Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 477

Researchers: Maybe fundamental constants are not constant

Maybe they are “kind of shifty after all,” some suggest:

Is it possible for light to travel faster or slower in the distant corners of our universe? The speed of light, like dozens of other so-called fundamental constants, is essential to how physicists understand the cosmos. These numbers even help define our units of measure, such as the meter, the second and, as of this Monday, the kilogram. However, there is no scientific consensus as for why the constants must be constant, or fundamental.

A new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters proposes experiments to investigate whether these unwavering pillars of physics are, in fact, fluctuating over space-time. If so, scientists will need to reevaluate the current models of our universe — or at least give these numbers a different name.Yuen Yiu, “Could Fundamental Constants Be Neither Fundamental nor Constant?” at Inside Science

Well, if they find anything at all, they could call fine-tuning “not-so-fine-tuning” and make a big point of it. If they don’t find anything, they can say they are still looking.

See also: Exact values of constants said to drive physicists crazy

and

What becomes of science when the evidence does not matter?

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Something new to learn about water?

/
Challenging findings on supercooled water and non-crystalline ice/JJill Hemman/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Even water has weird moments, in this case, a “major departure from widely accepted theory”:

At ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source, the team froze a three-millimeter sphere, or about half a drop, of deuterated water, which has an additional neutron in the hydrogen nucleus needed for neutron scattering analysis. Then, they programmed the Spallation Neutrons and Pressure, or SNAP, diffractometer to minus 173 degrees C. The instrument increased the pressure incrementally every couple of hours up to 411,000 pounds per square inch, or about 28,000 atmospheres while collecting neutron scattering data between each hike in pressure.

“Once we achieved amorphous ice, we planned to raise the temperature and pressure and observe the local molecular ordering as the amorphous ice ‘melts’ into a supercooled liquid and then recrystallizes,” Tulk said. However, after analyzing the data, they were surprised to learn they had not created amorphous ice, but rather a sequence of crystalline transformations through four phases of ice with ever-increasing density: from ice Ih to ice IX to ice XV to ice XIII. There was no evidence of amorphous ice at all.

“I’ve made many of these samples always by compressing ice at low temperature,” said co-author Dennis Klug from the National Research Council of Canada, the lab that originally discovered the pressure-induced amorphization of ice in 1984. “I’ve never previously seen this pressure-temperature path result in a series of crystalline forms like this.”

“If the data from our experiment was true, it would mean that amorphous ice is not related to liquid water but is rather an interrupted transformation between two crystalline phases, a major departure from widely accepted theory,” Klug added.Sara S. Shoemaker, “Unexpected observation of ice at low temperature, high pressure questions ice, water theory” at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Paper. (paywall)

Who will be surprised if the odd new phases turn out to relate in some way to the fine-tuning of the universe? Don’t know. Just wondering.

See also: Water can exist in two different liquid phases

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

In this version of the multiverse, you are unique

Just thought you would like to know:

Although we cannot prove whether inflation went on for an infinite duration or not, there is a theorem that demonstrates that inflationary spacetimes cannot be extrapolated back for arbitrary amounts of time; they have no beginning if so, and are called past-timelike-incomplete. Inflation may give us an enormously huge number of Universes that reside within a greater multiverse, but there simply aren’t enough of them to create an alternate, parallel you. The number of possible outcomes simply increases too fast for even an inflationary Universe to contain them all.

In all the multiverse, there is likely only one you. You must make this Universe count, as there is no alternate version of you. Take the dream job. Stand up for yourself. Navigate through the difficulties with no regrets, and go all-out every day of your life. There is no other Universe where this version of you exists, and no future awaiting you other than the one you live into reality. Make it count. Ethan Siegel, “Could Parallel Universes Be Physically Real?” at Forbes

But wait! There might be an infinity of multiverses in which you are not unique. This is the only one in which your head has not exploded.

See also: 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.

