From Denyse O’Leary at Salvo:
s there a “crisis” in cosmology, as science writer Dennis Overbye tells us at the New York Times? Or does cosmology merely face “challenges,” as we read at Scientific American?
Either way, the tale grows strange. We have so much more data now, but it does not provide the evidence many expected. For example, the ardent faith placed in string theory—the hypothesis that the particles of conventional physics are actually vibrating, one-dimensional “strings”—has proven fruitless for decades.
But what if evidence, or its absence, actually matters?
Peter Woit, a Columbia University mathematician, is a brave academic. He is an atheist who has long critiqued fashionable string theory (Not Even Wrong, 2007) and the multiverse it supports because the evidence does not really support these theories. But he acknowledged recently that lack of evidence is hardly an obstacle these days. More.
Note: Lots of good stuff to read at Salvo Online #41
See also: How naturalism rots science from the head down
and
The Big Bang: Put simply,the facts are wrong.