: namely, that anti-Semitism has to be looked at as something more profound than prejudice or the mere dislike of Jews or Judaism. It is a metaphysical condition with a long and complex history. It is not affected by particulars; rather, it actually affects and shapes the way the world is perceived. And it can express itself in the most unexpected forms—even, as Nathan Shields shows, in the form of seemingly “pure” and abstract sound...

http://scitechdaily.com/astrophysicists-...ar-system/

EXCERPT: Numerical calculations made by researchers at the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Cambridge reveal that there could be at least two unknown planets hidden well beyond Pluto. If confirmed, this hypothesis would revolutionize solar system models.

Astronomers have spent decades debating whether some dark trans-Plutonian planet remains to be discovered within the solar system. According to the calculations of scientists at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM, Spain) and the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) not only one, but at least two planets must exist to explain the orbital behavior of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNO).

The most accepted theory establishes that the orbits of these objects, which travel beyond Neptune, should be distributed randomly, and by an observational bias, their paths must fulfill a series of characteristics....

http://www.futurity.org/asteroids-planet...os-838872/

RELEASE: A recent paper in Nature suggests collisions of planetary embryos—the seeds to the planets in our solar system that existed 4 billion years ago—could be the origin of the material that formed asteroids.

When part of an asteroid falls onto the Earth it is called a meteorite. For more than a century scientists have studied the tiny bead-like grains of solidified melted rock called “chondrules” found in meteorites, but the origin of these grains remained a mystery, says Jay Melosh, professor of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences at Purdue University.

“Understanding the origin of chondrules is like looking through the keyhole of a door; while we can’t see all that is happening behind the door, it gives us a clear view of one part of the room and a glimpse into the very beginnings of our solar system,” says Melosh, who also is a professor of physics and aerospace engineering.

“We’ve found that an impact model fits extremely well with what we know about this unique material and the early solar system, and this suggests that, contrary to the current opinion among meteorite experts, asteroids are not leftover planet-building material and clumps of chondrules are not prerequisite to a planet.”

Some in the field may not warmly receive the study, says David Minton, an assistant professor of earth, atmospheric, and planetary science at Purdue who also was involved in the research.

“Chondrule-bearing meteorites have long been thought to be similar to the building blocks of planets,” says Minton.

“This study suggests that instead chondrules might actually be byproducts of impacts between objects of an earlier generation, and meteorites may not be representative of the material that made planets.”

The impact model for chondrules also resolves striking similarities observed between chondrules and materials created by impacts on the Earth and the moon, Melosh says.

“Chondrules are identical in size, shape, and texture to spherules on Earth and spherules found in the lunar soil,” Melosh says. “The only difference among chondrules, impact spherules, and lunar soil particles is in their chemical composition, which fits because they are made of different starting materials from impacts on different bodies.”

Impact spherules are small droplets of solidified molten rock found embedded in rocks on Earth. It is widely accepted that impacts created the spherules, which formed from droplets of molten rock in the plume of debris ejected when large asteroids crashed into the Earth. The droplets condensed and solidified to form the spherules, which then fell back to the surface creating a distinct layer on the Earth, he says.

Melosh has studied spherules and developed methods to infer the size and velocity of the responsible asteroid from characteristics of the spherules and the spherule layer.

The method of chondrule creation proposed by the team is slightly different and focuses on a small portion of debris ejected at the earliest moments of impact created by a process called “jetting.”

Jetting occurs at the beginning of impact as the surfaces of the two objects meet. The rock caught in the pinch between the two colliding objects is compressed to high pressure and intensely heated, which is responsible for the initial bright flash seen in laboratory impacts. The heat created by jetting is enough to melt rock and create droplets in the ejected debris that could become chondrules, Melosh says.
Planetary embryos

Impact origin theories proposed in the past had been dismissed because they could not explain the melted material found in chondrules, he says.

In the early solar system, collision speeds were much lower than they are now. The planetary embryos were no larger than the Earth’s moon and their collisions were relatively gentle, occurring at a speed of a few kilometers per second. For the most part, impacts at this speed would blast rock into broken fragments, but not melt it, he says.

“Jetting allows a low-velocity impact to melt a small quantity of the target rock,” Melosh says. “The melted material, but not the broken rock, is then ejected at high speed, such that the molten droplets can escape their parent bodies and depart into space, to later loosely bunch together.

“Millions of years of additional impacts and other compression mechanisms then created the asteroids and meteorites we know today.”

The debris ejected at high speed escapes the gravitational pull of the planetary embryo, while the majority of the debris plume falls back to the surface. The dust and molten droplets quickly slow to relatively low velocities due to the nebular gas in the early solar system. The gas provides a “soft catch” for the chondrules that allows them to accumulate into smaller bodies that eventually become asteroids, he says.
Meteorite clues

Chondrules have long been a puzzling feature of meteorites and, if they weren’t observable in meteorites, scientists would likely never have predicted their existence, Minton says.

