Many physicists argue that Einstein’s position is implied by the two pillars of modern physics: Einstein’s masterpiece, the general theory of relativity, and the Standard Model of particle physics. The laws that underlie these theories are time-symmetric — that is, the physics they describe is the same, regardless of whether the variable called “time” increases or decreases. Moreover, they say nothing at all about the point we call “now” — a special moment (or so it appears) for us, but seemingly undefined when we talk about the universe at large. The resulting timeless cosmos is sometimes called a “block universe” — a static block of space-time in which any flow of time, or passage through it, must presumably be a mental construct or other illusion.

Many physicists have made peace with the idea of a block universe, arguing that the task of the physicist is to describe how the universe appears from the point of view of individual observers. To understand the distinction between past, present and future, you have to “plunge into this block universe and ask: ‘How is an observer perceiving time?’” said Andreas Albrecht, a physicist at the University of California, Davis, and one of the founders of the theory of cosmic inflation.

Others vehemently disagree, arguing that the task of physics is to explain not just how time appears to pass, but why. For them, the universe is not static. The passage of time is physical. “I’m sick and tired of this block universe,” said Avshalom Elitzur, a physicist and philosopher formerly of Bar-Ilan University. “I don’t think that next Thursday has the same footing as this Thursday. The future does not exist. It does not! Ontologically, it’s not there.”

Last month, about 60 physicists, along with a handful of philosophers and researchers from other branches of science, gathered at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, to debate this question at the Time in Cosmology conference. The conference was co-organized by the physicist Lee Smolin, an outspoken critic of the block-universe idea (among other topics). His position is spelled out for a lay audience in Time Reborn and in a more technical work, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, co-authored with the philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who was also a co-organizer of the conference. In the latter work, mirroring Elitzur’s sentiments about the future’s lack of concreteness, Smolin wrote: “The future is not now real and there can be no definite facts of the matter about the future.” What is real is “the process by which future events are generated out of present events,” he said at the conference.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-debate-over-the-physics-of-time-20160719/

With hunting being so costly to the velvet worm, it comes as little surprise that some species choose to not go hunting alone. One Australian species- Euperipatoides rowelli- has been shown to form packs, with social hierarchy, pack protection, and team hunting. These packs have an ‘alpha female’, which usually is selected by being the largest and most aggressive individual in a group.

The velvet worms form a clump, and the largest female makes her way to the top, biting and pushing the others as she does. In this way, the velvet worms not only form a tolerance to being close to one another, but also an understanding of who is – both literally and figuratively – at the top of the pack.

The pack hunts together, trapping larger prey through using multiple slime jets. The alpha female will then, much like a male lion in a pack, push the other members aside to have their feed, after which the others will join in on the feast.

http://www.eartharchives.org/articles/velvet-worms-the-voracious-snipers-of-the-undergrowth/

I’m so in love with the species of the Cambrian Explosion lately…

All of the animals here are products of the Cambrian Explosion. This event was a boom of life that occurred somewhat earlier during this era and gave rise to some of the strangest creatures that have ever lived. Most of them belonged to families doomed to die out while others managed to pull through. First of all, nothing at this time had a backbone. For many millions of years, invertebrates would be the dominant form of life on the planet and nowhere is it more obvious than here in the Burgess Shale.

http://www.eartharchives.org/articles/the-alien-world-of-the-burgess-shale/

Replication crisis, episode #7812.

Despite the Stanford prison experiment’s canonical status in intro psych classes around the country today, methodological criticism of it was swift and widespread in the years after it was conducted. Deviating from scientific protocol, Zimbardo and his students had published their first article about the experiment not in an academic journal of psychology but in The New York Times Magazine, sidestepping the usual peer review. Famed psychologist Erich Fromm, unaware that guards had been explicitly instructed to be “tough,” nonetheless opined that in light of the obvious pressures to abuse, what was most surprising about the experiment was how few guards did. “The authors believe it proves that the situation alone can within a few days transform normal people into abject, submissive individuals or into ruthless sadists,” Fromm wrote. “It seems to me that the experiment proves, if anything, rather the contrary.” Some scholars have argued that it wasn’t an experiment at all. Leon Festinger, the psychologist who pioneered the concept of cognitive dissonance, dismissed it as a “happening.”

