From Robert Lawrence Kuhn at Space:
On the other hand, when asked his view of the anthropic principle, physicist David Gross at the University of California at Santa Barbara said, “I hate it.”
“Anthropic considerations acquire real physical meaning only if one has many potential options,” Linde explained to me, “but only if some of them are compatible with the existence of observers.
“The multiverse provides these options”, he asserted. “The most famous problem addressed by anthropic considerations is the size of the cosmological constant.” In other words, in studying the energy density of empty space, the vacuum, why is the cosmological constant so astonishingly small but still not zero?
Linde said there are multiple problems in physics and cosmology, and only a multiverse can solve them, thus validating the multiverse as “science,” even if justified in this new kind of way.
…
Moreover, Linde claimed, this also means that the same facts that can serve as experimental evidence in favor of a multiverse can simultaneously serve as experimental evidence in favor of string theory. Thus, he concluded, both string theory and the multiverse become properly classifiable as “science.”
Linde admitted that this is an unusual way to think about science, and he cited Weinberg: “Now we may be at a new turning point,” Weinberg said famously, “a radical change in what we accept as a legitimate foundation for a physical theory.”
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At first, the Simulation Argument (the possibility that this universe is a fake) seems to have nothing to do with arguments for the multiverse, yet each, curiously, threatens the other. Just as Davies showed how simulations would undermine the multiverse, a multiverse of infinite numbers of universes would play havoc with the Simulation Argument of this universe. (The reason is that infinities mess up measurements and statistics, because when all things occur an infinite number of times, the relative occurrences of all things acquire a kind of strange equality.) – See more at: http://www.space.com/32452-can-science-explain-the-multiverse.html#sthash.imj5bY3Q.dpuf
More.
As it happens, these people are serious. What’s their alternative?
And once “science” is accepted apart from evidence at the macro level, what do you suppose will happen at lower levels?
See also: Copernicus, you are not going to believe who is using your name. Or how.
Not only is earth one nice planet among many, but our entire universe is lost in a crowd
and
The multiverse: Where everything turns out to be true, except philosophy and religion
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