A bunch of links about recent happenings at everybody’s favorite space agency:/p>
- Steinn has links to dark energy proposals.
- Science and Reason on the “Beyond Einstein” program.
- Those little scamps are having another mysterious press conference tomorrow, to announce something about dark energy. Steinn suggests it has something to do with this guy’s research, but only Sean knows for sure, and he’s just going to taunt us.
Four more lab reports to grade, two exams to write (one at 9:00 tomorrow, one at 8:30 Friday morning), plus grading. And then I get to start reading 200 pages worth of NSF proposals that I’ve been asked to review, so I can have them done before I need to start reading 50-60 application folders. Shoot me now.
Taunting is what I’m good at. Go with your strengths, I always say.
LIGO fails to detect anything even as it snugs fundamental noise limits. One then hesitates to embrace LISA. Contemporary physics is troubled. Thermodynamics plus the Beckenstein bound give relativity, yet quantum field theory and gravitation will not usefully reconcile. The Standard Model demands SUSY, yet SUSY particles and contingencies remain unobserved.
Ptolemaic epicycles were not banished by a Copernican solar system, merely reduced in number. Kepler’s elliptical orbits cleaned house. Does the patchwork of renormalization, the Higgs mechanism… string theory sum to epicycles in a physically defective model?
Postulate the vacuum to be isotropic and the Equivalence Principle true. Other theory (going back to Cartan and Weitzenböck) makes no such demands. Physics has been fanatic about examining overlap of the two approaches. It should shift its attention to disjoint disagreements. if something is falsifable then somebody is wrong and things could be much simpler and more complete.
We have lots of epicycles here: drk energy, inflatons, any number of things in the standard model. Is there any wonder why physics is losing respect and funding?
More taunting :
I have heard through other inderect rumor sources that the press conference is probably going to be related to Adam Riess’s stuff.
I have also talked to Adam himself in the last two days, but not at all about the press conference, so I can’t give you any “horse’s mouth” style rumors, sorry.
I look forward to it whatever it is.
-Rob
Oh, and Chad, you’ve doubtless noticed one of the fundamental things that comes from blogging about cosmology, and some missions in particular : it rattles the woodwork.
From the big announcement: “Pinpointing supernovae in the faraway universe is similiar to watching fireflies in your backyard. All fireflies glow with about the same brightness. So, you can judge how fireflies are distributed in your back yard by noting their comparative faintness or brightness, depending on their distance from you.”
Someone please tell these boys that all fireflies do not have the same brightness.
Someone please tell these boys that all fireflies do not have the same brightness.
We’re talking about astronomers, here. These are people who are used to having error bars on the exponent. (And then graphing everything backwards…)
By astronomy standards, all fireflies are identical.