Isn't that called stat mech?

Nice article, but please make a distinction between the Big Bang and inflation. The Big Bang theory is the general idea that the early universe was very hot and dense and then expanded outward from there. This general theory has a lot evidence for it — the chief is the increasing red-shift of objects with distance.…

I was at the game (in orange and black, of course) and thought it was pretty low class when the house was booing him as he lay out on the ice. Definitely disappointed in that type of behavior.

I've heard talks from both Max Tegmarks. One, the respected cosmologist and, two, the dude bullshitting in a dorm room at 3AM. Guess which one is being discussed above.

I've seen some selkie stories, but not a ton. Sea-Hearts by Margo Lanagan is pretty good, but not too recent (2010, I think). Certainly didn't know there was a flood of them.

I read the first three Culture books (Consider Phlebas, Player of Games, Use of Weapons) in order. It really isn't necessary, though, and I probably least enjoyed Consider Phlebas, so I'd say it's worth jumping ahead if it isn't doing it for you. All three books are fairly different in their way so you may like the…

Oh, I totally agree with what you're saying here. The LHC is essentially an electroweak-scale experiment so WIMPs should make an appearance there if they exist. Evidence of WIMPs is definitely a significant find in particle physics and if related to dark matter, a huge find in astrophysics and cosmology.

When I spoke of scales, I meant energy scales (a habit from my days as a particle physics). The Planck scale is about 10^19 Gev while the weak scale is around 200 GeV, so the weak scale is the tinier from that point of view. Since the Planck scale is so much higher, generic effective field theory arguments imply that…

Are you thinking of something in particular regarding this discovery being relevant to quantum gravity? If it really is a WIMP signal, then the dynamics are of the weak scale, which is well below the Planck scale so I wouldn't expect much insight. Sure, anything is possible, but the effective field theory logic…

Where's this art from? I like Supes a lot.

Thank you for the detailed response!

How does the "Snowball Earth" differ from the idea of ice ages? Just more extreme?

"Straight line" is sort of a simplified description in this example but there is a analogous technical concept that suitably generalizes to curved spaces. What's really meant by a "straight" route between two points on a sphere is the most direct (shortest) route between those two points. Everything Esther is saying…

Interesting suggestion. It probably depends on what you mean by a tsunami. In general relativity there are theoretically things that you might think of as a single gravitational wave-front. You might call this a tsunami but it's a bit of a stretch, I think.

To be fair, I couldn't really explain classical mechanics in 14 words., let alone string theory.

Spin isn't usually measured in the same units as speed. I guess they mean that a point on the black hole's horizon is moving at half the speed of light?

I'm not an expert on the Alcubierre equations but to my knowledge they follow from general relativity so can't really violate what I'm saying. To be more specific, the speed of light in my answer refers to a local quantity; how fast a particle traverses the space in its immediate vicinity. The types of effects you are…

In general relativity, gravitational waves would communicate changes in spacetime, and these travel at the speed of light as well. Really, light inherits its speed limit from the universal speed limit of spacetime itself. IMO, it would be more conceptually correct to call the "speed of light" the "speed of gravity"…

That's assuming the simulation even uses a lattice. Sure, we use lattices in our simulations but once you start postulating some kind of god-like entity that simulates the whole universe, I think all bets are off on making a guess on how that's actually implemented.

I seem to remember Mr Wizard doing a similar experiment one time. I tried to find it on youtube, but just ended up watching a bunch of Mr Wizard eps.