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String theory skeptic accused of crimes “as contemptible as … bin Laden”

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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 so far.

Yes, but testability may soon be joining falsifiability and Occam’s Razor as outdated stuff string theorists and other multiverse proponents want to just get rid of.

The greatest vitriol was reserved for online interactions, as you might expect. His rivals would pounce on something he wrote, says Woit, “take it out of context, and then [say] ‘Oh now I can show that Peter Woit is a fool and doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.’ ” He marvels at this treatment from “some of the smartest people in the world.” The fighting reached into professional forums, too. Woit had sometimes posted links to his blog entries on the website arXiv.org (pronounced “archive”), a repository for physics papers awaiting peer review run by Cornell University. But during the string wars, Woit says, his ability to post links on arXiv was revoked. “That whole story is one of the most disgraceful, intellectually dishonest pieces of behavior I’ve seen,” he says.

He mustn’t live up our fork of the road. Happens to our folk all the time.

So his blog routinely condemns the theory as a “failure, ” and decries the “faddishness,” “mania,” and “arrogance” of physicists who promote its promise. He has publicly urged agencies like the National Science Foundation to cut string theory funding. The reaction from the community is plainly evident online, where he is called an “incompetent, power-thirsty … moron” and a “stuttering crackpot-in-chief” guilty of crimes as contemptible as those of Osama bin Laden. More.

Hey, that’s worse than calling him a “denialist.” Almost as bad as calling him a creationist. And about as well-sourced.

We like him because he is a genuine skeptic. He says: Show me. And of course they can’t. We’re familiar with that, from Darwin’s funded followers.

See also: Why the string theorists have every reason to be freaking out.

See also: Why is it now so cool to be a“creationist”?

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Comments
Woit is wrong if he wants to put a stop to string theory research just because he thinks it is a waste of time. There are obviously a lot of very bright people out there who disagree with him. If they think they can make something out of string theory then what's wrong with letting them run with it? It doesn't matter than Einstein had relativity theory done and dusted in 10 years while string theory is at 30 years and counting. It'll take as long as it takes. If string theory is ultimately found to be a dead-end then it will be abandoned for being sterile. But if string theorists are actually on to something then it would be really dumb to give up on it just because one guy thinks the math is a "gory mess". I have no idea which it is and neither does anyone else so they only way to find out is to keep working on it.Seversky
May 9, 2015
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Fork of the road is a good line and point by the author of this thread. Indeed its a predictable thing that the same equation of how opponents of beloved ideas will be treated if they take on the ideas using scientific research methodology. Or claim too. I know little about string theory except its not proven like Einsteins stuff. Yet it could be recirved just as Darwins suff is. I suspect string theory is wrong from the little I read about it. I think physics should easily prove its points. Speculation is not good enough. Biology is more complicated then physics. Origin biology is very difficult and requires serious investigation and imagination to figure it out. In fact a little revelation would help. Oh yeah the bible.Robert Byers
May 8, 2015
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Here are a few more quotes underscoring the preceding quote:
“Clearly then no scientific cosmology, which of necessity must be highly mathematical, can have its proof of consistency within itself as far as mathematics go. In absence of such consistency, all mathematical models, all theories of elementary particles, including the theory of quarks and gluons…fall inherently short of being that theory which shows in virtue of its a priori truth that the world can only be what it is and nothing else. This is true even if the theory happened to account for perfect accuracy for all phenomena of the physical world known at a particular time.” Stanley Jaki – Cosmos and Creator – 1980, pg. 49 BRUCE GORDON: Hawking’s irrational arguments – October 2010 Excerpt: The physical universe is causally incomplete and therefore neither self-originating nor self-sustaining. The world of space, time, matter and energy is dependent on a reality that transcends space, time, matter and energy. This transcendent reality cannot merely be a Platonic realm of mathematical descriptions, for such things are causally inert abstract entities that do not affect the material world. Neither is it the case that “nothing” is unstable, as Mr. Hawking and others maintain. Absolute nothing cannot have mathematical relationships predicated on it, not even quantum gravitational ones. Rather, the transcendent reality on which our universe depends must be something that can exhibit agency – a mind that can choose among the infinite variety of mathematical descriptions and bring into existence a reality that corresponds to a consistent subset of them. This is what “breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.” Anything else invokes random miracles as an explanatory principle and spells the end of scientific rationality. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/oct/1/hawking-irrational-arguments/
As the preceding quote from Dr. Gordon makes clear, agent causality is needed so as to avoid the epistemological failure of science. The following quote goes further and highlights the 'personal' insanity that follows if agent causality is denied altogether (as it is denied altogether in the naturalistic worldview)
A Professor’s Journey out of Nihilism: Why I am not an Atheist – University of Wyoming – J. Budziszewski Excerpt page12: “There were two great holes in the argument about the irrelevance of God. The first is that in order to attack free will, I supposed that I understood cause and effect; I supposed causation to be less mysterious than volition. If anything, it is the other way around. I can perceive a logical connection between premises and valid conclusions. I can perceive at least a rational connection between my willing to do something and my doing it. But between the apple and the earth, I can perceive no connection at all. Why does the apple fall? We don’t know. “But there is gravity,” you say. No, “gravity” is merely the name of the phenomenon, not its explanation. “But there are laws of gravity,” you say. No, the “laws” are not its explanation either; they are merely a more precise description of the thing to be explained, which remains as mysterious as before. For just this reason, philosophers of science are shy of the term “laws”; they prefer “lawlike regularities.” To call the equations of gravity “laws” and speak of the apple as “obeying” them is to speak as though, like the traffic laws, the “laws” of gravity are addressed to rational agents capable of conforming their wills to the command. This is cheating, because it makes mechanical causality (the more opaque of the two phenomena) seem like volition (the less). In my own way of thinking the cheating was even graver, because I attacked the less opaque in the name of the more. The other hole in my reasoning was cruder. If my imprisonment in a blind causality made my reasoning so unreliable that I couldn’t trust my beliefs, then by the same token I shouldn’t have trusted my beliefs about imprisonment in a blind causality. But in that case I had no business denying free will in the first place.” http://www.undergroundthomist.org/sites/default/files/WhyIAmNotAnAtheist.pdf A Professor’s Journey out of Nihilism: Why I am not an Atheist – 2012 talk University of Wyoming J. Budziszewski http://veritas.org/talks/professors-journey-out-nihilism-why-i-am-not-atheist/?view=presenters&speaker_id=2231
