Yes, it’s the excellent Sabine Hossenfelder again, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, trying to understand a world where intelligent people are expected to pretend that nonsense is good sense:
How often can you hold up four fingers, hear a thousand people shout “five”, and not agree with them? How often can you repeat an argument, see it ignored, and still believe in reason? How often can you tell a thousand scientists the blatantly obvious, hear them laugh, and not think you are the one who is insane?
I wonder.
Every time a particle physicist dismisses my concerns, unthinkingly, I wonder some more. Maybe I am crazy? It would explain so much. Then I remind myself of the facts, once again.
Fact is, in the foundations of physics we have not seen progress for the past four decades. Ever since the development of the standard model in the 1970s, further predictions for new effects have been wrong. Physicists commissioned dozens of experiments to look for dark matter particles and grand unification. They turned data
up-side down in search for supersymmetric particles and dark energy and new dimensions of space. The result has beenconsistently : Nothing new…Those who, a decade ago, made confident predictions that the Large Hadron Collider should have seen new particles can now not be bothered to comment. They are busy making “predictions” for new particles that the next larger collider should see. We risk spending $20 billion dollars on more null-results that will not move us forward. Am I crazy for saying that’s a dumb idea? Maybe. Sabine Hossenfelder, “Maybe I’m crazy” at BackRe(Action)
No, Sabine, you’re not crazy. But you live in crazymaking times. Cosmology has degenerated into the pursuit of cool nonsense like the multiverse via string theory. So much now seems to revolve around whether findings help or hurt the nonsense. Not about learning more about what is really happening here now.
At least, that’s what it looks like from the outside. So – if it’s any help – outsiders would not think you are crazy. And usually, when a person is crazy, it’s the outsiders who notice first.
Keep hold of this: Even the multiverse can’t come to exist just because people can imagine it.
See also: Sabine Hossenfelder: Physics Problems That Lead To Breakthroughs Arise From Inconsistencies In Data, Not Beautiful Math
and
Theoretical Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder Shares Her Self-Doubts About Exposing Nonsense In Cosmology
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One empathises.
In case professor HOSSENFELDER didn’t get the memo yet: welcome to this [pathetic] world! 🙁
The world where true meaning is irrelevant.
She’s studied modern physics and wants to analyze it seriously. That’s her problem. There’s nothing serious about anything anymore. The minds in this world are Tiffany-twisted. We’re all prisoners of our own nature.
Relax. This world is programmed to receive. You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave.
As to
No she’s not. At least not is so far as she expects empirical science to follow the evidence where it leads. But if someone looked at what General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are telling us should happen if they both are true, one might be very well tempted to think that physics itself is crazy.
Another major problem in trying to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity is that when theorists try to combine the two theories, then the resulting theory predicts that spacetime, atoms, and the universe itself should all be literally torn apart. Here are a few references that get this point across.
And yet, despite both theories contradicting each other, quantum mechanics and general relativity are both tested to extreme levels of precision,
And yet since quantum mechanics and general relativity are both tested to extreme levels of precision, and we can thus have a high level of confidence that both theories are true, and since Godel’s incompleteness theorem requires something to be ‘outside the circle’ of mathematics, then it is safe to assume that something very powerful must be holding the universe together. ,,, For the Christian this should not be surprising. Christianity predicts that Christ is before all things, and in him all things hold together, and that He upholds the universe by the word of his power.
Some may say that the insanity of our two best theories of physics predicting the universe should literally blow itself apart was solved when the ‘fudge factor’ of Dark Energy was added. Yet at the 8:15 minute mark of the following video, Richard Dawkins is set straight by Steven Weinberg, who is an atheist himself, on just how big the ‘problem’ of the 1 in 10^120 Cosmological Constant is for atheists, and others, who want to explain the universe entirely by mathematics without ever appealing to God:
And here is Dr. Hugh Ross speaking on the Theistic implications of the 1 in 10^120 finely tuned Expansion Of The Universe
And here is the paper from the atheistic astrophysicists, that Dr. Ross referenced in the preceding video, that was withdrawn because of mounting evidence for a Cosmological Constant, that speaks of the ‘disturbing implications’ of the finely tuned expanding universe (1 in 10^120 cosmological constant). The implications were ‘disturbing for them since it “would have required a miracle”.
And here are the verses from the Bible which Dr. Ross listed, which were written well over 2000 years before the discovery of the finely tuned expansion of the universe, that speak of God ‘Stretching out the Heavens’; Job 9:8; Isaiah 40:22; Isaiah 44:24; Isaiah 48:13; Zechariah 12:1; Psalm 104:2; Isaiah 42:5; Isaiah 45:12; Isaiah 51:13; Jeremiah 51:15; Jeremiah 10:12. The following verse, since it has overt Christian implications, is my favorite out of the group of verses:
Thus, in order to prevent our two best theories in science, Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, from contradicting each other, to the point of blowing up the universe, theorists added a ‘fudge factor’ of a 1 in 10^120 cosmological constant, i.e. Dark Energy, to explain the finely tuned expansion of the universe. Yet there is no theoretical reason why the expansion of the universe should be finely tuned to 1 in 10^120. Indeed, some atheistic theorists, before they retracted their paper, predicted that such ‘would have required a miracle’. And yet the Bible itself predicted, in numerous places, far before it was discovered, that God himself “stretches out the heavens”.
Thus in conclusion, if we ‘sanely’ follow the evidence where it leads, we find that physics needs God in order to prevent the ‘theoretical insanity’ of the universe blowing itself apart when physicists try to combine General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything’.
Supplement notes:
Verse: