Brights News Feed

Two amazing stories today testify both to the grandeur of nature, and to the power of humanity in understanding its intricacy and appreciating its power.

New Scientist reports on the discovery that particles of dust immersed in ionized gas can behave as information-transmitting replicators, essentially meaning that they could support “genetic” inheritance, and perhaps even support a full, living, evolutionary process.

Also, widely linked across the internet an on television news, the world has watched amateur nature video. A pride of lions attack a herd of water buffalo, but events take two unexpected twists leaving the spectators aghast and amazed. The video is on YouTube here.

A central pillar of the naturalistic worldview is under threat.

A cluster of concepts tends to accrue around philosophically stated versions of the “naturalistic worldview”. As well as excluding supernaturalistic explanations (because they are either meaningless or unknowable), the cluster of naturalistic concepts may include scientific rational empiricism (that the world is in particular ways amenable to investigation), physicalism (that all causes must be part of a causally closed system of nature which can be described in physical terms), and realism (that the world exists and persists outside of conscious experience).

But what happens if two of these concepts collide? What if the results of scientific rational empiricism start to clash with “certain intuitive features of realism”? Such a question has always been posed by the weird conclusions drawn from quantum mechanics. But an article in the current issue of Nature (abstract only, without subscription) presents experimental results which, the authors argue, deepens the shadow that the quantum world casts over realism itself.

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The PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) laboratory (New Jersey, US) is to close after 28 years, having depleted private donations in the region of $10 million, according to its founder and lead scientist, Robert G. Jahn.

Princeton has always been somewhat muted about the underground center, which attracted little professional interest from other scientists at the university. The lab has conducted many experiments in telekenetics and ESP, famously including the attempted manipulation of random number generators by subjects instructed to “think high” or “think low”.

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From the nation that brought us the Enlightenment, the French edition of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? features an astonishing display of scientific ignorance en masse. For €1,500 the question is “Qu’est-ce qui gravite autor de la Terre?” — “Which of these is in orbit around the Earth?” Is it A, the Moon; B, the Sun; C, Mars; or D, Venus?

Not only does the contestant not know the answer, he uses his “Ask the audience” lifeline… with astonishing results.

See the YouTube. (Only limited French required to follow it.) (Via Perlocutionary.)

Speaking shortly before receiving one of science’s oldest and most prestigious awards — the Royal Society’s Copley Medal — Professor Stephen Hawking has said today that humankind will “sooner or later” be wiped out by a cosmic diaster like a meteorite strike, or an anthropogenic cataclysm like nuclear war, and only by travelling to Earth-like planets orbiting other stars can we hope to survive in the long term.

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A new study by the US Air Force has proposed giant ring of superconducting magnets as an alternative to the traditional rocket-from-a-launch-pad method of reaching space. The payload, such as communication satellites and supplies for space station crews, would be encased in a conical heat shield, and gradually accelerated around the circuit on a special “sled”, before being flung into orbit off a 30 degree ramp at over 23 times the speed of sound.

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