Although Professor Budziszewski was comparing the superiority of agent causality to the mere mathematical description of gravity, (i.e. general relativity), the necessity for agent causality, (to 'breathe fire into the equations' in order to give them a universe to describe), is seen much more clearly in the field of Quantum Mechanics. Overwhelmingly clearly seen with something called Leggett's Inequality:
“I’m going to talk about the Bell inequality, and more importantly a new inequality that you might not have heard of called the Leggett inequality, that was recently measured. It was actually formulated almost 30 years ago by Professor Leggett, who is a Nobel Prize winner, but it wasn’t tested until about a year and a half ago (in 2007), when an article appeared in Nature, that the measurement was made by this prominent quantum group in Vienna led by Anton Zeilinger, which they measured the Leggett inequality, which actually goes a step deeper than the Bell inequality and rules out any possible interpretation other than consciousness creates reality when the measurement is made.” – Bernard Haisch, Ph.D., Calphysics Institute - Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness - A New Measurement - Bernard Haisch, Ph.D (Shortened version of entire video with notes in description of video) http://vimeo.com/37517080 Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger by Richard Conn Henry - Physics Professor - John Hopkins University Excerpt: Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the "illusion" of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism (solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist). (Dr. Henry's referenced experiment and paper - “An experimental test of non-local realism” by S. Gröblacher et. al., Nature 446, 871, April 2007 - “To be or not to be local” by Alain Aspect, Nature 446, 866, April 2007 (Leggett's Inequality: Violated, as of 2011, to 120 standard deviations) http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/aspect.html "Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists who think the world sprang into existence on October 23, 4004 BC at 9AM (presumably Babylonian time), with the fossils already in the ground, light from distant stars heading toward us, etc. But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!" Scott Aaronson - MIT associate Professor - Lecture 11: Decoherence and Hidden Variables - Quantum Physics – (material reality does not exist until we look at it) – Dr. Quantum video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1ezNvpFcJU
Moreover, due to advances in quantum mechanics, the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this:
1. Consciousness either preceded all of material reality or is a 'epi-phenomena' of material reality. 2. If consciousness is a 'epi-phenomena' of material reality then consciousness will be found to have no special position within material reality. Whereas conversely, if consciousness precedes material reality then consciousness will be found to have a special position within material reality. 3. Consciousness is found to have a special, even central, position within material reality. 4. Therefore, consciousness is found to precede material reality. Four intersecting lines of experimental evidence from quantum mechanics that shows that consciousness precedes material reality (Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries, Wheeler’s Delayed Choice, Leggett’s Inequalities, Quantum Zeno effect): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G_Fi50ljF5w_XyJHfmSIZsOcPFhgoAZ3PRc_ktY8cFo/edit
Moreover, If we rightly allow agent causality 'back' into math (as the Christian founders of modern science originally intended, so as to ‘“breathes fire into the equations” and make a universe for them to describe), then a successful, empirically backed, resolution between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity readily pops out for us that resolves the 'infinity problem' between the two theories. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/multiverse-cosmologist-says-the-concept-of-infinity-is-ruining-physics/#comment-549912 Verses and Music:
Matthew 28:18 Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Colossians 1:15-20 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. John1:1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." of note: ‘the Word’ in John1:1 is translated from the word ‘Logos’ in Greek. 'Logos' also happens to be the root word from which we derive our modern word logic Brooke Fraser - Hillsong: “Lord Of Lords” - music http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB4Tc5zJMUc
bornagain77
May 8, 2015
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It is amazing the presuppositions that materialist/naturalist scientists seem to take completely for granted. One unwarranted presupposition, that both Woit and his detractors seem to take for granted, is that it is 'natural' for math to be able to describe the universe and for man to be able to grasp that mathematical structure in the first place. There simply is no justification for that belief in the materialist/naturalist philosophy. In fact, Dr. Craig used the applicability of math as a philosophical proof for God:
Mathematics and Physics – A Happy Coincidence? – William Lane Craig – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF25AA4dgGg 1. If God did not exist the applicability of mathematics would be a happy coincidence. 2. The applicability of mathematics is not a happy coincidence. 3. Therefore, God exists.
Here are a few supplemental quotes attesting to the ‘miracle’ of the applicability of mathematics by no less than Einstein, the father of General Relativity, and Wigner, whose insights into quantum mechanics are now fostering a second quantum revolution (according to leading quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger):
“You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way .. the kind of order created by Newton’s theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different. Even if a man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. That is the ‘miracle’ which is constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.” Albert Einstein – Letters to Solovine – New York, Philosophical Library, 1987 The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences – Eugene Wigner – 1960 Excerpt: ,,certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.,,, It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.,,, The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
