The problem with the Hubble constant

Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
NASA-WMAP

The Hubble constant, which measures the speed of expansion of space in the universe, has very curious properties. For instance, although we call it constant, it turns out that it is not a constant, as it varies over time. That is why its current value is represented by the symbol H₀, but since its value was different at other times, it can be represented by other symbols, such as H_CMBR, which refers to its value at the time when the cosmic microwave background radiation originated, about 13.7 billion years ago.

The Twilight Zone

It has been said that the series titled The Twilight Zone was the best TV series of all time. I cannot give my opinion, for I haven’t seen so many series, so I cannot compare them, but this is what I have read.

The series, which ran for five seasons between 1959 and 1964, was dedicated to fantasy, science fiction, psychological horror and the supernatural. It was created and presented by Rod Serling, who also wrote the script of 92 of its 156 episodes. Rod Serling is well known for the scripts of two famous films of the sixties: Seven days in May and Planet of the Apes. The spectacular surprise ending of the second film (which is not in the book on which it is based, Pierre Boulle’s novel of the same title) is at the same level as many episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Productivity measures for the increase in life expectancy

In my previous post in this blog I spoke about the article entitled Are ideas getting harder to find? which can be downloaded from the Stanford University website. In this paper, the authors also analyze the increase in life expectancy in the USA and the effort necessary to achieve it, and reach the following results:

Moore's law, a self-fulfilling prediction?

Gordon Moore

In an article that can be downloaded from the Stanford University website, entitled Are ideas getting harder to find?, the authors raise the following situation:

In many models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and the long-run growth rate is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence... showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. A good example is Moore’s Law. The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling every two years of the density of computer chips is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s... [W]e find that ideas — and the exponential growth they imply — are getting harder to find. Exponential growth results from large increases in research effort that offset its declining productivity.

Media manipulation: the Nobel Prizes and religion

James Peebles

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics has been assigned to cosmology and divided among three scientists: James Peebles, a Canadian, who receives half the prize for his theoretical work; and Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who have shared the other half for having discovered the first planet outside the solar system that revolves around a star in the main sequence.

The theory of the Big Bang was proposed in 1931 by George Lemaître, as a consequence of the extension to the past of the Hubble-Lemaître law. In 1948, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman predicted that, if the Big Bang theory is correct, there must be a cosmic background radiation with a temperature close to 5 Kelvin. In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the existence of such cosmic radiation, whose temperature turned out to be close to 3 Kelvin. That same year, Robert Dicke, James Peebles and other collaborators reasoned that the radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson is precisely the signature of the Big Bang predicted by Alpher and Herman. During the 70s, Peebles was one of the leading theoretical cosmologists who studied the field of the formation of the great cosmic structures (galaxies and groups of galaxies). For these works he has now been awarded the Nobel Prize.

Harry Potter and the multiverse

In the previous post in this blog, I discussed the current absence of great men in many fields of human activity; in particular, in science. Shortly after writing that post, an interview with Sabine Hossenfelder in a major Spanish newspaper (La Vanguardia) made me see that I’m not alone in denouncing the crisis of science, at least in the field of theoretical physics, which includes theories about the multiverse, about which, a few weeks ago, I published another post.

Sabine Hossenfelder is a German theoretical physicist. She has lately become news by publishing a book: Lost in Maths: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018), where she asserts that theoretical physics has progressed practically nothing in the last 60 years, and advocates dedicating public funds to research the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, rather than squandering them on colossal particle accelerators or in research on baseless lucubration, such as string theory and multiverses.

Why we have no great men today

G.K. Chesterton

First, a clarification: I won’t let myself be dragged by political correctness. I’m not going to change the title of this post to “great human beings.” For me, the word “man” (equivalent to the Latin homo) still has a main generic meaning, different from the meaning whose Latin antecedent is vir (male), opposed to woman or female.

The absence of great men is a common place today and affects almost all fields: