Multiverse

Further to The war on falsifiability, from Laszlo Bencze: In This Idea Must Die, cosmologist Sean Carroll argues that the criterion of falsifiability as a characteristic of scientific theories must die because it is holding back the advance of science. So what is “falsifiability” and why does it matter? First of all, falsifiability is not a scientific theory at all. It is a philosophical proposition about the nature of scientific theories. Basically it is the tent pole for Karl Popper’s attempt to distinguish science from other things like pseudo-science, metaphysics, and mathematics. It states that unless a theory allows for the possibility that certain observations would prove the theory false, the theory is not a scientific one.  Karl Popper (1902–1994) Read More ›

Barry Arrington notes Absence of evidence for a proposition does not make it unfalsifiable. A proposition is unfalsifiable if, in principle, there can be no empirical test that would disprove it. That is of course correct. But where does it leave the multiverse? Writing as I did, I had taken for granted that no evidence could support the multiverse. Science is about studying this universe, not hypothetical others. But I was getting ahead of myself. There may be no evidence for a cougar concealing himself in the wildlife preserve adjacent to a hog barn. But anyone familiar with the big cat’s elusiveness would be unwise to rule it out in principle. A systematic search with well-trained tracking dogs might verify Read More ›

My (O’Leary for News)’s new piece at Salvo: Proving Grounded Multiverse Supporters Put the Brakes on Falsifiability … today, some scientists want to throw falsifiability overboard. They hope by doing this to protect the concept of the multiverse. Put simply, there is currently no evidence for the existence of any universes other than our own, making the theory of the multiverse unfalsifiable. But if the proposal to dispense with falsifiability were accepted, that would be very convenient for naturalist atheists. They could then argue that any stream of events that occurs in our universe may well have occurred differently in any one of an infinite number of other universes. So no inferences (other than their own) could be drawn from Read More ›

From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong blog: Today I happened to come across a really wonderful discussion there though, and wanted to draw attention to it, even though it’s from a year ago. It’s entitled A View from an Ex-String Theorist and consists of a long piece by someone who has recently left string theory, as well as some answers to questions asked by others. If you want to understand what string theory looks like these days to good theorists who are working on it, read what “No_More_Strings” has to say. The suggestion that “string theorists” should stop calling what they do “string theory” is an excellent one. … If you didn’t have to start every grant application Read More ›

In a comparatively nonsense-free book review, we read, Schrödinger and Einstein both spent far longer on the hunt for a unification of quantum physics and relativity than they had on the breakthroughs for which they are known. This quixotic quest forms the major part of Halpern’s book, and it makes for a tragic tale. instein revised and rejigged his work, to the increasing ennui of his peers and the increasing adulation of the world. Schrödinger, never as famous, overstepped the mark, trying so hard to be taken seriously that he offended Einstein with public pronouncements about the superiority of his own work. For three years, Einstein didn’t return Schrödinger’s letters. Their fellow physicists became more bewildered and irritated by the Read More ›

Never boils. But that somehow never matters. Do readers remember these stories? The multiverse circus is coming back to a PBS affiliate near you? And If you’ve ever doubted that popular culture loves the multiverse… Well, here is public broadcasting on Gravitational Waves From Bubble Universe Collisions: Follow inflation to what many theorists think is its logical conclusion, though, and things get very strange. That’s because many versions of inflation lead straight to a multiverse: that is, a cosmos in which our universe is just one of many universes, each with different laws and fundamental constants of physics. The idea is controversial, not least because there is no guarantee that we would ever be able to prove or disprove the Read More ›

Which means the war on falsifiability has totally infiltrated popular culture Further to Wait till it hits the school system, our favourite NON-creationist mathematician Peter Woit notes, I know I should be coming up with material on different topics here, but the multiverse stuff sometimes is just too hard to ignore. Next week’s Comicpalooza in Houston will feature string theorist Gerald Cleaver. His blurb tells us that: His EUCOS team conducts long-term systematic computer-based studies of global phenomenology of parameter spaces of the string landscape of around 10,500 possible string-derived universes and its theorized multiverse realization. A local paper has a news story: Physicist to discuss multiverse theory at comic convention. According to the article: … See also: The multiverse  Read More ›

At Scientific American, courtesy of Dan Falk and Quanta Magazine: we learn that in his latest book, Science’s Path from Myth to Multiverse, Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg explores how science made the modern world, and where it might take us from here: Myth to multiverse? Wasn’t a long haul, was it?: But at least we can see some of those other planets. That’s not the case with the universes that are said to make up the multiverse. It’s not part of the requirement of a successful physical theory that everything it describes be observable, or that all possible predictions of the theory be verifiable. For example, we have a very successful theory of the strong nuclear forces, called quantum chromodynamics Read More ›

Yes, yes, Peter Woit of Not Even Wrong. From Nautilus: Woit’s major complaint about the theory, then and now, is that it fails to make testable predictions, so it can’t be checked for errors—in other words, that it’s “not even wrong.” Contrast this with general relativity, for example, which enabled Einstein to predict, among other things, the degree to which a star’s light is deflected as it passes the sun. Had measurements of this effect not agreed with Einstein’s prediction, general relativity would have been disproved. Such falsifiability is a widely cited criterion for what constitutes science, a perspective usually attributed to philosopher Karl Popper. Plus, general relativity took Einstein only 10 years. String theory has taken more than 30 Read More ›

Not Even Wrong has the story: Just about ten years ago, my April 1 posting here was a fantasy about the Stanford ITP getting major funding from the Templeton Foundation, using it to fund a program on the multiverse, and renaming themselves the Stanford Templeton Research Institute for Nature, God and Science. The last part hasn’t yet come true yet, but I just noticed the announcement last year of a $878K Inflation, the Multiverse, and Holography grant from Templeton to the SITP, the third part of “A three component Templeton Initiative at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics.” To get some idea of the scale of this funding, note that the entire NSF budget for theoretical HEP is about $12 Read More ›

Hey, not much religion news today, as the new atheists must be on vacay or something. But our old fave Peter Woit is back, and offers this re discovering the parallel universe: The plan has been to inject a beam into the LHC this week, leading to a news item in the UK Daily Express about how Scientists at Large Hadron Collider hope to make contact with PARALLEL UNIVERSE in days. This nonsense comes to us courtesy ofthis paper published in Physics Letters B. Unfortunately the machine checkout going on at the LHC has identified a problem that may delay contact with the PARALLEL UNIVERSE for a little while. Looks like no beam this week, for details see this from Read More ›

Here at Science Friday: are excerpts from Brockman’s latest, This Idea Must Die : Seth Lloyd: Suppose that everything that could exist does exist. The multiverse is not a bug but a feature. We have to be careful: The set of everything that could exist belongs to the realm of metaphysics rather than physics. Tegmark and I have shown that with a minor restriction, however, we can pull back from the metaphysical edge. Suppose that the physical multiverse contains all things that are locally finite, in the sense that any finite piece of the thing can be described by a finite amount of information. The set of locally finite things is mathematically well defined: It consists of things whose behavior Read More ›