It is a theistic, not naturalistic, presupposition that the universe should be governed by mathematical laws.
Not the God of the Gaps, But the Whole Show – John Lennox – 2012 Excerpt: God is not a “God of the gaps”, he is God of the whole show.,,, C. S. Lewis put it this way: “Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.” http://www.christianpost.com/news/the-god-particle-not-the-god-of-the-gaps-but-the-whole-show-80307/ The Genius and Faith of Faraday and Maxwell - Ian H. Hutchinson - 2014 Conclusion: Lawfulness was not, in their thinking, inert, abstract, logical necessity, or complete reducibility to Cartesian mechanism; rather, it was an expectation they attributed to the existence of a divine lawgiver. These men’s insights into physics were made possible by their religious commitments. For them, the coherence of nature resulted from its origin in the mind of its Creator. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-genius-and-faith-of-faraday-and-maxwell “Our monotheistic traditions reinforce the assumption that the universe is at root a unity, that is not governed by different legislation in different places.” John D. Barrow
Another presupposition that materialist/naturalist scientists unfairly take for granted is that there should be a mathematical theory of everything. But why should they, materialist/naturalist scientists, presuppose that there should be a mathematical theory of everything? They simply don't have, within atheistic naturalism, a basis for that belief. Professor Steve Fuller puts the 'hidden teleology' within their presupposition like this:
“So you think of physics in search of a “Grand Unified Theory of Everything”, Why should we even think there is such a thing? Why should we think there is some ultimate level of resolution? Right? It is part, it is a consequence of believing in some kind of design. Right? And there is some sense in which that however multifarious and diverse the phenomena of nature are, they are ultimately unified by the minimal set of laws and principles possible. In so far as science continues to operate with that assumption, there is a presupposition of design that is motivating the scientific process. Because it would be perfectly easy,, to stop the pursuit of science at much lower levels. You know understand a certain range of phenomena in a way that is appropriate to deal with that phenomena and just stop there and not go any deeper or any farther.”,,, You see, there is a sense in which there is design at the ultimate level, the ultimate teleology you might say, which provides the ultimate closure,,” In Cambridge, Professor Steve Fuller discusses intelligent design - quoted at the 17:34 minute mark of the video https://uncommondescent.com/news/in-cambridge-professor-steve-fuller-discusses-why-the-hypothesis-of-intelligent-design-is-not-more-popular-among-scientists-and-others/
Another, presupposition that the naturalists unfairly make is that math is sufficient within itself so as to be a 'theory of everything'. Yet, mathematics is unequivocally shown to be 'incomplete':
Kurt Gödel – Incompleteness Theorem – video https://vimeo.com/92387853 THE GOD OF THE MATHEMATICIANS – DAVID P. GOLDMAN – August 2010 Excerpt: we cannot construct an ontology that makes God dispensable. Secularists can dismiss this as a mere exercise within predefined rules of the game of mathematical logic, but that is sour grapes, for it was the secular side that hoped to substitute logic for God in the first place. Gödel’s critique of the continuum hypothesis has the same implication as his incompleteness theorems: Mathematics never will create the sort of closed system that sorts reality into neat boxes. http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/07/the-god-of-the-mathematicians Taking God Out of the Equation – Biblical Worldview – by Ron Tagliapietra – January 1, 2012 Excerpt: Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) proved that no logical systems (if they include the counting numbers) can have all three of the following properties. 1. Validity … all conclusions are reached by valid reasoning. 2. Consistency … no conclusions contradict any other conclusions. 3. Completeness … all statements made in the system are either true or false. The details filled a book, but the basic concept was simple and elegant. He (Godel) summed it up this way: “Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle—something you have to assume but cannot prove.” For this reason, his proof is also called the Incompleteness Theorem. Kurt Gödel had dropped a bomb on the foundations of mathematics. Math could not play the role of God as infinite and autonomous. It was shocking, though, that logic could prove that mathematics could not be its own ultimate foundation. Christians should not have been surprised. The first two conditions are true about math: it is valid and consistent. But only God fulfills the third condition. Only He is complete and therefore self-dependent (autonomous). God alone is “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28), “the beginning and the end” (Revelation 22:13). God is the ultimate authority (Hebrews 6:13), and in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3). http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v7/n1/equation#
Moreover, this ‘incompleteness’ extends to the universe itself. Even Hawking himself at one time admitted, and apparently subsequently forgot, (as atheists are prone to do), that there cannot be a ‘complete’ mathematical theory of everything for the universe,
The nature and significance of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems – Princeton – 2006 Excerpt: ,,Stephen Hawking and Freeman Dyson, among others, have come to the conclusion that Gödel’s theorem implies that there can’t be a (mathematical) Theory of Everything.,, http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/Godel-IAS.pdf
bornagain77
May 8, 2015
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