The Scientific American columnist is unimpressed by two recent books on the subject, cosmologist Sean Carroll’s Something Deeply Hidden and science writer Tom Siegfried’s The Number of the Heavens. He rehearses their arguments sympathetically but then tells us, “I’m less entertained by multiverse theories than I once was, for a couple of reasons” :
First, science is in a slump, for reasons both internal and external. Science is ill-served when prominent thinkers tout ideas that can never be tested and hence are, sorry, unscientific. Moreover, at a time when our world, the real world, faces serious problems, dwelling on multiverses strikes me as escapism—akin to billionaires fantasizing about colonizing Mars. Shouldn’t scientists do something more productive with their time?
Maybe in another universe Carroll and Siegfried have convinced me to take multiverses seriously, but I doubt it.
John Horgan, “Multiverse Theories Are Bad for Science” at Scientific American
Funny this: Atheism is in the ascendant and science is in a decline. Was that in the– where’s the manual? We don’t remember that part.
See also: The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide
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