Climate Change: There are no simple solutions

Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 5 years ago

Graham Farmelo’s Interview of Edward Witten. Transcript

[I’ve meant for some while to try an automatic transcription software, and Graham Farmelo’s interview of Edward Witten ( mentioned by Peter... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 5 years ago

How to live without free will

Lego sculpture. By Nathan Sawaya. [ Image Source ] It’s not easy, getting a PhD in physics. Not only must you learn a lot, but some of... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 5 years ago

No, we probably don’t live in a computer simulation (2017)

According to Nick Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute, it is likely that we live in a computer simulation . And one of our bigge... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 5 years ago

Just because it’s falsifiable doesn’t mean it’s good science

Events on the world lines of two theoretical physicists, from the horizon to timelike infinity.
A scientifically minded blog with varying amounts of entertainment, distractions, and every day trivialities. | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 5 years ago

Particle physics may have reached the end of the line

Image: CERN CERN’s press release of plans for a larger particle collider , which I wrote about last week , made international headlines.... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 5 years ago

The Real Problems with Artificial Intelligence

R2D2 costume for toddlers. [image: amazon.com ] In recent years many prominent people have expressed worries about artificial intelli... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 5 years ago

The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics. One experiment after the other is returning null results : No new particles, no new... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 5 years ago

Electrons don’t think

Brainless particles leaving tracks in a bubble chamber. [ image source ] I recently discovered panpsychism. That’s the idea that al... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 5 years ago

How the LHC may spell the end of particle physics

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) recently completed its second experimental run. It now undergoes a scheduled upgrade to somewhat higher en... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 5 years ago

Human civilization is failing

[Photo: Herrmann Stamm ] The clock says 3:30 am. Is that early or late? Wrapped in a blanket I go into the living room. I open the doo... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 5 years ago

Don’t ask what science can do for you

Among the more peculiar side-effects of publishing a book are the many people who suddenly recall we once met. There are weird fellows ... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 5 years ago

No, negative masses have not revolutionized cosmology

Figure from arXiv:1712.07962 A lot of people have asked me to comment on a paper by Jamie Farnes, titled A Unifying Theory of Dark Ene... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 5 years ago

CERN produces marketing video for new collider and it’s full of lies

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) just completed its second run . Besides a few anomalies, there’s nothing new in the data. After the discover... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 5 years ago

Do women in physics get fewer citations than men?

Yesterday, I gave a seminar about the results of a little side-project that I did with two collaborators, Tobias Mistele and Tom Price. We ... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 5 years ago

Dotnet – Throttling with BlockingCollection

Fluid art by Vera de Gernier. Stephen Hawking sadly passed away earlier this year , but his scientific legacy is well alive. The black h... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 5 years ago

The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics. One experiment after the other is returning null results : No new particles, no new... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 6 years ago

Gender-Bias in Academia: The Case Strumia

Events on the world lines of two theoretical physicists, from the horizon to timelike infinity.
A scientifically minded blog with varying amounts of entertainment, distractions, and every day trivialities. | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 6 years ago

I’m now older than my father has ever been

Old photo. My father died a few weeks shy of his 42nd birthday. Went to bed one night, didn’t wake up the next morning. The death certif... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 6 years ago

Hawking temperature of black holes measured in fluid analogue

Fluid art by Vera de Gernier. Stephen Hawking sadly passed away earlier this year , but his scientific legacy is well alive. The black h... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 6 years ago

Science has a problem, and we must talk about it

Bad stock photos of my job. A physicist is excited to have found a complicated way of writing the number 2. When Senator Rand Paul last ... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 6 years ago

Roger Penrose still looks for evidence of Universal rebirth

Roger Penrose really should have won a Nobel Prize for something. Though I’m not sure for what. Maybe Penrose-tilings. Or Penrose diagrams... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 6 years ago

Astrophysicists try to falsify multiverse, find they can’t

Ben Carson, trying to make sense of the multiverse. The idea that we live in a multiverse – an infinite collection of universes from whic... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 6 years ago

10 physics facts you should have learned in school but probably didn’t

[Image: Dreamstime.com ] 1. Entropy doesn’t measure disorder, it measures likelihood. Really the idea that entropy measures disorder i... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 6 years ago

Is it possible that there is a universe in every particle?

“Is it possible that our ‘elementary’ particles are actually large scale aggregations of a different set of something much smaller? Then, ... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 6 years ago

10 physics facts you should have learned in school but probably didn’t

[Image: Dreamstime.com ] 1. Entropy doesn’t measure disorder, it measures likelihood. Really the idea that entropy measures disorder i... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 6 years ago

Evidence for modified gravity is now evidence against it

Hamster. Not to scale. Img src: Petopedia . It’s day 12,805 in the war between modified gravity and dark matter. That’s counting the day... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 6 years ago

Sabine Hossenfelder – Science Magazine had my book reviewed, and it’s glorious

Science Magazine had my book “Lost in Math” reviewed by Dr. Djuna Lize Croon, a postdoctoral associate at the Department of Physics at Da... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 6 years ago

New results confirm old anomaly in neutrino data

The collaboration of a neutrino experiment called MiniBooNe just published their new results: Observation of a Significant Excess of Electr... | Continue reading


@backreaction.blogspot.com | 6 years ago