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One common strategy for thinking about this is to suggest that what we used to call the whole universe is just a small part of everything there is, and that we live in a kind of bubble universe, a small region of something much larger

Newton realized there had to be some force holding the moon in its orbit around the earth, to keep it from wandering off, and he knew also there was a force that was pulling the apple down to the earth. And so what suddenly struck him was that those could be one and the same thing, the same force

That was a physical discovery, a physical discovery of momentous importance, as important as anything you could ever imagine because it knit together the terrestrial realm and the celestial realm into one common physical picture. It was also a philosophical discovery in the sense that philosophy is interested in the fundamental natures of things.

There are other ideas, for instance that maybe there might be special sorts of laws, or special sorts of explanatory principles, that would apply uniquely to the initial state of the universe.

The basic philosophical question, going back to Plato, is "What is x?" What is virtue? What is justice? What is matter? What is time? You can ask that about dark energy - what is it? And it's a perfectly good question.

right now there are just way too many freely adjustable parameters in physics. Everybody agrees about that. There seem to be many things we call constants of nature that you could imagine setting at different values, and most physicists think there shouldn't be that many, that many of them are related to one another. Physicists think that at the end of the day there should be one complete equation to describe all physics, because any two physical systems interact and physics has to tell them what to do. And physicists generally like to have only a few constants, or parameters of nature. This is what Einstein meant when he famously said he wanted to understand what kind of choices God had --using his metaphor-- how free his choices were in creating the universe, which is just asking how many freely adjustable parameters there are. Physicists tend to prefer theories that reduce that number

You have others saying that time is just an illusion, that there isn't really a direction of time, and so forth. I myself think that all of the reasons that lead people to say things like that have very little merit, and that people have just been misled, largely by mistaking the mathematics they use to describe reality for reality itself. If you think that mathematical objects are not in time, and mathematical objects don't change -- which is perfectly true -- and then you're always using mathematical objects to describe the world, you could easily fall into the idea that the world itself doesn't change, because your representations of it don't.

physicists for almost a hundred years have been dissuaded from trying to think about fundamental questions. I think most physicists would quite rightly say "I don't have the tools to answer a question like 'what is time?' - I have the tools to solve a differential equation." The asking of fundamental physical questions is just not part of the training of a physicist anymore.

The question remains as to how often, after life evolves, you'll have intelligent life capable of making technology. What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true. Obviously it doesn't matter that much if you're a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there's a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence.

This epoch in our cosmic history has long fascinated scientists. They hoped that someday, using technology that was calibrated just right, they could detect faint signals from that moment. Now, they think they’ve done it.

The nature of this signal suggests a new estimate for when the first stars emerged: about 180 million years after the Big Bang, slightly earlier than many scientists expected, but still within the expectations of theoretical models.

The nature of the radio waves Bowman and his colleagues detected mostly matches theoretical predictions, but not everything lines up. When they tuned their instrument to listen to the frequency for hydrogen gas that models predicted, they didn’t hear anything. When they decided to search in a lower range, they got it. But the signal they found was stronger than expected. That meant that the hydrogen gas in the early universe was much much colder—perhaps nearly twice as cold—than previously estimated.

Bowman says other teams around the world have been working to build and design instruments to detect this signal from the early universe, and he expects they should be able to confirm the results in the coming months.

This seems to indicate that many Americans are familiar with the theories of evolution and the Big Bang; they simply don't believe they're true.

The system is small: about 1-2% the mass of the Milky Way and is rich in heavier elements.

But it has a surprising feature: it is turning gas and dust into new stars at a remarkable rate, churning them out hundreds of times faster than our own galaxy can.

One very interesting way to learn about the Universe is to study these outliers and that tells us something about what sort of physical processes are dominating galaxy formation and galaxy evolution. "What was great about this galaxy is not only is it so distant, it is also pretty exceptional."

astronomers are likely to discover even more distant galaxies when Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is launched and other ground-based telescopes come online.

This is an important step forward, but we need to continue looking for more.

Beyond the grammars of geometry and algebra lies a domain of not math-like but text-like compositions and meanings (of semantics beyond mathematics).

17. Word and world both have grammars that don’t fit our available mathematical rules.

18. Reality is relational, and not entirely objective. Subject and object aren’t separable, they’re entangled, inescapably. “Objective” is always relative to some other system/observer. 

But that is exactly what Mr. Grinda did. He moved out of the Bedford house in December 2012, ditched the city apartment and got rid of the McLaren. He donated clothes, sports equipment and kitchen utensils to the Church of St. Francis Xavier in Lower Manhattan. He gave his furniture to Housing Works and he packed a Tumi carry-on suitcase with 50 items, including two pairs of jeans, a bathing suit and 10 pairs of socks.

