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Credit: Templeton Foundation The Templeton Foundation has announced that Marcelo Gleiser, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Dartmouth University in New Hampshire, USA, has been awarded the 2019 Templeton Prize. The Templeton Prize, which includes a 1.1 million pound stipend, is awarded each year to a person “who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming Continue reading Marcelo Gleiser wins Templeton Prize Introduction Both creationist and intelligent design writers assert that science has yet to understand the origin of life, and further claim that this is a fatal flaw in evolutionary theory [Behe1996; Dembski1998]. More importantly, creationist-minded members of the public have, in numerous cases, attempted to capitalize on this perceived weakness to persuade school boards and Continue reading When did life start on Earth? Top 500 supercomputer performance (orange = #1, blue = #500, green = sum) Postmodern denials of scientific progress The fact that scientific research has made immense progress over the past years, decades and centuries is taken for granted among professional scientists and most of the lay public as well. But there are others, from Continue reading Is scientific progress real? Credit: NASA The great silence As we have explained in previous Math Scholar blogs (see, for example, MS1 and MS2), the perplexing question why the heavens are silent even though, from all evidence, the universe is teeming with potentially habitable exoplanets, continues to perplex and fascinate scientists. It is one of the most significant Continue reading New books and articles on the “great silence” Credit: Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics String theory, fine tuning and the multiverse String theory is the name for the theory of mathematical physics which proposes that physical reality is based on exceedingly small “strings” and “branes,” embedded in 10- or 11-dimensional space. String theory has been proposed as the long-sought “theory of everything,” Continue reading Does the string theory multiverse really exist? Distant galaxies magnified by a gravitational lens Fermi’s paradox As we have discussed on this forum before (see, for example, previous Math Scholar blog), Fermi’s paradox looms as one of the most profound and puzzling conundrums of science: Given that the universe is presumed to be teeming with intelligent life and technological civilizations, why Continue reading Fermi’s paradox and the Copernican principle History The Yunis-Prakash diagram comparing the chromosomes of humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans Evolution in general and human evolution in particular continue to be bones of contention, so to speak, as evidenced by the ongoing efforts by some groups to prohibit or downplay evolution, or to mandate “equal time” for “intelligent design,” in state and Continue reading Chromosomes, DNA and human evolution Introduction Is the universe fine-tuned for intelligent life? In 2016, astrophysicist Geraint Lewis and cosmologist Luke Barnes, both at the University of Sydney, Australia, waded into this perplexing and controversial arena in a new book entitled A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos [Lewis2016]. The core of the Lewis-Barnes book and an accompanying Continue reading Has cosmic fine-tuning been refuted? Introduction Many have read books and articles by renowned Harvard social scientist Steven Pinker. In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Pinker cited a huge amount of historical and sociological data to conclude, counter-intuitively to many, that violence has declined “at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and Continue reading Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now”: Humanism and scientific progress Introduction Both traditional creationists and intelligent design writers have invoked probability arguments in criticisms of biological evolution. They argue that certain features of biology are so fantastically improbable that they could never have been produced by a purely natural, “random” process, even assuming the billions of years of history asserted by geologists and astronomers. Continue reading Do probability arguments refute evolution? |
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