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Two Moons In One, Old People Do It, Bumpin’ Universe, Heat Seeking Vampires, Smarties Getting Smarter, Curing Sleep, We Are Chimera, Rat Slobber, And Much More…
Two, two, two moons in one!!!
Old People Do It
Did our universe go bump in the night?
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Jonah Lehrer asks ‘Are smart people getting smarter‘?
Beware the toxic rat slobber
We are all chimeras
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Everyone who’s seen Batman Forever knows bats aren’t rodents, Doctor Kiki!
4:47 … the DARK side of the Moon is lumpy …
Don’t let Phil Plait hear you say that!
You mean the FAR SIDE of the Moon, not to be confused with the DARK side.
There is no permanent DARK side of the Moon, any more than there is a permanent DARK side of the Earth.
The Moon has a “day” that is (not coincidentally) one month long.
It is tidally locked to the Earth, which means the same face is always pointed at us.
You can see the day/night cycle sweep across the Moon’s face as it changes phase.
16:30 There are universes all around us, popping into and out of existence at all times.
This description of Chaotic Inflation is not correct.
The bubbles are not separate universes in a strict sense, because they are still attached to our spacetime.
They grow chaotically out regions where the vacuum has not yet reached its ground state.
They do not pop into our out of existence!
They are peaks in the evolution of a scalar field which has always, and will always be there.
17:20 We’ve got a picture of what the universe looks like … since the big bang.
The CMBR shows a picture of the Universe just after Recombination.
Recombination occurred when the universe was already about 380,000 years old!
18:00 A report … in Physical Review D suggests that there might actually be bruises on our universe.
No, the article examines the CMBR for evidence of collision between our observable universe another expanding bubble of spacetime.
No evidence of such collisions was found.
You can read this in the abstract:
18:40 They actually have these spots within the [CMBR], they don’t really know what they are.
No, “they” do not “have” any such spots!
The CMBR has lots of interesting spots; the famous Cold Spot, for example.
These are called anisotropies, and can be explained as quantum fluctuations magnified to large scale due to the inflation of space.
Bubble collisions due to Chaotic Inflation are predicted to show up in the CMBR as “circular temperature discontinuities”.
From the conclusion on page 32:
19:34 They found four areas that looked like they were signatures [of bubble collision].
These four features have evidence ratios of -4.6, -4.1, -5.4 and -3.8. (Page 32)
They can not be called signatures of bubble collision.
The article is very clear about this on page 32:
19:40 [Chaotic Inflation is] ten times more likely then the standard theory to explain [these 4 features].
This is where you, via the BBC “news”, got the number ten (one order of magnitude).
It is wrong to say that the four features are better explained by Cosmic Inflation.
Such evidence was not found.
You even went on to say these 4 features “don’t actually have statistical significance”! (20:08)
How are your listeners supposed to deal with this contradiction?
21:25 They have evidence of four bubble marks in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.
No, again, these four features might have been bubble marks, but as it turns out, they are not.
It’s like you didn’t understand the text you read aloud at 20:08!
No statistical significance means it is NOT evidence!
It is only noise, like the static on a radio tuned to an unused frequency.
Beautiful, enormous, distant noise.
On Retractions
I think TWIS should give retractions at show’s end for mistakes made on-air the previous week.
The misinterpretation of the null result in the bubble universe paper is a perfect example.
The paper concludes with a null result, but was presented as though a positive result was found.
I don’t expect the hosts to catch all the mistakes that plague science journalism.
I do expect that these mistakes, when brought to attention, be addressed openly.
For what it’s worth, regarding the study about smart people getting smarter…. Malcom Gladwell writes about this in his book Outliers. He argues that public schools test children at a young age and identify the high scorers as “gifted and talented” and they are placed in the GATE program. These students are then exposed to more challenging material and then become the kids in honors programs in junior high and AP classes in high school. They may not have any more natural ability; they just performed better on an early test that put them on a path of a better learning environment.