“Popperazi” = falsifiability enthusiasts, a la Karl Popper
Here.
When George Ellis and Joe Silk wrote an op-ed in the prestigious Nature magazine, dramatically entitled “Defend the integrity of physics,” cosmologist Sean Carroll responded via Twitter (not exactly a prestigious scientific journal, but much more effective in public discourse) with, and I quote: “My real problem with the falsifiability police is: we don’t get to demand ahead of time what kind of theory correctly describes the world.” The “falsifiability police”? Wow.
It’s how he sees them, Massimo, and whatever appears to be true to him is true.
The focus, of course, is superstring theory and related concepts (such as that of a multiverse), which appear to be dominant in the fundamental physics and cosmology communities at the moment, and yet have gathered an increasingly vociferous number of critics who allege that these mathematical constructs are just that: math (possibly even useful math), but not science. More.
Pass the cheez zizzles this way, please, and someone go for more pop.
See also: Not only is earth one nice planet among many, but our entire universe is lost in a crowd
and
The multiverse: Where everything turns out to be true, except philosophy and religion
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String theory is built on the assumption that there should be some overarching unity to mathematics. Specifically it is built on the assumption that the mathematics of General Relativity and the mathematics Quantum Mechanics should be able to be ‘unified’ into a single mathematical ‘theory of everything’ that describes the entire universe:
For atheistic materialists/naturalists, there are two deep flaws with the assumption that General Relativity and the ‘radically different formalism’ of Quantum Mechanics can be unified into a single mathematical theory.
The first deep flaw in this assumption is that Godel has proven that mathematics is fundamentally ‘incomplete’.
Godel proved that, if numbers are included, there cannot be a ‘complete’ mathematical theory of everything.
Even Hawking himself at one time admitted, and apparently subsequently forgot, that there cannot be a ‘complete’ mathematical theory of everything,
Weinberg, who is an atheist, and although he was not specifically commenting on the incompleteness of mathematics, none-the-less Weinberg succinctly puts the mathematical dilemma that incompleteness presents to atheists as such:
In fact, according to Chaitin, there are an infinite number of true mathematical theorems that exist that cannot be proved from any finite system of axioms.
As well, in support of mathematical incompleteness and also in support of the contention that general relativity and quantum theory are fundamentally mathematically incompatible from each other, general relativity and quantum theory are formulated in two very different mathematical languages
I think that Dr. Gordon has done a beautiful job in the following article of clearly elucidating the profound dilemma that atheists are facing in regards to ever describing the universe purely in terms of a single mathematical theory of everything:
The second deep flaw in the atheistic assumption that the universe should be able to be described by a single mathematical ‘theory of everything’ is that the belief that the entire universe should be governed by a single set of laws was, and still is, a Theistic presumption. ‘Coherent unity’ of the universe has NEVER been an atheistic presumption.
In fact, to further solidify the contention that the ‘coherent unity’ of the universe is not an Atheistic presumption, Leonard Susskind, an atheist, at the 7:19 minute mark of the following video, proposed ‘varying laws’ for unobservable parts of the universe in order to try to ‘explain away’ the fine-tuning of the laws of physics in the observable universe:
Moreover, when the agent causality of Theists is rightly let ‘back’ into the picture of physics, as the Christian founders of science originally envisioned, (instead of the self refuting ‘blind causality’ of atheists), then a empirically backed unification between Quantum Theory and General Relativity is readily achieved in the resurrection of Christ from death:
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-548425
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Supplemental note: