Not Even Wrong has the story:
Just about ten years ago, my April 1 posting here was a fantasy about the Stanford ITP getting major funding from the Templeton Foundation, using it to fund a program on the multiverse, and renaming themselves the Stanford Templeton Research Institute for Nature, God and Science. The last part hasn’t yet come true yet, but I just noticed the announcement last year of a $878K Inflation, the Multiverse, and Holography grant from Templeton to the SITP, the third part of “A three component Templeton Initiative at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics.”
To get some idea of the scale of this funding, note that the entire NSF budget for theoretical HEP is about $12 million (the DOE spends about $50-60 million, but that supports groups at the labs, as well as computational hardware, and is decreasing). The Templeton Foundation has an endowment of over $3 billion (growing rapidly), and pays out over $100 million in grants/year (also growing rapidly). I don’t think my skills as a fantasist are good enough to imagine what this means for ten years from now in the future.
We might be able to help out here.
It will mean stuff like
Not only is earth one nice planet among many, but our entire universe is lost in a crowd
The multiverse: Where everything turns out to be true, except philosophy and religion
As if the multiverse wasn’t bizarre enough …meet Many Worlds
But who needs reality-based thinking anyway? Not the new cosmologists
treated and funded as serious science. They’re all set now.
Is this science’s version of what happened to the humanities (which is mostly in the business of turning out socially conscious baristas now)?
See, the big problem isn’t whether there are or aren’t other universes. There could be. There could also be Bigfoot. Or space aliens. Or ghosts. (Unless one has a philosophical reason for believing that one or all of them can’t exist… ) What we used to think is important was evidence. But it has been clear from the beginning that the multiverse has been pursued for other reasons. There is a move to drop falsifiability as a category. So one thing we canreasonably expect I no shortage of well-funded nonsense in legacy media.
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