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arroba
Sean M. Carroll, a noted cosmologist, in his first column for Discovery Magazine called Welcome to the Multiverse writes that the progress in cosmology has forced cosmologists “kicking and screaming” to accept the Multiverse, the same theory that caused Giordano Bruno to be burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.
Sigh.
I sigh because the two pieces of evidence that have dragged him “kicking and screaming” into multiverse theory are “string theory” and “inflation”. And what you should immediately ask, is “What!? Not Bruno’s universalism?” because both of those “theories” have about as much to support them as Bruno did.
Carroll knows this, and in a clever twist, argues that like Bruno, we should explore scientific heresies with an open mind. Except that it isn’t the Church, but the philosophy of science that is being trashed. That is, while I am all for exploring scientifically heretical subjects, I would prefer to do so on empirically sound foundations, which neither String Theory nor Inflation possess. One should read Bruce Gordon on the metaphysics that undergirds both theories–which have gone through numerous modifications as they fail to conform to data. In fact, on Lakatos‘ analysis, both StringTheory and Inflation are clearly “degenerate science programs”.
So how does one get “forced” by degenerate science programs that expend all their disposable hypotheses on shoring up the main thesis?