What does it mean to say, in physics, that something like the Higgs boson “exists”? Sabine Hossenfelder: Realism is a philosophy. It’s a belief system, and science does not tell you whether it is correct.

and

Ethan Siegel tackles fine tuning at Forbes

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Science media: Insects can reason logically! Researchers: We never said that…

paper wasps/© Floki, Adobe Stock

But current pop science media’s warp hides a bigger story. In a paper on wasps learning to avoid shocks better than bees, the researchers referenced an ability to grasp levels of risk. That was immediately inflated into “wasps can reason!”

The researchers clearly dissociate themselves from a claim that wasps reason. “We’re not saying that wasps used logical deduction to solve this problem…” But the media ignored the hint, as they might be expected to do. …

Many people who write for science media seem to believe that reason arises naturally from brute forces and is present in, say, insects. Explicit disavowals by researchers will not prevent them from claiming a trophy.

The media’s monolithic obsession with denying human uniqueness comes at a cost. The remarkable fact that two life forms have the same number of neurons but one displays significantly more complex behavior than the other is drowned out by the volume of misrepresentation. Denyse O’Leary, “Wasps can reason? Science media say yes, researchers no” at Mind Matters News

Could legacy science media actually afford to get it right? Could they afford a serious discussion?

See also: Did a fish just show self-awareness? What if the whole question is founded on a mistake about the nature of the mirror test?

Study: Cats recognize their names They recognize them as signals but not abstractions

and

Do big brains matter to human intelligence? We don’t know. Brain research readily dissolves into confusion at that point

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

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:

Are new particles materializing right under physicists’ noses and going unnoticed? The world’s great atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), could be making long-lived particles that slip through its detectors, some researchers say. Next week, they will gather at the LHC’s home, CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss how to capture them. They argue the LHC’s next run should emphasize such searches, and some are calling for new detectors that could sniff out the fugitive particles.

It’s a push born of anxiety. In 2012, experimenters at the $5 billion LHC discovered the Higgs boson, the last particle predicted by the standard model of particles and forces, and the key to explaining how fundamental particles get their masses. But the LHC has yet to blast out anything beyond the standard model. “We haven’t found any new physics with the assumptions we started with, so maybe we need to change the assumptions,” says Juliette Alimena, a physicist at Ohio State University in Columbus who works with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), one of the two main particle detectors fed by the LHC.Adrian Cho, “Atom smasher could be making new particles that are hiding in plain sight” at Science

Various proposals are underway to look for “odd events” and “fringe” long-lived particles. We asked Rob Sheldon, our physics color commentator, for a comment:

The problem is that atom smashers have not found any new particles since the Higgs, and that means the “standard model” hasn’t been updated since about 1982. In desperation, experimentalists are suggesting building more detectors placed far away from the usual ones, in the hope that perhaps some of the particles are “long-lived” and slippery, so they would only appear some distance away. Of course there’s some theory or another about this, but what we are really seeing is desperation.

As Sabine Hossenfelder would say, there’s no shortage of wrong theories, so there must be something broken about our theorizing. Einstein said that repeating a failed approach is a clear sign of insanity. My way of saying it, is that there are an infinite number of wrong theories, so despite the brave face put on it, disproving another dozen won’t get us any closer to the truth. If you don’t know where you are going, you will certainly arrive. Information is finite, ignorance infinite.

He adds, “Yet another way to say Darwin was doomed.” (He must have been reading recent biology news.)

Rob Sheldon is the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent c

See also: Rob Sheldon: That “sterile exoplanet ocean” paper is bunk! The amazing thing about life, is that it is always so very adaptable. Who knew that bugs can live at 140C, or with metabolism so slow it takes centuries to replicate?

Exoplanets: Those water worlds would have sterile oceans too… Researchers: An all-ocean planet would be sterile due to lack of nutrients leached from land.

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.

Doubt cast on new “exomoon”: Rob Sheldon explains Sheldon: There are red flags all over this data, but the investigators are standing by their measurement. This is what irreproducible papers look like in physics, and why the same crisis that afflicts other disciplines also afflicts physics.

and

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.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

What does it mean to say, in physics, that something like the Higgs boson “exists”?

Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, offers to explain,

A lot of scientists, for example, subscribe knowingly or unknowingly to a philosophy called “realism” which means that they believe a successful theory is not merely a tool to obtain predictions, but that its elements have an additional property that you can call “true” or “real”. I am loosely speaking here, because there several variants of realism. But they have in common that the elements of the theory are more than just tools.

And this is all well and fine, but realism is a philosophy. It’s a belief system, and science does not tell you whether it is correct.

So here is the thing. If you want to claim that the Higgs-boson does not exist, you have to demonstrate that the theory which contains the mathematical structure called “Higgs-boson” does not fit the data. Whether or not Higgs-bosons ever arrive in a detector is totally irrelevant. Sabine Hossenfelder, “Does the Higgs-boson exist?” at BackRe(Action)

See also: Sabine Hossenfelder: Black holes vs. quantum mechanics = something has to give Her view: Most physicists believe that the solution is that the Hawking radiation somehow must contain information after all.

Sabine Hossenfelder: “We know that quantum mechanics is wrong.” Do we know that quantum mechanics is wrong and, if so, how can it be useful?

and

Sabine Hossenfelder: Has The Large Hadron Collider “Broken Physics”?

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Sit down. Cells have signaling circuit boards. Only much more advanced than ours

images of cell-wide web/U Edinburgh

We are told that that fact turns our understanding of how instructions spread in a cell on its head:

Cells in the body are wired like computer chips to direct signals that instruct how they function, research suggests.

Unlike a fixed circuit board, however, cells can rapidly rewire their communication networks to change their behaviour.

The discovery of this cell-wide web turns our understanding of how instructions spread around a cell on its head.

It was thought that the various organs and structures inside a cell float around in an open sea called the cytoplasm.

Signals that tell the cell what to do were thought to be transmitted in waves and the frequency of the waves was the crucial part of the message.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh found information is carried across a web of guide wires that transmit signals across tiny, nanoscale distances.

It is the movement of charged molecules across these tiny distances that transmit information, just as in a computer microprocessor, the researchers say. … Professor Mark Evans, of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences, said: “We found that cell function is coordinated by a network of nanotubes, similar to the carbon nanotubes you find in a computer microprocessor.

“The most striking thing is that this circuit is highly flexible, as this cell-wide web can rapidly reconfigure to deliver different outputs in a manner determined by the information received by and relayed from the nucleus. This is something no man-made microprocessors or circuit boards are yet capable of achieving.” University of Edinburgh, “Scientists discover signalling circuit boards inside body’s cells” at Phys.org

Paper. (open access)

PaV, who often posts here, kindly writes to say,

Look at the final paragraphs of the pdf where they liken this to a quantum computer system. We’re dealing here with a programmable computer chip–their language. How in the world can something like this be brought about through random variation??? Also note that they say that it’s likely each cell type has its own signalling program.”

It appears to be ‘binary code’ at the level of atoms and molecules, which mimics what computers do. It’s like finding “Deep Blue” (IBM’s computer) inside a cell. This is quantum computing–a feat humankind has failed to master, going on inside a busy cell. Random variations? Oh, my!

Let’s make a prediction: computer scientists might begin studying cells to see how they keep out “noise” in a quantum computing system! Amazing.

Cellular quantum computing…? When Darwinism was alive and the Darwin-in-the-schools lobby was suing the school boards, the cell was a simple jelly that could arise in a warm little pond. Remember that?

See also: Researcher: Mathematics Sheds Light On “Unfathomably Complex” Cellular Thinking

In addition to DNA, our cells have an instruction language written in sugar Of course it all just tumbled into existence and “natural selection” somehow organized everything. As if.

and

In Nature: Cells have “secret conversations” We say this a lot: That’s a lot of information to have simply come into being by natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism). It’s getting not only ridiculous but obviously ridiculous.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Remember junk RNA? Cell division requires a balanced level of it

The researchers offer a model/U Hong Kong

It turns out that centromeric RNA (cenRNA) helps control cell division:

If there is too much or too little centromeric RNA (cenRNA), the centromere will be defective and chromosomes will be lost. The findings were recently published in one of the top multidisciplinary journals, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). This research article is recommended by F1000Prime, whose members selected approximately the top 2% of all published articles in the biology and medical sciences each year, and the recommended Faculty commented that this PNAS article is of special significance and an emerging frontier in the centromere biology field.

