Interesting Links for 12-09-2025

[andrewducker]

1. What holes are there in the Big Bang theory?

(tags:BigBangTheory physics science history )

2. "Gender Ideology" Is a Conspiracy Theory

(tags:transgender bigotry conspiracy LGBT )

3. Would you like some reasons to have hope about the environment?

(tags:hope nature history environment )

4. Pharmaceutical companies are pulling out of the UK because the UK government isn't investing in life sciences

(tags:UK healthcare investment doom pharmaceuticals )

5. Factsheet: The immune system and ME/CFS

(tags:ChronicFatigueSyndrome health immune_system )

6. Hyundai is now delaying its EV battery plant that was raided by ICE

(tags:manufacturing usa racism doom korea )

7. You have a chance to collect meteorite fragments from Scottish highland hills for first time in 100 years

(tags:scotland space rocks )

Comments

[redbird]

4. This mentions in passing that Merck, and probably other companies, are going to be moving some of that research to the United States, not because the US is investing more in life science research, but because Trump is threatening companies, saying move your plants here or else.

That may be a reasonable decision for Merck, but it's not "the UK isn't investing as much in this as the United States." it's "the US is also cutting drug and other life science research funds, but Trump is threatening to raise tariffs again, or stop buying our products, if we don't pay up."

The Trumpstortion Principle in Action

[dewline]

That's what this is. Extortion.

[calimac]

1) Wow, this is absolutely and completely clear. That's rare for an article on such an abstruse technical topic.

2) I studied a little biology at university and quickly learned that sex and gender are messy. Trans people didn't come up as a topic (this was a half century ago), but when I learned of their existence I was not in the least surprised. To posit a conspiracy theory creating this requires a kindergarten-block level of understanding of biology.

3) If it really is hopeless, then there's no point in doing anything about it, so elbiotipo's rebuttal to Anonymous has no force.

6) If I were Hyundai, and consequently more concerned with moral force than with profits, I'd pull out of the US altogether. This wouldn't be good for me (the real me), as I drive a Hyundai and rely on their corporate dealer network.

What holes are there in the Big Bang theory?

[jack]

Just one infinitesimally small but very crucial :)

Re: What holes are there in the Big Bang theory?

[jack]

More seriously, that is very interesting.

On the one hand, I am heartened that we *are* still finding out more about universe. It seemed like we might have just found all the evidence we can find for the forseeable future, and need to live with the uncertainty.

On the other hand, I am still confused about some of the things in the article. It seems we are slowly getting a better picture of dark energy and dark matter and how they affect the expansion of the universe, much of which was a surprise. But I thought they both had enough evidence that physicists took their existance as complete fact, as someone said, "physicists like postulating invisible matter even less than everyone else, they beleive in it because they have to". Likewise, I thought cosmic background radiation was very strong evidence for the big bang, I'm not sure if they're really considering "not a big bang" or just "big bang was quite different than we thought".

Re: What holes are there in the Big Bang theory?

[jack]

In fact, now I look closer, I notice "In an open letter published in New Scientist magazine in 2004, a group of renegade cosmologists declared:"... that was twenty years ago. Firstly, I'm suspicious it was in new scientist not a journal or preprint. Secondly, I looked it up and apparently the guy who wrote it wrote an anti-big-bang book in the 90s, and wikipedia thinks the theory is a real one, but mainstream scientists don't accept it as an alternative to the big bang. And the letter complains about making up all these new dark matter and dark energy and expansion things that no-one can see -- but I think all those things have got *more* certain since 2004. Which makes me doubt the rest of the article I don't know as much about :( (I assume the facts are accurate but the gist may not be)

Re: What holes are there in the Big Bang theory?

[bens_dad]

The New Scientist has had articles about most of this on and off for a good while (several years probably).

I think the real point is that new observations are more and more clearly showing that the current theory isn't right but no-one has a better idea. Some are scrabbling around for a tweak or a replacement and others are sticking with what we know at least for now.

Re: What holes are there in the Big Bang theory?

[doubtingmichael]

I found the article rather annoying. It's using a lot of flourishes and claims that aren't justified.

- Fred Hoyle was not a maverick astronomer, he was an astronomer, and a good one too. (He did a lot of work on how stars evolve.)
- But he happened to be wrong about the Big Bang, preferring the steady state idea. Which rather undermines the claim that the universe must have had a historical beginning because it's expanding as an "inevitable consequence". (Hoyle was wrong, but not stupid. He had a philosophical dislike of a universe created at time X, for probably the same reason the Catholic church likes it.)
- Do you really want to say Einstein "recanted", when he was convinced after evidence was presented? This was not a Galileo-style defeat.

My understanding is that Dark Matter is reasonably well understood in its behaviour, but not what it is made of. (It's probably a subatomic particle of some kind that was missed out when we were busy finding all the particles that would interact with light.) A few people still prefer the idea that gravitation isn't quite what our theories make of it. But pictures of light-warped galaxies support the idea that Dark Matter forms clouds, usually around galaxies.

Dark Energy, on the other hand, is very strange, and all the ideas about it are weird and speculative. It's already a "make the numbers work" fudge even before you add the apparent reduction it's undergoing. I would not be surprised if it turned out to be replaced by a "whoops, we missed something" ten years from now. (But I wouldn't be surprised if that didn't happen either!)

I think everyone in the field believes in the Big Bang, but there are a lot of models for how it works, and the most accepted one is struggling now. These measurements are making it possible that the universe is older, or younger, and will affect our predictions of what the universe will do.

And lastly, it doesn't mention the biggest question: why does everyone put up with Sheldon?