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Signup for your FREE TRIAL to The GREAT COURSES PLUS here: http://ow.ly/5KMw30qK17T. Until 350 years ago, there was a distinction between what people saw on earth and what they saw in the sky. There did not seem to be any connection.

Then Isaac Newton in 1,687 showed that planets move due to the same forces we experience here on earth. If things could be explained with mathematics, to many people this called into question the need for a God.

But in the late 20th century, arguments for God were resurrected. The standard model of particle physics and general relativity is accurate. But there are constants in these equations that do not have an explanation. They have to be measured. Many of them seem to be very fine tuned.

Scientists point out for example, the mass of a neutrino is 2X10^-37kg. It has been shown that if this mass was off by just one decimal point, life would not exist because if the mass was too high, the additional gravity would cause the universe to collapse. If the mass was too low, galaxies could not form because the universe would have expanded too fast.

On closer examination, it has some problems. The argument exaggerates the idea of fine tuning by using misleading units of measurement, to make fine tuning seem much more unlikely than it may be. The mass of neutrinos is expressed in Kg. Using kilograms to measure something this small is the equivalent of measuring a person’s height in light years. A better measurement for the neutrino would be electron volts or picograms.

Another point is that most of the constants could not really be any arbitrary number. They are going to hover around some value close to what they actually are. The value of the mass of a neutrino could not be the mass of a bowling ball. Such massive particles with the property of a neutrino could not have been created during the Big Bang.

Continue reading “Is God in Physics? Fine Tuning Scrutinized” | >

Is it an egg, a blimp or a bullet? Whatever you might want to call the shape of the Otto Celera 500L, it’s one that catches the eye. It looks like no other plane out there, and for a good reason: unique aerodynamics.

The shape of the Celera is designed to drastically reduce drag by allowing air to flow very smoothly over the surface of the plane. That makes the aircraft less power-hungry, which means it burns less fuel.

“This gets us four to five times the efficiency of other turboprop aircraft, and seven to eight times the efficiency of jet aircraft,” says William Otto Jr., CEO of Otto Aviation.

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Even after 30 months in space, The Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 mission continues to successfully “sail on sunbeams” demonstrating solar sail technology in Earth orbit. The mission is providing hard data for future missions that hope to employ solar sails to explore the cosmos.

LightSail 2, a small cubesat, launched in June 2019 on a SpaceX

Commonly known as SpaceX, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is a private American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company that was founded by Elon Musk in 2002. Headquartered in Hawthorne, California, the company designs, manufactures, and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft.

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Octopuses, crabs and lobsters will receive greater welfare protection in UK law following an LSE report which demonstrates that there is strong scientific evidence that these animals have the capacity to experience pain, distress or harm.

The UK government has today confirmed that that the scope of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill will be extended to all decapod crustaceans and cephalopod molluscs.

This move follows the findings of a government-commissioned independent review led by Dr Jonathan Birch. The review drew on over 300 existing scientific studies to evaluate evidence of sentience in cephalopods (including octopuses, squid and cuttlefish) and decapods (including crabs, lobsters and crayfish).

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The vehicle was able to fire off its own missile over the South China Sea while travelling at five times the speed of sound.

China tested a hypersonic vehicle in July that was able to fire off its own missile over the South China Sea while travelling at five times the speed of sound, in a physics-defying display of technology that no other country has demonstrated, according to a new report.

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A rare manuscript by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein goes under the hammer in Paris on Tuesday, with auctioneers aiming for a stratospheric price tag.

The manuscript, containing preparatory work for Einstein’s key achievement the theory of relativity, is estimated at between two and three million euros (2.3−3.4 million), according to Christie’s which is hosting the sale on behalf of the Aguttes auction house.

“This is without a doubt the most valuable Einstein manuscript ever to come to auction,” Christie’s said in a statement.

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Threat actors are hacking Microsoft Exchange servers using ProxyShell and ProxyLogon exploits to distribute malware and bypass detection using stolen internal reply-chain emails.

When threat actors conduct malicious email campaigns, the hardest part is to trick users into trusting the sender enough so that they open up linked to or included malware-distributing attachments.

TrendMicro researchers have discovered an interesting tactic used of distributing malicious email to a company’s internal users using the victim’s compromised Microsoft exchange servers.

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A research team at the University of Wisconsin – Madison has identified a new way to convert ammonia to nitrogen gas through a process that could be a step toward ammonia replacing carbon-based fuels.

The discovery of this technique, which uses a metal catalyst and releases, rather than requires, energy, was reported on November 8, 2021, in Nature Chemistry and has received a provisional patent from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

“The world currently runs on a carbon fuel economy,” explains Christian Wallen, an author of the paper and a former postdoctoral researcher in the lab of UW–Madison chemist John Berry. “It’s not a great economy because we burn hydrocarbons, which release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We don’t have a way to close the loop for a true carbon cycle, where we could transform carbon dioxide back into a useful fuel.”

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