Lifeboat Foundation

In recent years, a group of Hungarian researchers have made headlines with a bold claim. They say they’ve discovered a new particle — dubbed X17 — that requires the existence of a fifth force of nature.

The researchers weren’t looking for the new particle, though. Instead, it popped up as an anomaly in their detector back in 2015 while they were searching for signs of dark matter. The oddity didn’t draw much attention at first. But eventually, a group of prominent particle physicists working at the University of California, Irvine, took a closer look and suggested that the Hungarians had stumbled onto a new type of particle — one that implies an entirely new force of nature.

Then, in late 2019, the Hungarian find hit the mainstream — including a story featured prominently on CNN — when they released new results suggesting that their signal hadn’t gone away. The anomaly persisted even after they changed the parameters of their experiment. They’ve now seen it pop up in the same way hundreds of times.

In this Big Think interview, theoretical physicist Sean Carroll discusses the concept of time and the mysteries surrounding its properties. He notes that while we use the word “time” frequently in everyday language, the real puzzles arise when we consider the properties of time, such as the past, present, and future, and the fact that we can affect the future but not the past.

Carroll also discusses the concept of entropy, which is a measure of how disorganized or random a system is, and the second law of thermodynamics, which states that there is a natural tendency for things in the Universe to go from a state of low entropy to high entropy — in other words, from less disorganized to more disorganized. He explains that the arrow of time, or the perceived difference between the past and the future, arises due to the influence of the Big Bang and the fact that the Universe began in a state of low entropy.

Dibaryons are the subatomic particles made of two baryons. Their formations through baryon-baryon interactions play a fundamental role in big-bang nucleosynthesis, in nuclear reactions including those within stellar environments, and provide a connection between nuclear physics, cosmology and astrophysics.

Interestingly, the strong force, which is the key to the existence of nuclei and provides most of their masses, allows formations of numerous other dibaryons with various combinations of quarks. However, we do not observe them abound—deuteron is the only known stable dibaryon.

To resolve this apparent dichotomy, it is essential to investigate dibaryons and baryon-baryon interactions at the fundamental level of strong interactions. In a recent publication in Physical Review Letters, physicists from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and The Institute of Mathematical Science (IMSc) have provided strong evidence for the existence of a deeply bound dibaryon, entirely built from bottom (beauty) quarks.

At the end of of 2022, we released a film offering a reply to the fine tuning argument for God from leading physicists and philosophers of physics. This included both those that doubt there is any fine tuning and those that think there is but it can be solved by naturalistic means.
Subsequently astrophysicist Luke Barnes and philosopher Philip Goff offered their criticism of our criticism. Here we have assembled some of our original talking heads to review their criticism and offer a reply, defending the original position that fine tuning argument for God does not work.
Our original film can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ-fj3lqJ6M

Luke Barnes and Philip Goff’s reply is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJYWkqOzUQ0&t=4036s and we also recommend this video on Bayes theorem on the Majesty of Reason Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1MdtyLL3Uw&t=4423s.

Continue reading “Fine Tuned Universe: the critics strike back” »

Two pairs of gigantic black holes, each in a different dwarf galaxy, are speeding towards each other, and they’re set for two separate, never-before-seen collisions.

Astronomers used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to spot the four dwarf galaxy black holes racing towards each other, dragging an enormous train of gas and stars in their wake. Some of this material is already being sucked into the black holes, causing them to grow ever larger before their eventual crashes.

Indian astronomers have analyzed observational data of a gamma-ray blazar known as PKS 0402–362, collected in the timespan of nearly 13 years. The study, published March 7 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, provides crucial information regarding the long-term behavior of this blazar.

Blazars are very compact quasars associated with supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centers of active, giant elliptical galaxies. They belong to a larger group of active galaxies that host active galactic nuclei (AGN), and are the most numerous extragalactic gamma-ray sources. Their characteristic features are relativistic jets pointed almost exactly toward the Earth.

Based on their optical emission properties, astronomers divide blazars into two classes: flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) that feature prominent and broad optical emission lines, and BL Lacertae objects (BL Lacs), which do not.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has snapped a picture of WR 124, a rare Wolf-Mayet star 30 times the size of our sun, ejecting a luminous cloud of cosmic dust.

One of the first practical applications of the much-hyped but little-used quantum computing technology is now within reach, thanks to a unique approach that sidesteps the major problem of scaling up such prototypes.

The invention, by a University of Bristol physicist, who gave it the name “counterportation,” provides the first-ever practical blueprint for creating in the lab a wormhole that verifiably bridges space, as a probe into the inner workings of the universe.

By deploying a novel computing scheme, revealed in the journal Quantum Science and Technology, which harnesses the basic laws of physics, a small object can be reconstituted across space without any particles crossing. Among other things, it provides a “smoking gun” for the existence of a physical reality underpinning our most accurate description of the world.

Quantum computing technology is within reach due to an innovative method that overcomes the significant challenge of scaling up these prototypes.

The invention, by a University of Bristol physicist, who gave it the name ‘counterportation’, provides the first-ever practical blueprint for creating in the lab a wormhole that verifiably bridges space, as a probe into the inner workings of the universe.