The DNA of our chromosomes codes for about 20,000 proteins. When the cell needs to produce a particular protein, such as insulin, the segment of DNA molecule coding for insulin, known as a gene, is first used as a template to copy into a RNA molecule. That RNA then serves as a recipe for directing the cells to make the specific protein. However, only 2% of our DNA is protein-coding. Yet, another 70% of our DNA is still copied into RNAs, which are not recipes to make proteins. Those are called non-coding RNA. These non-coding RNAs are once considered as “junk”. In recent years, however, researches have revealed vital roles of non-coding RNA, such as in gene regulation and maintaining chromosome structure…

The University of Hong Kong, “Cell division requires a balanced level of non-coding RNA for chromosome stability” at Phys.org

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham, who writes, “The abstract at the .nih website contains a reference (18) to another paper, “Evolution: Tracing the origins of centrioles, cilia, and flagella” which is an interesting read. The Conclusions and Perspectives of this paper states “Because we have not yet found intermediate structures, we can only speculate how CBBs and cilia could have emerged from simpler, preexisting components.”

And got stored as random accumulations of junk.

See also: The centriole as just another instance of random accumulation of cells Philip Cunningham draws attention to a comment that reads “If I were in a repair shop and came across something that looked like this I’d say it’s the stator rotor of a brushless DC motor. This looks very similar and it is constructed from laminations, just like a DC rotor is constructed. Hmmm.”

Junk RNA helps embryos sort themselves out

Junk RNA” plays key role in helping cells respond to stress

and

“Junk” RNA helps regulate metabolism

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Astronomer: Seeing dead space aliens would teach us a lesson

Artist’s impression of interstellar asteroid/comet, Oumuamua /ESO, M. Kornmesser

Remember the astronomer who thought that space detritus Oumuamua might be an extraterrestrial lightsail? He’s back:

Harvard professor Avi Loeb thinks humans should be on the hunt for signs of alien life and alien death.

During a recent presentation at the The Humans to Mars Summit, Loeb argued that the discovery of a dead alien civilization could serve as a sort of cautionary tale for humanity, letting us know what not to do if we want to survive.

“The idea is we may learn something in the process,” he said. “We may learn to better behave with each other, not to initiate a nuclear war, or to monitor our planet and make sure that it’s habitable for as long as we can make it habitable.”

Loeb calls this process of looking for evidence of dead alien civilizations “space archaeology.” Kristin Hauser, “Harvard Prof: Finding Dead Alien Civilizations Could Save Humans” at Futurism

Okay, prof. Now that you mention it, dead aliens sound scarier than live ones, though just why is unclear.

See also: What? Oumuamua Was Just A Comet? After All The ET Hype?

Astronomer: We’re too dumb to think space object Oumuamua was an extraterrestrial lightsail.

Astronomers: Solar System Object In Transit, Oumuamua, Might Be A “Light Sail Of Extra-Terrestrial Origin”

Why Some Scientists Saw Asteroid Oumuamua As ET

Why can top scientists get away with extraordinary claims?

and

“Tales of an Invented God. Why They must be Out There.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

When did the folk at Skeptical Inquirer become creationists?

A reader read an item we had today posted about something from Skeptical Inquirer that whizzed by a while back but we only got to it today: Pointing people to it, we said that genes are more like a river than a string of beads…

Anyway, the interested reader went back and read the article, “Seven Big Misconceptions About Heredity” and found something that surprised him a lot.

It, shockingly, includes this quote: “And if you could get in a time machine and travel back a few thousand years, you could find someone who was a common ancestor of all living people on Earth.”

Uh, did he just say that? CREATIONIST!