Podcast

Hello Reality, on Skepticality

23 July 2015


Jim Baggott talks to Derek Colanduno, host of the official radio show and podcast of Skeptic Magazine and the Skeptics Society, at TAM13 in Las Vegas. Jim’s section starts about 28 minutes into the podcast. TAM13 was the 13th AMAZING Meeting, organised by the James Randi Education Foundation. Jim was invited to give a talk on Farewell to Reality.

 

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Article

Origins in 24 Hours

26 May 2015


In the preface to Origins I’ve mapped out a ‘timeline of creation’, from the big bang to the origin of human consciousness, projected to a single day. On this reckoning, the universe ‘begins’ at midnight. Particles with mass appear the merest whisper of a fraction of a second afterwards, and the universe is bathed in light at the moment of recombination two seconds later, as primordial electrons latch themselves to primordial hydrogen and helium nuclei. Stars and galaxies first appear between 12:30 and 1:00 a.m., with complex molecules starting to make their appearance sometime between 3 a.m. and 6:30 a.m., in time for breakfast.

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Article

Against Falsifiability

9 April 2015


Nearly two years after the publication of Farewell to Reality, the debate about ‘fairy-tale’ physics rages on. Highly speculative and arguably non-scientific papers continue to be published on aspects of superstring theory and the multiverse. Peter Woit recently drew attention on his blog to a Templeton Foundation grant of almost $900,000 to Stanford University theorists Leonard Susskind, Andre Linde and Stephen Shenker, on the subject of ‘Inflation, the Multiverse and Holography’ (see here). I think we can agree that’s a lot of money.

Now, I didn’t expect Farewell to change anything – its purpose was simply to raise awareness of some of the problems with contemporary theoretical physics and engage the debate. However, I confess to being a little disappointed to see that arguments against ‘fairy-tale’ physics still tend to be based on Austrian philosopher Karl Popper’s criterion of falsifiability, which states that a theory is not considered to be scientific unless it makes predictions that can in principle be falsified.

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Article

NHK TV Programme on Atomic Espionage

11 March 2015


Last month I was approached by Japanese television company NHK for help in developing a programme they’re planning to broadcast later this year, as part of a series of events to commemorate the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago.

I’m not familiar with all the details, but I got the sense that the programme will focus on the role of atomic spies during the war. I’ll post more details if and when I get them.

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Article

In Thrall to Uncertainty

18 September 2014


Jim Baggott reviews The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty, by Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber, published in Nature 503 (2014) 308-9.

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Podcast

Rationally Speaking, with Massimo Pigliucci

7 September 2014


As part of our special mini-interviews series, Massimo talks to Jim Baggott, author of “Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth.” Jim is one of an increasingly vocal number of critics of some directions taken lately by research in fundamental theoretical physics, and particularly of string theory. Massimo and Jim explore what it means for some physicists to call for a new era of “post-empirical” science.

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Article

The Evidence Crisis

9 June 2014


Thanks to a kind invitation from the Simons and John Templeton Foundations and the World Science Festival, last Friday (30 May 2014) I participated in a public discussion on ‘Evidence in the Natural Sciences’ with Professors Brian Greene and Peter Galison.

This discussion was the final act in a one-day symposium of the same name, held at the Simons Foundation’s Gerald D. Fischbach Auditorium on 5th Avenue, New York City. These were comfortable, well-appointed surroundings. But the overwhelming message from the symposium was actually quite discomfiting. In its 300-year maturity, it seems that science is confronted with nothing less than a crisis of evidence.

 

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Video

Symposium on Evidence in the Natural Sciences

30 May 2014


What is the difference between evidence, fact, and proof? Can we quantify evidence; is something more evident than something else? What does it take to convince a scientist, a scientific community, and the general public of the correctness of a scientific result in the era of very complicated experiments, big data, and weak signals? This symposium, co-hosted by the Simons Foundation and John Templeton Foundation and in collaboration with the World Science Festival, addressed these and related questions, during a scientific program suited for established researchers, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students working in the natural sciences and allied fields, and during an evening program aimed at the above scientists in addition to the well-informed general public.

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Article

Farewell to Reality?

7 January 2014


Science writer and historian Jim Baggott retraces how the relentless pursuit of a ‘theory of everything’ has led some theorists and their funders to pursue structures that cannot be tested, abandoning the scientific method as we know it.

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Article

Fairy-Tale Physics

1 November 2013


Modern physics is heady stuff. It seems that we can barely get through a week without being assaulted by the latest astounding physics story, its headlines splashed gaudily over the covers of popular science magazines and, occasionally, newspapers. The public’s appetite for these stories is seemingly insatiable, and there’s no escaping them. They are the subjects of innumerable radio and television news reports and television documentaries, the latter often delivered with breathless exuberance and lots of arm-waving, from unconnected but always exotic locations, against a background of overly dramatic music.

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