Science
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The BBC, the Big Bang and WMAP
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For some reason, the BBC’s Today Program had a feature on the Big Bang and its purported problems confronting modern data. Apart from the woefully misguided Eric Lerner, the discussion was relatively nuanced and at least attempted to distinguish between a wrong theory and an incomplete one — the questions that the Big Bang, as…
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“They’re just birds”
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Unlike their sister paper, The Guardian, who seem willing to pander to the crackpot anti-evolution right, The Observer not only reports on the Religious Right’s weird valorization of the film March of the Penguins, but is also willing to point out the truth in an editorial (aka leader): If ever the world needed reminding about…
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The Guardian’s Unintelligent Design
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I was enjoying the new, redesigned Guardian newspaper today, until I came to the end of the new G2 features section, and an offensive interview with chief Intelligent Design crackpot Michael Behe, under the inappropriate banner, “Ideas”. Offensive because interviewer John Sutherland doesn’t call Behe on any of his flagrant misstatements (I hesitate to call…
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Life Principle or just dirty water?
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In the Guardian, Paul Davies writes about investigating the origins of life on earth and, possibly, throughout the Universe. Davies, a media-savvy astrophysicist with a notable spiritual, if not mystical, streak, comes dangerously close to advocating something like Intelligent Design, albeit a more primordial level than its usual crackpot promoters. He talks about the existence…
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Quote of the day (experts only)
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The ΛCDM Model requires two pieces of unknown physics. One is ‘Λ’ and the other is ‘CDM’ -Tom Shanks, at “Open Questions in Cosmology“, a meeting being held at the Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik in Garching, Germany. I’ll explain later.
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Boomerang
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A couple of weeks ago, my colleagues in the Boomerang Collaboration, spread out over the US, Italy, Canada, France and the UK, released five papers analyzing the data from the latest flight of the Boomerang instrument, over Antarctica in January 2003 (check this out for information from my fellow Boomerangers on what it’s like down…
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Bush endorses crackpots
I apologize in advance that this is going to be one of those instances of the blogosphere acting as an echo chamber, but I must at least comment on President George W Bush’s latest statements that the so-called ideas of the crackpot crypto-creationist Intelligent Design community should be taught alongside evolution in American schools. Let…
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Pulsar Timing and Gravitational Waves
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Greetings en route from State College, Pennsylvania, home of Penn State University, the only University of which I am aware with a library named after its football coach, Joe Paterno. More relevant to me, Penn State is also the home of the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics, which has been hosting a workshop, “The Pulsar…
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Cosmic Variance: New blog on the block
Let me welcome to the scientific blogosphere Cosmic Variance, a new group blog featuring Clifford Johnson, a string theorist from USC; JoAnne Hewett, a particle theorist from SLAC at Stanford; Risa Wechsler & Sean Carroll, both cosmologists from the University of Chicago; and Mark Trodden from Syracuse University. Mark and Sean have already been blogging…
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