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Merry TWISmas!!!, LHC Finds Chi, Fluoride Fighters, Neti Dangers, Maggot Medicine FTW!, Buffed Mole Rats, Techie Devices, Universal Validation, RNA Magic, Floating Drugs, And Much More…
Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer!
‘Twas the night before Twismas, when all thro’ the house,
Many studies were stirring, even one on a mouse;
The stories were stacked by the webcam with care,
In hopes that their moment soon would be there;
The minions were nestled all snug in their beds,
While science-y visions danc’d in their heads,
And Kirsten with her baby, and I with my pabst,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap-
When out on the internet arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my slumber to see what was the matter.
Away to my windows I flew like a kite,
Clicked open the browsers, and signed into my skype.
The tweeters were a twitter, the inbox was full
Facebook was liking it, Google was too
According to NASA, something new had appeared
A satellite tracking of a sleigh and rein-deer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I thought for a moment it must be a trick.
For much faster than photons this UFO came,
And whistled, and shouted, and call’d out by name:
“Now! Copernicus, now! Newton, now! Einstein, and Bohr,
“On! Darwin, on! Huxley, on! Watson and Crick;
I read he exclaimed this, then I got a text
Happy Twis mas to all from this week in science… coming up next
LHC finds Chi particle
fluoride resistant bacteria
Why Neti Pots Are Bad For Your Brain
Medical maggots
Naked mole rats feel no pain when exposed to acid
Get a free audiobook at Audible.com!
Techie devices
Validating the universe
RNA to DNA
Hormones make women more sensitive to cute babies
If you love TWIS, please support us by donating below:
I'm the host of this little science show. 
40:00 [String theory says we live in] a space of 9 dimensions … even though we EXIST in three.
A small point of language. I think you meant “… even though we only OBSERVE three”.
According to SU(9) super-string theory, there are 9 spacial dimensions, 6 of which are compact.
The presence of these compact dimensions are hard to detect because they have a small effect on motion.
In the theory, though, these dimensions very much “exist”, and we really do move through them.
40:30 Nobody, until now, has actually been able to [run a String Theory Monty Carlo simulation].
This is NOT the first computer simulation of string theory!
Monty Carlo computer simulations of string theory have been performed since the 1980s.
This article talks about the first simulation of a particular model, the IKKT matrix model.
This model is interesting because it shows evolution from SO(9) to SO(3).
43:30 It’s a nice model, but… show me a Higgs boson.
This is a horribly insinuative and foolish comment.
Sang-Woo Kim, Jun Nishimura, and Asato Tsuchiya are working on a fascinating theoretical model.
Their work is respected in the community, but obviously not by you, Justin.
Maybe you should keep your mouth shut if you don’t have anything to add.
Stop being a nay-saying jerk.
Have I been charged with scientific heresy here?
If that is the charge than I willingly submit myself as guilty.
The show is an irreverent look at science, which means we do not by default take on the pre-ordained opinions of universities, research institutions, individuals or governments into account when reviewing the stories.
If you make science about how respected a researcher is within the community and not about the results of that work, you have failed to engage in a pursuit of knowledge.
There are enough cheerleaders of the Higgs Boson within the scientific community, it does not suffer from our absence along the sideline.
Like Justin, on the neti pot story the first question in my mind was whether the “tap water” was municipal (treated) or just pumped out of the swamp.
You’re right, the scientific community does not suffer from your comments.
Your poor listeners do suffer, greatly.
What you call “irreverent” I call insulting, intolerant, often incorrect, and proudly ignorant.
I want you to stop.
I want you to research rumors before sharing them as facts.
I want you to keep your unjustified and scientifically unfounded opinions to yourself.
I want you to keep your desperate negativity and childish pride off the air.
I’m tired of it.
I love that word you used: heresy.
It’s so evocative of the Renaissance, and freedom from dogma; especially religious dogma.
Of course, you use it as a sad ironic sense, as a sort of doublespeak.
You aren’t being accused of scientific heresy! Didn’t you read what I said?
I clearly accused you of spreading your own personal doctrine of defiance before reason.
Justin, you are in the habit of playing victim to an imagined cult of oppressive scientific sophists.
When in fact, you’re just afraid of and/or unable to grasp the science.
You’re no brave heretic, nailing the Magna Carta to the church doors. Please!
This delusion is as transparent and permeable as the arguments you concoct to rationalize it.
You don’t understand the Higgs mechanism well enough to satisfy natural, healthy skepticism.
You haven’t studied the Standard Model enough to see the significance of non-zero W and Z masses.
It doesn’t come together in your head. It doesn’t make sense. So you reject it.
You reject it the only way you know how: label it as dogma.
Then you play the free-thinking hero fighting the preordained opinions of universities, etc.
You run in terror from the pursuit of knowledge, to hide in fear and ignorance.
I cannot blame you for this. This is not my complaint.
Many people don’t have the stomach for, of all things, particle physics!
I mean, all that math? So intimidating!
But then, you do something unethical, and, to me, fearsomely evil.
You dispense a deluge of delusional diarrhea, on the radio, for all to hear:
*pffthhhht* Ohhhh, the Higgs Boson, what nonsense, scientific elitists trying to justify their grant money!
*poomhhh* Uuuuh, the curvature of space-time, what nonsense; and black holes? Too scary to be real!
*poshputts* Mmmmh, the universe expanding, what nonsense, redshift could be anything, CMBR be damned!
Don’t you feel sorry for your listeners?
It’s bad enough that on TWIS, you go into little more depth than the headline of most stories…
Add to it this frightened, uninformed rambling…
I am worried that TWIS is making it’s listeners DUMBER, not SMARTER.
I run in terror from the pursuit of knowledge, to hide in fear and ignorance?
Great rant, but who’s it for?
I’ve been hanging in the hot tub with knowledge and her bff pragmatism, sipping reason though a bendy rhetoric straw of performative thought… did you not get the invite… again?
I have never made any of the following statements
*pffthhhht* Ohhhh, the Higgs Boson, what nonsense, scientific elitists trying to justify their grant money!
*poomhhh* Uuuuh, the curvature of space-time, what nonsense; and black holes? Too scary to be real!
*poshputts* Mmmmh, the universe expanding, what nonsense, redshift could be anything, CMBR be damned!
If you are going to invent opinions to argue against out of whole cloth please do not pretend the ideas to be mine. (though I do intend to use poshputts in a sentence someday, thanks for that one)
I do not think the scientific community is made up of elitists make-ity-uping stuff to get grant money, but I have predicted the Higgs boson not to exist since before the LHC was finished.
I have never said the curvature of space is nonsense, I believe this IS gravity.
I have never said that black holes are too scary to exist, but I do I doubt that they trap light.
I have never said that red shift could be anything, I have said that it is a poor measurement by which to believe the entire universe is ballooning away from itself.
You accuse me of having a personal doctrine of defiance before reason…
I think you are missing what we do here entirely.
This is not a lecture, this is not a course in physics or biology or cosmology course.
It is science news stories, sometimes un-vetted, and we don’t just read the stories, we comment, speculate, debate and perform reason.
I take opposing ideas sometimes to give them a shot at being argued, and at other times because I genuinely like them.
Your responses seem to be emotionally tied to a certain line of questioning in physics and anything that does not agree is seen as disrespectful to you…
This reminds me of the reactions I used to get from my older rants which also received lots of heated overblown criticism when I would say that natural selection didn’t seem like enough basis for evolution. I suggested that action in a parent’s lifetime would influence the genetic traits of the offspring.
I got letters such as yours, filled with outrage and emotion and was attacked for doubting natural selection as the end all explanation of evolution, and of course my failure to understand the issue was giving ammunition to creationists.
Since then the role of epigenetics and the adjustments that take place due to the childhood conditions of the father as well as the hormonal stresses of the pregnant mother have been shown to have important roles in influencing generational changes in offspring.
I received very little heat for suggesting Neanderthals weren’t killed off, but more likely bred out of existence by early humans… but it wasn’t a popular idea when I said it and since then we’ve discovered that all European races have traces of Neanderthal DNA in them…
I liked the Hobbit homo floresiensis as a new species, not a diseased island dwarf… most experts rejected the idea, but the evidence panned out in favor of new species.
The Higgs was predicted to be found with 95% certainty by people dedicated to a line of questioning…
I predicted otherwise.
The LHC is running… I’m still in the hot tub…
So far I’m winning.
By the way, as we have discussed here in the past, I have one issue with which is the source of all my discontent with the standard model is… Gravity.
My new fave quote is vis Michio Kaku regarding this
http://bigthink.com/ideas/41579
“…the Standard Model does not contain gravity…”
This is the root of all my physics rants
This is the root of all my physics rants
No, it’s not.
Gravity not being unified with the standard model has nothing logically to do with your various rejections of well-established physics.
Those “physics rants” exist because you remain ignorant of the genuine scientific arguments.
Your responses seem to be emotionally tied to a certain line of questioning in physics and anything that does not agree is seen as disrespectful to you…
There are two separate issues here:
1. You are often wrong.
When you’re wrong about something, I sometimes provide the correct explanation.
You accuse me of being closed minded, and of rejecting “anything that does not agree” with me.
This is hypocritical nonsense, because you’re the one unswayed by clear, powerful, logical argument.
1. You are often disrespectful.
Being so often wrong, you seek a sorely lacking justification for these contrarian beliefs.
So, you put down the out-crowd of “scientific elites”.
You escape the cognitive dissonance of the unknown by burrowing in a nest of quack science.
So far I’m winning.
You feel the need to prove your position by keeping score.
You ignore the losses and tally only the wins.
You point to success over fools as evidence for your superiority over your opponent and their stronger argument.
So pitiful.
The LHC is running.
No, it’s shut down for the winter.
The “scientific elites” thing is your argument for what I’m saying, not mine. It’s as if you’ve taken a crackpot physics argument from somebody else’s crackpot physics ideas and applied my name to it.
I do not believe science to be an elitist activity at all, far from it. I believe anyone can dip their toes in it.
There is nothing in physics that is proven that I will reject. Physics works.
But there are unsolved problems in physics, they have answers, but they are not yet proven.
Gravity is an unsolved problem in physics. It’s a huge unsolved problem. We know what it does, but not how or why. And what we ultimately discover about it may not end in unification as a force.
There are questions that physics has not proven that we can feel free to ponder and contemplate.
This doesn’t mean that physics has no answer for the mysteries, just no proof.
In terms of gravity we have the graviton, the gravity wave, and emergent gravity… all good answers, still not proven.
The Higgs boson is an answer for mass… but it is not proven.
Continuing the conversation beyond the answer is not disrespecting science, it’s performing it.