Once he realized his days as a roving houseguest were numbered, Mr. Grinda decided to shift his approach: He kept traveling, but now he was renting apartments on Airbnb or staying in luxury hotels.

Born in suburban Paris in 1974, Mr. Grinda graduated from Princeton in 1996 with a degree in economics. He worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company for two years before moving back to France to found an online auction start-up funded by the business magnate Bernard Arnault, which Mr. Grinda sold in 2000.He returned to the United States, where he co-founded Zingy, a mobile phone ringtone and game maker, which fetched $80 million in a 2004 sale. After that, he was a founder of OLX, a Craigslist-like service that has become one of the largest global classified websites.Now he is an entrepreneur and angel investor, with more than 200 investments to date, who visits start-ups in Berlin, Paris, New York, San Francisco and other cities.

He looks (and acts) something like Sheldon Cooper, the oddball science geek played by Jim Parsons on “The Big Bang Theory,” an observation Mr. Grinda himself has made.“Friends, who knew me in my late teens and early twenties, would tell you I had exactly the same delusional sense of self-worth and condescending and arrogant self-centered worldview,” he wrote in a blog post that noted his similarities to the sitcom character.

In all, Mr. Grinda said, he stayed with about 15 friends and family members in the first months of 2013. “Everyone was, like, ‘It’s a great idea. Come over,’ ” Mr. Grinda said. “The problem is, the idea of ‘Great, come over’ and me there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, is very different. Especially when their lives are not in sync with mine.”

“When I looked back at the things that mattered the most to me,” he said, “they were experiences, friendships and family — none of which I had invested much in, partly because I was too busy, and partly because I felt anchored by my possessions.”

He hatched a new plan: His friends and family members would come to him.“Rather than me going to them and disrupting their routine,” he said, “getting everyone together in a setting of vacation makes more sense.”

He invited his parents, his friends, their partners, children and nannies for a two-week stay in Anguilla, an island east of Puerto Rico, where he rented two conjoining houses, at a cost of $240,000, with chefs and full house service (and a total of 19 bedrooms).

Mr. Grinda forgot to consider that not everyone lives as he does.For one thing, he had scheduled the Anguilla vacation during the school year, which meant friends with children couldn’t make it. The island’s remoteness, furthermore, meant some guests were forced to endure a tangle of flight connections, leaving some of them exhausted by the time they arrived.And many of the people he invited, who had jobs and other obligations, could stay only for a long weekend.

Mr. Grinda said he has learned a lot from his very big downgrade. He reconnected with old friends, even if it meant annoying them a little, and he rekindled his relationship with his father.“We spent time talking about his life,” he said. And he is no longer against the idea of having a fixed address; he said he is now in negotiations to buy a two-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side, which he plans to rent out when he is not in town.

Still, the experiment has taken its toll. “The philosophy is interesting,” he said. “But how do you put it into practice? How do you make it real?”

He recently split up with Otilia Aionesei, a former model who works at technology start-up, whom he had been dating, off and on, for two years. The sticking point was their lack of a shared home.“If you want to be his girlfriend, this is the life you have to lead,” Ms. Aionesei said. “I like simple things, to watch movies on the same couch.”Mr. Grinda had a different view. “We went to the Galápagos,” he said. “We went to Tulum. To St. Barts. We have these wonderful experiences and memories together.”

“My home is where I am,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter if it is a friend’s place or a couch or the middle of the jungle or a hotel room on the Lower East Side. But I realize that most of humanity, especially women, don’t see it that way.”

At this point the idealist swooshes in: ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing but mind! There is no problem of interaction with matter because matter is mere illusion

idealism has its charms but taking it seriously requires an antipathy to matter bordering on the maniacal. Are we to suppose that material reality is just a dream, a baseless fantasy, and that the Big Bang was nothing but the cosmic spirit having a mental sneezing fit?

pan­psychism: even the lowliest of material things has a streak of sentience running through it, like veins in marble. Not just parcels of organic matter, such as lizards and worms, but also plants and bacteria and water molecules and even electrons. Everything has its primitive feelings and minute allotment of sensation.

The trouble with panpsychism is that there just isn't any evidence of the universal distribution of consciousness in the material world.

it occurred to me that the problem might lie not in nature but in ourselves: we just don't have the faculties of comprehension that would enable us to remove the sense of mystery. Ontologically, matter and consciousness are woven intelligibly together but epistemologically we are precluded from seeing how. I used Noam Chomsky's notion of "mysteries of nature" to describe the situation as I saw it. Soon, I was being labelled (by Owen Flanagan) a "mysterian"

The more we know of the brain, the less it looks like a device for creating consciousness: it's just a big collection of biological cells and a blur of electrical activity - all machine and no ghost.

mystery is quite pervasive, even in the hardest of sciences. Physics is a hotbed of mystery: space, time, matter and motion - none of it is free of mysterious elements. The puzzles of quantum theory are just a symptom of this widespread lack of understanding

The human intellect grasps the natural world obliquely and glancingly, using mathematics to construct abstract representations of concrete phenomena, but what the ultimate nature of things really is remains obscure and hidden. How everything fits together is particularly elusive, perhaps reflecting the disparate cognitive faculties we bring to bear on the world (the senses, introspection, mathematical description). We are far from obtaining a unified theory of all being and there is no guarantee that such a theory is accessible by finite human intelligence.

real naturalism begins with a proper perspective on our specifically human intelligence. Palaeoanthropologists have taught us that the human brain gradually evolved from ancestral brains, particularly in concert with practical toolmaking, centring on the anatomy of the human hand. This history shaped and constrained the form of intelligence now housed in our skulls (as the lifestyle of other species form their set of cognitive skills). What chance is there that an intelligence geared to making stone tools and grounded in the contingent peculiarities of the human hand can aspire to uncover all the mysteries of the universe? Can omniscience spring from an opposable thumb? It seems unlikely, so why presume that the mysteries of consciousness will be revealed to a thumb-shaped brain like ours?

The "mysterianism" I advocate is really nothing more than the acknowledgment that human intelligence is a local, contingent, temporal, practical and expendable feature of life on earth - an incremental adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one would reg

rd as faintly omniscient. The current state of the philosophy of mind, from my point of view, is just a reflection of one evolutionary time-slice of a particular bipedal species on a particular humid planet at this fleeting moment in cosmic history - as is everything else about the human animal. There is more ignorance in it than knowledge.

“We want to be very clear that all we are reporting is observation of an excess (a fairly significant one) and not a discovery of any kind,”

“I’m trying to be calm here, but it’s hard not to be hyperbolic,” said Neal Weiner, a particle theorist at New York University. “If this is real, calling it a game changer would be an understatement.”

Dr. Aprile’s Xenon experiment is currently the largest and most sensitive in an alphabet soup of efforts aimed at detecting and identifying dark matter

The best guess is that this dark matter consists of clouds of exotic subatomic particles left over from the Big Bang and known generically as WIMPs, for weakly interacting massive particles, hundreds or thousands of times more massive than a hydrogen atom.

Dr. Aprile and her colleagues have wired a succession of vats containing liquid xenon with photomultipliers and other sensors. The hope is that her team’s device — far underground to shield it from cosmic rays and other worldly forms of interference — would spot the rare collision between a WIMP and a xenon atom. The collision should result in a flash of light and a cloud of electrical charge.

in its most recent analysis of that experiment, the team had looked for electrons, rather than the heavier xenon nuclei, recoiling from collisions. Among other things, that could be the signature of particles much lighter than the putative WIMPs striking the xenon.

Simulations and calculations suggested that random events should have produced about 232 such recoils over the course of a year.

But from February 2017 to February 2018, the detector recorded 285, an excess of 53 recoils.

The story of axions begins in 1977, when Roberto Peccei, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who died on June 1, and Helen Quinn, emerita professor at Stanford, suggested a slight modification to the theory that governs strong nuclear forces, making sure that it is invariant to the direction of time, a feature that physicists consider a necessity for the universe.

this modification implied the existence of a new subatomic particle. Dr. Wilczek called it the axion, and the name stuck.

Axions have never been detected either directly or indirectly. And the theory does not predict their mass, which makes it hard to look for them. It only predicts that they would be weird and would barely interact with regular matter

although they are not WIMPS, they share some of those particles’ imagined weird abilities, such as being able to float through Earth and our bodies like smoke through a screen door.

In order to fulfill the requirements of cosmologists, however, such dark-matter axions would need to have a mass of less than a thousandth of an electron volt in the units of mass and energy preferred by physicists

(By comparison, the electrons that dance around in your smartphone weigh in at half a million electron volts each.) What they lack in heft they would more than make up for in numbers.

That would make individual cosmic dark-matter axions too slow and ethereal to be detected by the Xenon experiment.But axions could also be produced by nuclear reactions in the sun, and those “solar axions” would have enough energy to ping the Xenon detector right where it is most sensitive

The other exciting, though slightly less likely, possibility is that the Xenon collaboration’s excess signals come from the wispy particles known as neutrinos, which are real, and weird, and zipping through our bodies by the trillions every second.

Ordinarily, these neutrinos would not contribute much to the excess of events the detector read. But they would do so if they had an intrinsic magnetism that physicists call a magnetic moment. That would give them a higher probability of interacting with the xenon and tripping the detector

According to the standard lore, neutrinos, which are electrically neutral, do not carry magnetism. The discovery that they did would require rewriting the rules as they apply to neutrinos.

That, said Dr. Weiner, would be “a very very big deal,” because it would imply that there are new fundamental particles out there to look for — new physics.