“Chondrules are incredibly abundant and so they must be telling us something important about what conditions were like in the early solar system when the planets were forming,” he says.

“We think collisions were common in the early solar system and that planets are built out of the collisions between smaller bodies, so an impact theory for the origin of chondrules fits well with what we know of how planets formed.”

The study was led by Brandon Johnson, a graduate student under Melosh when the research began, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Maria Zuber, professor of geophysics and vice president for research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also is a coauthor of the paper.

The NASA-funded research focused on chondrules found in most stony meteorites. Chondrite is the term for meteorites that contain chondrules, and encompasses 92 percent of all meteorites, according to statistics produced by Washington University in St. Louis based on data from the Meteoritical Bulletin Database.

The idea of impact jetting producing chondrules is not entirely new, and a study of the creation of chondrules from jetting of the impacts of centimeter-scale particles was published in 1975. However, this model failed to produce chondrules that would cool at the expected rate or have the correct volatile abundance, Johnson says.

The idea of chondrule formation by jetting during large-scale impacts wasn’t considered earlier because it was unknown if impacts could produce melt droplets that were millimeters in size and had cooling rates similar to the observed chondrules, he says.

In addition, it was thought that because jetting only involves a small percentage of the mass of the impacting body it would not be able to produce the abundance of chondrules seen in meteorites.

“Chondrules are some of the earliest solar system solids and clearly contain important information about conditions in the nascent solar system,” Johnson says. “It is no surprise that these enigmatic particles have intrigued countless scientists over more than a century. What had been thought of as the missing pieces of an impact theory fall into place in this model.”
Modeling impacts

The team’s model builds on an earlier study of impact jetting by Johnson, Melosh, and Timothy Bowling, a graduate student in earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences at Purdue.

Minton created a computer simulation based on accepted hypotheses of solar system development that follows the formation and growth of planets and estimates the location, timing, sizes, and velocities of chondrule-forming impacts. He used the simulation to model the early stage of planetary formation through the accumulation of smaller bodies called planetesimals.

The team also calculated the cooling rates of chondrules produced by the impacts and found that they matched the slow cooling that has been determined from analysis of the textures of chondrules in meteorites, Melosh says.

The next step in the research may be to explore how this chondrule formation mechanism fits into a new model for the early stages of planet formation called “pebble accretion,” in which the effect of gas drag from the protoplanetary nebula is important, Minton says.

http://theyoungsocrates.com/2014/12/19/d...same-coin/

EXCERPT: [...] Now, let’s go back to my friend and his seemingly discriminatory beliefs. Because if you take a closer look, it appears that discrimination and falsifiability are two sides of the same coin. Why is that? Well, let’s assume that we would pose the hypothesis that ‘All Moroccans are aggressive’ – like my friend seemed to do. This claim is clearly falsifiable: one non-aggressive Moroccan is sufficient to prove the claim wrong. Now, let’s say we’d go to a bar and meet a few Moroccans. And, as my friend expected, these people are indeed aggressive. Thus far, Popper couldn’t blame my friend for holding on to the claim ‘All Moroccans are aggressive’. After all, the claim hasn’t been falsified yet.

The point being: doesn’t my friend apply the same method as is used in the sciences? Making bold conjectures and, based on data, either refute them or not? We don’t seem to have much of a problem with claiming that all ‘Swans are white, until it has been proven wrong. So why would a different claim applying the same ‘scientific’ methods, when applied to members of our own species, suddenly be discriminating? Isn’t it utterly reasonable to hold on to your claims until they’ve proven to be wrong? Or in the case of my friend: to hold on to his ‘discriminatory belief’?

Note that I am not claiming that discrimination is reasonable in itself. What I am claiming is that we cannot accuse people of holding seemingly unreasonable beliefs if they (these people) haven’t been proven wrong in holding this belief....

http://plus.maths.org/content/steady-on-Einstein

EXCERPT: [...] Last year we went along to a conference that brought together cosmologists and philosophers to discuss some of the big questions in cosmology. Physicist Cormac O'Raifeartaigh, from the Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland, told us about his recent and unexpected discovery of an unpublished paper by Einstein in the digital archive. The paper contained a model of the Universe that was dramatically different from any of the others that Einstein was known to have studied. And although it wasn't the model that Einstein, or the rest of the scientific community, eventually settled on, the discovery is important as it sheds light on how Einstein's thinking about the Universe changed, as he was dealing with some of the big questions in cosmology at the time....