A steady trickle of critiques have continued to emerge over the years, expanding the attack on the experiment to more technical issues around its methodology, such as demand characteristics, ecological validity, and selection bias. In 2005, Carlo Prescott, the San Quentin parolee who consulted on the experiment’s design, published an Op-Ed in The Stanford Daily entitled “The Lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment,” revealing that many of the guards’ techniques for tormenting prisoners had been taken from his own experience at San Quentin rather than having been invented by the participants.

In another blow to the experiment’s scientific credibility, Haslam and Reicher’s attempted replication, in which guards received no coaching and prisoners were free to quit at any time, failed to reproduce Zimbardo’s findings. Far from breaking down under escalating abuse, prisoners banded together and won extra privileges from guards, who became increasingly passive and cowed.

This is a deeply somber analysis, and well worth the read. In the long run, I would much prefer to see the United States gradually move away the role of global policeman, because I think it’s a bad idea for any country to be that uniquely powerful. But in my ideal world, that’s something that would happen slowly and gently. Sudden, massive disruption seems likely to end in tragedy.

If history is any guide, the next four years are the critical inflection point. The rest of the world will take its cue from the early actions of the new administration. If the next president governs as he ran, which is to say if he pursues a course designed to secure only America’s narrow interests; focuses chiefly on international terrorism—the least of the challenges to the present world order; accommodates the ambitions of the great powers; ceases to regard international economic policy in terms of global order but only in terms of America’s bottom line narrowly construed; and generally ceases to place a high priority on reassuring allies and partners in the world’s principal strategic theaters—then the collapse of the world order, with all that entails, may not be far off.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-twilight-of-the-liberal-world-order/

I am so happy about this. I think switching to instant-runoff voting would be one of the best steps we could take to improve politics in this country. It would mean that people could finally vote for their favorite candidate without worrying about throwing your vote away.

What if we’ve been electing our politicians the wrong way this whole time?

Voters in Maine will tackle that question on Tuesday, when the state holds its primaries using a radical yet sensible electoral reform that could fundamentally change how campaigns are run and who ends up winning. It will be the first time the method — known as ranked-choice, or instant-runoff, voting — is used in a statewide election.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/opinion/ranked-choice-voting-maine-san-francisco.html

http://www.zoenren-osaka.jp/contest_nagai_h28.html

From Ursula Vernon, who wrote the Hugo-award-winning novel that that I recently posted, a wonderful graphic novel, Digger (which won a Hugo of its own). This is the best comic I’ve run into in quite a while. Quirky, adventurous, sometimes funny, sometimes sweet, sometimes dark, and with the truly awesome protagonist. Highly recommended.

You can read the whole thing for free online:

http://diggercomic.com/blog/2007/02/01/wombat1-gnorf/

Marvelous magical realist science fantasy. Won the 2017 Hugo for best novelette.

Grandma Harken lived on the edge of town, in a house with its back to the desert.

Some people said that she lived out there because she liked her privacy, and some said that it was because she did black magic in secret. Some said that she just didn’t care for other people, and they were probably the closest to the truth.

When her daughter Eva asked her to move into town, to be a little closer, Grandma Harken refused. It got to be a regular ritual with them—“Mother, won’t you move in a little closer? I worry about you out there alone.”

“What’s going to bother me out here?”

“You could step on a rattlesnake,” said Eva.

“I’d rather get bit by a rattlesnake than the neighbors,” said Grandma Harken. “I get enough people coming whining to me as it is. As it is, some of ‘em get tired and turn around. A twenty minute walk has its advantages.” She held up a needle and threaded it on the first try. “Besides, I can still see what I’m doing. Talk to me when I’ve gone blind.”

https://www.apex-magazine.com/the-tomato-thief/

And this short story involves the same characters, and precedes the novelette. You may want to read it first, actually.

https://www.apex-magazine.com/jackalope-wives/

In Grand Junction, it was often dispiriting to see such enthusiasm for a figure who could become the ultimate political boom-and-bust. There was idealism, too, and so many pro-Trump opinions were the fruit of powerful and legitimate life experiences. “We just assume that if someone voted for Trump that they’re racist and uneducated,” Jeriel Brammeier, the twenty-six-year-old chair of the local Democratic Party, told me. “We can’t think about it like that.” People have reasons for the things that they believe, and the intensity of their experiences can’t be taken for granted; it’s not simply a matter of having Fox News on in the background. But perhaps this is a way to distinguish between the President and his supporters. Almost everybody I met in Grand Junction seemed more complex, more interesting, and more decent than the man who inspires them.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/24/how-trump-is-transforming-rural-america