Worse still, the laws of physics themselves seem to be working against us. Ours isn’t just a randomly hostile universe, it's an actively hostile universe

The history of physics, in fact, is a marvel of using simple symmetry principles to construct complicated laws of the universe

if the entire universe were made symmetric, then all of the good features (e.g., you) are decidedly asymmetric lumps that ruin the otherwise perfect beauty of the cosmo

it would be a mistake to be comforted by the symmetries of the universe. In truth, they are your worst enemies. Everything we know about those rational, predictable arrangements dictates that you shouldn't be here at all.

How hostile is the universe to your fundamental existence? Very. Even the simplest assumptions about our place in the universe seem to lead inexorably to devastating results

The symmetry of the universe would bake us in no time at all, but an asymmetry rescues us

In literally every experiment and observation that we’ve ever done, matter and antimatter get created (or annihilated) in perfect concert. That is, every experiment except for one: us.

Matter and antimatter should have completely annihilated one another in the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang. You should not even exist. But you do, and there’s lots more matter where you came from.

if the perfect symmetry between matter and antimatter remained perfect, you wouldn’t be here to think about it.

The flow of time (as near as we can tell) is completely arbitrary. Does entropy increase with time or does it make time? Are our memories the thing that ultimately breaks the symmetry of time?

It seems only a matter of luck (and some fairly arbitrary-looking math) that a symmetric universe would end up being remotely hospitable to complex creatures like us

Without electrons binding to protons, there would be no chemistry, no molecules, and nothing more complicated than a cloud of charged gas. And you’re not a sentient cloud of gas, are you?

Froese and Bader's research wound up defining four ways in which Americans see God: •The Authoritative God. When conservatives Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck proclaim that America will lose God's favor unless we get right with him, they're rallying believers in what Froese and Bader call an Authoritative God, one engaged in history and meting out harsh punishment to those who do not follow him. About 28% of the nation shares this view, according to Baylor's 2008 findings. "They divide the world by good and evil and appeal to people who are worried, concerned and scared," Froese says. "They respond to a powerful God guiding this country, and if we don't explicitly talk about (that) God, then we have the wrong God or no God at all."

•The Benevolent God. When President Obama says he is driven to live out his Christian faith in public service, or political satirist Stephen Colbert mentions God while testifying to Congress in favor of changing immigration laws, they're speaking of what the Baylor researchers call a Benevolent God. This God is engaged in our world and loves and supports us in caring for others, a vision shared by 22% of Americans, according to Baylor's findings. "Rhetoric that talks about the righteous vs. the heathen doesn't appeal to them," Froese says. "Their God is a force for good who cares for all people, wee

•The Critical God. The poor, the suffering and the exploited in this world often believe in a Critical God who keeps an eye on this world but delivers justice in the next, Bader says. Bader says this view of God — held by 21% of Americans — was reflected in a sermon at a working-class neighborhood church the researchers visited in Rifle, Colo., in 2008. Pastor Del Whittington's theme at Open Door Church was " 'Wait until heaven, and accounts will be settled.'

•The Distant God. Though about 5% of Americans are atheists or agnostics, Baylor found that nearly one in four (24%) see a Distant God that booted up the universe, then left humanity alone. This doesn't mean that such people have no religion. It's the dominant view of Jews and other followers of world religions and philosophies such as Buddhism or Hinduism, the Baylor research finds.

Unaccounted for, this missing matter was predicted to exist, but hard to find. In fact, astronomers have been searching for it over the last 30 years, the researchers said. Measurements of the Big Bang show how much matter was present in the early days of the universe, suggesting its existence.

"It turned out that it was hiding in a density so low that it does not emit light, it doesn't absorb it, and it doesn't reflect it," he said.

"The radiation from fast radio bursts gets spread out by the missing matter in the same way that you see the colors of sunlight being separated in a prism," Macquart said.

"Their millisecond durations made it very easy to measure the effect of dispersion — the process by which their longer wavelength emission is delayed with respect to their shorter wavelength emission is delayed — and hence to measure exactly how much matter they have encountered on their multi-billion year intergalactic journeys to Earth," Macquart said.

Astronomers were able to pin down the source of a repeating fast radio burst in 2017. But single radio bursts are harder to pinpoint because they don't reoccur.

"ASKAP both has a wide field of view, about 60 times the size of the full Moon, and can image in high resolution," said Ryan Shannon, study coauthor and associate professor at Swinburne University of Technology, in a statement. "This means that we can catch the bursts with relative ease and then pinpoint locations to their host galaxies with incredible precision.

"We've discovered the equivalent of the Hubble-Lemaître Law for galaxies, only for fast radio bursts," Macquart said. "The Hubble-Lemaître Law, which says the more distant a galaxy from us, the faster it is moving away from us, underpins all measurements of galaxies at cosmological distances."