Physical Sciences
pharyngula | November 2, 2011Keith Ward sounds just like Ken Ham. It's remarkable. You see, Ken Ham has this schtick in which he basically denies all of history: you weren't there (the only valid evidence is eyewitness evidence captured through your biological senses), and because history isn't repeatable, its study isn't a real science, isn't empirically verifiable, and is subject to whims and fads and therefore lacks any substantial objective core. Ken Ham says this kind of nonsense because he believes in a great elaborate line of historical bullshit, and wants to pretend that his illusions are on an equal footing with…
esiegel | October 28, 2011"Every true, eternal problem is an equally true, eternal fault; every answer an atonement, every realisation an improvement." -Otto Weininger
The best measurements of the distant Universe -- out beyond our galaxy -- have led us to the current picture of exactly what our Universe is doing: expanding and cooling, with its galaxies progressively getting farther and farther apart.
Image credit: Molly Read for the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
But what does that mean for our past?
If we're expanding and cooling, that means our past was less expanded and less cooled, or as we like to think of…
esiegel | October 24, 2011"Science is facts; just as houses are made of stone, so is science made of facts. But a pile of stones is not a house, and a collection of facts is not necessarily science." -Jules Henri Poincaré
The higher you fall from, the faster you'll be moving when you hit the ground.
Image credit: Marianne Holland.
Seems like the most obvious thing in the world. You know this intuitively, of course, based on all your experience in the world. Drop an egg from too great a height and it breaks.
While you wouldn't be afraid to jump off of a diving board like the one above, jumping from a greater height…
esiegel | October 21, 2011"By now you must know that your father can never be turned from the Dark Side. So will it be with you." -Emperor Palpatine, Return of the Jedi
You've heard about dark matter. It's the notion that the Universe is somehow very much different than the small corner of it that we're most familiar with.
Photo credit: International Astronomical Union, retrieved from bbc.co.uk.
When we look at our Solar System, we can add up all the rocky planets, the gas giants, the asteroids, moons, and comets, as well as the entire Kuiper belt, and find out just how much of our neighborhood is dark.
And we can…
gregladen | October 20, 2011Urban areas can be warmer than surrounding non-urban areas because there is a lot of combustion, pavement and other structure can collect solar heat and retain it for a while, and other factors. It is not uncommon to look at a weather map where conditions for precipitation are marginal, and everywhere but the urban zone, or only the urban zone and nothing else, is showing a weather phenomenon. Because people and airports (where weather is very important) are located in or very near urban areas, it stands to reason that a lot of the data used to estimate global temperatures would be affected…
pharyngula | October 11, 2011Shorter Deepak: "Richard Dawkins didn't endorse my quantum bullshit, therefore The Magic of Reality sucks!"
Deepak Chopra actually sounds quite upset — his review of the book reads more like the indignant squawk of a charlatan furious that the presence of a skeptic might cut into his take. It's largely an exercise in name-dropping and the profession of bleary, vacuous misinterpretations of science on his part, which he then turns around and uses to accuse Dawkins of error because he doesn't share his inoculation of the ideas with pseudoscience. Like this:
What is obnoxious about Dawkins'…
gregladen | October 5, 2011The finding for which this year's Chemistry Nobel was awarded earlier today was sufficiently unexpected and counter to the orthodoxy of the time that today's prize winner was tossed out of his own research group for reporting it. His 1982 discovery has to do with how atoms are organized in solid matter, and is based on observations made with electron microscopy. Daniel Shechtman's imagery...
...showed that the atoms in his crystal were packed in a pattern that could not be repeated. Such a pattern was considered just as impossible as creating a football using only six-cornered polygons,…
oracknows | October 4, 2011He's ba-ack.
Has it really only been two weeks? A mere two weeks since everybody's favorite advocate of The One Quackery to Rule Them All promised the woo-friendly readers of the "health" section of that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post that he would "provide further specific evidence of the unscientific attitude and actions from those individuals and organizations who are leading the campaign against homeopathy." Like pretty much every skeptic who's made any sort of name for himself, no matter how minor, in having fun taking down the pseudoscientific nonsense known as…
catdynamics | September 29, 2011Ok, peeps, the NASA Explorer AO outcomes are out, and you know what they are: so, who lost, and more importantly, who won?
PS: and the winners are...
NASA Selects Science Investigations For Concept Studies
Five Explorer Mission proposals were selected from 22 submitted in February. Each team will receive $1 million to conduct an 11-month mission concept study. Mission costs are capped at $200 million each, excluding the launch vehicle.
In addition, one Explorer Mission proposal was selected for technology development and will receive $600,000.
Five Mission of Opportunity proposals were…
oracknows | September 14, 2011Oh goody.
Goody, goody, goody, goody, goody.
