Viva Las Vegas

 

Alt Right gadfly Vox Day is currently enbroiled in some drama with Erika "Gutsick Gibbon", a science influencer on YouTube who questioned his critique of evolutionary theory. 

Says Vox: "It’s probably best that Ericka runs away now, considering what happened to the last woman who tried to debate me. For those of you who weren’t around then, she literally abandoned the debate after three rounds and ran off to Las Vegas to start a new career as a prostitute at a legal brothel. I’m neither kidding nor exaggerating for effect. You can look it up. You can probably still buy her services, for that matter."

Oookay. The Internet is forever, as they say...

String them up

 

Sabine doubles down on the crisis in science / physics. Enjoy! Power move from the mama. I didn´t know string theory is still a thing, btw...

Makabert

 

Credit: JM Ligero Loarte

Källan är en avhoppare, men även den amerikanska militären undersökte ju om djur kunde ha övernaturliga förmågor. Och människor! Så visst kan detta vara sant. Och sanslöst. 

Makabert experiment skulle testa kaniners övernaturliga förmågor

UFOs on the Moon

 

Sabine Hossenfelder debunks some new (alleged) evidence for UFOs (as in extraterrestrial craft). One piece deals with some Ukrainian scientists who claims to have discovered UFOs on the Moon (!), whereas the second video is about the ubiquitous Avi Loeb. 

Hossenfelder belives the "warp drive" some scientists speculate about are indistinguishable from mundane meteorites. But ahem, what about the strange orbs discussed by Loeb? Interestingly, the US military actually tested some kind of infrared light at the same time, but claims that it *didn´t* cause the orbs. But surely that *is* the most likely explanation? 

What is really going on here, I wonder? And who is psyopping who? 

Well, akshually, para-dimes are good, akshually

 

A little reminder. A propos the recent blog post on Sabine Hossenfelder and the role of mathematics in the hard (oh-so-hard) sciences.

Quantum questions

Inside out

 

Some scientists apparently un-ironically speculate that we may live *inside* a black hole. Well, that would explain a thing or two, I suppose...

Note what Sabine is saying here: there are several competing theories about black holes, each mathematically "correct". Yet, only one of them can be true - or none of them are. So naaah, you can´t just "shut up and do the math", as some midwits are trying to tell us.

Shut up *and do the empirical research* is the bottom line here. Note also that many scientists themselves suspect that the simplest explanation (a black hole is a singularity) simply can´t be true...and so the speculations continue. 

I actually see that as a singularly good thing! 

Where is the science?

 

It seems both neuroscience and psychology are in crisis. Sabine Hossenfelder has the updates. Shit like this will eventually make the public (including the educated part - they are the only ones paying attention anyway) skeptical towards the entire scientific establishment. And maybe even the project itself? Which I wouldn´t consider a positive development. Note also the crises in quantum physics and cosmology...

Therefore Sabine

 

Is causality an emergent property? And what does that even mean? Sabine hopes that quantum physics can be made more logical and less woo-woo-ish, but a recent paper on the topic falls short of this. Or so she believes. Since I´ve been up most of the night, I hardly understand what she´s talking about, but I´m sure it´s interesting...

A universe in a grain of sand

 

Or 9 out of 10 on a bullshit meter? Sabine isn´t *terribly* impressed by the recent headlines about some scientist creating a "mini-universe" in a lab, und so weiter. 

This sentence is a lie, that is the truth

Overheard on the interwebs: "If you don't read the papers you are uninformed, if you do read the papers you are misinformed."

Ahem

 

No? 

Light in darkness

 

Overheard on the internets: scientists just disconfirmed some old experiment from the 1990´s which supposedly proved the existence of dark matter particles. What did I tell you, chat...

Dark matter aint real. And the light shineth in the darkness. 

Heavy water

 

Damn. It seems to be official now: the mysterious object 3I/ATLAS isn´t an alien probe (pun unintended) but an entirely natural object. A kind of comet, in fact, made of "heavy water" and other mundane substances. Blasted!

On the positive side, the comet could be 12 billion years old (!) and give us clues to how solar systems were formed in the early universe ("early" if you believe in the Big Bang). Clue: probably not as ours. It struck me that this could have some kind of consequences, too. For instance, does it make it more likely or less likely that alien star systems might harbor intelligent life (or any life)? 

The case against reality

 

Sabine Hossenfelder tries to take Donald Hoffman seriously, but it just doesn´t work. She gives Hoffman a ten out of ten on her "bullshit meter", claiming he´s "not even wrong". Apparently, Hoffman recently published a paper trying to prove mathematically that aliens seen during psychedelic trips are real. I think even people who do believe in aliens and/or psychedelics might find that approach a bit...trippy. 

Back to the things themselves

 

Our man Formscapes (the mutant Anthroposophist) just came up with a new term: "physicalist traditionalism". If you want science to go back to its state circa 1890, you are a physicalist traditionalist. Common sense science before Einstein, the Copenhagen interpretation and (I would guess) all the dark matter bullshit. And common sense materialism, too! Differently put: there is no such thing as "quantum mysticism" independent of quantum physics, indeed, QM *is* quantum mysticism. It´s woo-woo all the way down to the super-strings.  

Had I been a consistent materialist, I would probably be a "physicalist traditionalist". And while Marxism isn´t exactly that (due to its implicit teleology derived from one Hegel), there is certainly a family likeness. See Lenin´s "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism". 

I admit a strong sympathy for this position even though I don´t consider myself a "physicalist"...

Time is on our side

 

What the fuck does this experiment even mean? How did "time stop"? We´re still here, dude. And the show goes on... 

Physicist stops time by building a mini-universe in his lab

Lucifer-effekten

 

Självklart är detta också en bluff. Är allt inom sociologin och psykologin baserat på rena falsarier? 

De radikala studenterna förstörde experimentet

Bullet cluster

 

Is it finally over for dark matter and (maybe) Einstein? Sabine Hossenfelder may have found the silver bullet...

Ancient aliens, modern hoaxes

 

This is obviously a hoax or some kind of avantgarde art project. Of course it´s not ancient aliens. Why? Because the "carvings" look exactly how ancient aliens are supposed to look like *according to the expectations of current (mostly American) pop culture*. What are the chances?

Even Dan Dedunking doesn´t seem to believe in these "artifacts". Yes, we´re talking about the guy who thinks Easter Island is Atlantis! I mean, dude. 

The God molecule

 

Materialists are funny. So supposedly consciousness comes from some kind of quantum effects related to phosphorus molecules. Or something. Sabine isn´t buying it, but even if true, how does this disprove "God" or "the Divine"? So a certain kind of phosphorus can give rise to subjective lived experience, wow, sounds like the God molecule or something...