Luke A. Barnes's Blog
July 25, 2020
A Thick Layer: A Fine-Tuned Critique of Arvin Ash
Arvin Ash is an engineer with a YouTube channel. He recently posted a video titled “Is God in Physics? Fine Tuning Scrutinized“. It gets almost everything wrong: history, philosophy, science, and fine-tuning. All quotes from the video, unless noted otherwise.
A. Motion in the heavens
Until 350 years ago, there was a distinct demarcation between what people observed on Earth and what people saw up in the sky. There did not seem to be any connection. Things that happened on Earth could at least be...
April 29, 2020
Speaking Via Zoom in Brampton, UK
Geraint Lewis and I will be speaking tomorrow-ish remotely in the UK at Cafe Sci Brampton on our new book The Cosmic Revolutionarys Handbook: (Or: How to Beat the Big Bang). All welcome! Itll be an early start for us, but hopefully better wherever you are: 5am Friday Sydney; 8pm Thursday UK, 12pm to 3pm Thursday USA.
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From the Organisers:
Dear Café Sci Supporters,
You are invited to take part in the next Zoom presentation on The Cosmic Revolutionarys Handbook on Thu 30 Apr which will begin at...
January 30, 2020
Vale Prof. Richard Hunstead
Joss Bland-Hawthorn has tweeted that Prof. Richard Hunstead passed away last night. When I started my undergraduate studies at Sydney University, Dick was one of the organisers of the Talented Student Program. He bore with a smile my barrage of naive questions about the universe and cosmology, and directed me towards a project on the origin of wiggles in the cosmic microwave background. His enthusiasm was catching and I was hooked; almost 20 years later, I’m still researching cosmology.
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I...
October 1, 2019
Our Climate: An Open Letter to my High School Principal
Dear Rod,
Next year will mark 20 years since I graduated from Coffs Harbour Christian Community High School. I’m sure you’d count me as a success story – I went from Macksville to Cambridge, and a career as a research astrophysicist.
It is with some frustration that I read your recent comments regarding climate change. Firstly, you may want to think about the effect on your students of dismissing Ms Thunberg as a “little girl” (she is 16) and as having “mental problems” (she has Asperger’s sy...
September 25, 2019
No, Roger Penrose did not refute Fine-Tuning
A YouTube video has been brought to my attention, which seems to show physicist Roger Penrose refuting the idea that the entropy of the universe is fine-tuned for life. The crucial section starts at 16:05. The video is jarringly edited: we aren’t shown what the interviewer actually asked before this section. The longer, complete interview is linked to, but I haven’t watched it.
Penrose: “It’s a gross course tuning. The entropy in the gravitational field is ridiculously small compared with the...
July 30, 2019
Master of Research Opportunities at WSU
Western Sydney University is advertising research projects for prospective masters students. You’ll find one from me about our impending collision with the Andromeda Galaxy. (Well, if you can call a few billion years “impending”.)
Will we survive the Andromeda collision?Supervisors: Luke Barnes (Data Science, Astronomy)
School/Institute: School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics
The Milky Way’s nearest galactic neighbour – of similar size – is Andromeda, located 2.5 million light year...
July 28, 2019
Vale Verlie Lee (nee Maurice): Sydney Observatory star measurer and computer
Reposted from Sydney Observatory:
Verlie Lee passed away on 15th June 2019 in Nambucca Heads and Eungai Creek on the North Coast of NSW at the age of 88. Verlie worked at Sydney Observatory from 1948 to 1954 and she was one of the many ‘hidden figures’ who worked on the Astrographic Catalogue, tides and other charts in observatories during that period. Recently the work many women did behind the scenes in science is being brought to the fore and it is timely to remember Verlie June Maurice’s...
July 25, 2019
New Book: The Cosmic Revolutionary’s Handbook (Or: How to Beat the Big Bang)
New! With Geraint Lewis, from Cambridge University Press, in Feb 2020:
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Free yourself from cosmological tyranny! Everything started in a big bang? Invisible dark matter? Black holes? Why accept such a weird cosmos? For all those who wonder about this bizarre universe, and those who want to overthrow the big bang, this handbook gives you ‘just the facts’: the observations that have shaped these ideas and theories. While the big bang holds the attention of scientists, it isn’t perfect. The auth...
June 29, 2019
When a Fact becomes Evidence
Another edition of “How to Use Bayes Theorem Properly 101” (links to previous posts are below). I was listening to a YouTube debate, and one of the speakers offered the following definition of “evidence”:
Evidence is a body of objectively verifiable facts, that are positively indicative of or exclusively concordant with one particular conclusion over any other.
They then demonstrated the many fatal flaws of this definition; for example, there is no such thing as objective verification of fact...
April 29, 2019
Fine-Tuning and the Sharp-Shooter Fallacy
(This is a repurposed Facebook comment.)
The Fine-Tuning Argument (FLA) is accused of committing the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Sam the shooter wants to hit a bullseye, but isn’t having much luck. They can barely hit the side of a barn. Having sprayed bullets at the barn all day, they devise a plan: pick an arbitrary bullet hole, paint a bullseye around it, ignore the rest of the bullet holes, and announce themselves to be a sharpshooter.
The moral of this story can be stated in a few ways....