As I sat down to lay down a bit of the old ultrainsolence on a hapless bit of psuedoscience, I was near despair. For whatever reason, there didn't appear to be anything new out there for me to sink my teeth into. True, when this has happened in the past, I've often delved deep into the Folder of Woo in search of tasty tidbits of quackery saved for just this eventuality, but I really hate to do that. After all, it might be good to apply science, critical thinking, and reason to a particularly nonsensical bit of pseudoscience (which is fun) or to a…
drorzel | September 12, 2011In typical fashion, no sooner do I declare a quasi-hiatus than somebody writes an article that I want to say something about. For weeks, coming up with blog posts was like pulling teeth, but now I'm not trying to do it, it's easy...
anyway, that's why there's the "quasi-" in "quasi-hiatus," and having been reasonably productive in the early bit of the weekend, I have a few moments to comment on this column by Ben Goldacre about bad statistics in neuroscience. It seems lots of researchers are not properly assessing the significance of their results when reporting differences between measured…
hrynyshyn | September 9, 2011A letter in Climatic Change looking at the life-cycle greenhouse warming potential of natural gas raised a lot of hackles a little while back. If, as the authors posit, replacing coal and oil combustion with gas-fired turbines could actually accelerate global warming rather than slow it down, then we have a serious problem, given the investments being made in gas.
Much the skepticism about that study could be traced to the background of the lead author, Robert Howarth, who happens to have a history of opposing gas fracking. Of course, Howarth's scientific credentials, or his activism, have…
esiegel | September 5, 2011"But I'm also talking about American businessmen doing what they were born to do. Make things. We've stopped making and become a country of consumers. Well, I, for one, am done consuming. And I'm ready to make." -Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock
I don't normally write about what's going on in my personal life, but this is an important development, and it affects what I do here at Starts With A Bang, so here goes.
Most of you know how a career as a physicist is supposed to go, much like any academic/science career. You're supposed to get your degree, go to graduate school and get your Ph.D., work at a…
esiegel | September 2, 2011"When you make the finding yourself -- even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light -- you'll never forget it." -Carl Sagan
When we talk about dark matter and its alternatives, we are talking about no less a task than explaining the structure of every large object in the Universe. This means every one of the billions of galaxies, including the way they form, merge, and cluster together.
Image credit: Mark Subbarao, Dinoj Surendran, and Randy Landsberg for the SDSS team.
On the largest scales -- where each pixel in the map above represents an entire galaxy -- dark matter blows…
milhayser | August 31, 2011
On Brookhaven Bits & Bytes, Steve Kettell brings us up to speed on a new research project taking place beneath a mountain in southern China. The object of study is the neutrino, which can "pass through the Earth and through much of the universe without interacting with anything." Ethan Siegel explains on Starts With a Bang: "Neutrinos only interact gravitationally and through the weak force. They have no electromagnetic interactions." And because they have no charge, neutrinos are free to pass between the atoms that make up tangible matter. Steve writes that neutrinos from the sun…
tfk | August 31, 2011On twitter, journalist Dave Roberts wrote:
Evolution is not a free-floating "theory." It underlies all of modern biology & ecology. Similarly for climate change: it's a foundation.
I wrote back:
I agree (hence @NCSE's work on both). But AGW is less foundation than integrative and crucial knowledge, built on other foundations
As NCSE shifts to combat attacks on climate science in classrooms, I've been thinking about the similarities and dissimilarities of these sciences, as well as the denialisms surrounding both.
Evolution is foundational to modern biology because all life evolved. That…
pharyngula | August 26, 2011Ann Coulter is a horrible, ignorant person who once wrote a whole book accusing liberals of being Godless, as if that were an insult, and advancing arguments against evolution that made the standard noisy creationist look like a veritable scholar. I looked at her arguments, and I made a public challenge back in 2006 for any defenders to pick one paragraph from the book and we'd discuss it in detail — there have been no takers, not one person willing to stand up and support in detail any claim she had made. She also made some amazingly inane arguments: did you know that one strike against…
drorzel | August 25, 2011
A Higgs Setback: Did Stephen Hawking Just Win the Most Outrageous Bet in Physics History? | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network
Overblown anti-Higgs hype, just for balance.
News: Breaking Bread - Inside Higher Ed
"For the project, students were asked about their views on the state of race relations on campus. Not surprisingly (as this is the case at many places), the views of white students about the state of race relations were generally much more positive than those of minority students. Then the sociologists looked at what factors were linked to whether students had a more…
oracknows | August 24, 2011One of the things that distinguishes evidence-based medicine (EBM) and science-based medicine (SBM) is how the latter takes into account prior probability that a therapy is likely to work when considering clinical trials. My favorite example to demonstrate this difference, because it's so stark and obvious, is homeopathy. Homeopathy, as regular readers of this blog no doubt know by now, is a mystical, magical system of medicine based on two principles. The first is the law of similars, commonly phrased as "like cures like"; i.e., the way to treat symptoms is to use a smaller amount of…
"Integrative medicine" further evolves into "evidence-based complementary medicine." Nothing changes
oracknows | August 16, 2011One of these days I'm going to end up getting myself in trouble.
The reason, as I've only half-joked before, is that, even though I'm not even 50 yet, I'm already feeling like a dinosaur when it comes to "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, as it's called more frequently now, "integrative medicine" (IM). These days, we now have the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), the Bravewell Collaborative, and a number of other forces are conspiring to "integrate" quackery with real medicine. As part of that task, it's been necessary to rebrand quackery, a…