From Columbia math prof Peter Woit:
The Guardian has a podcast up today featuring Robert Trotta and David Wallace called The Multiverse in a Nutshell. It’s largely more of the usual uncritical multiverse hype that has been flooding the public expositions of fundamental physics for years now. Trotta gives the usual promotion of the cosmological multiverse, with no indication there is any problem with it. He assures us that this is being tested (by looking for “bruises” in CMB collisions). As far as I can tell, the Planck results released today, like all CMB data, show no evidence for anything like this. It appears that the Planck people don’t even think this is worth mentioning. The public channels used for this hype will never report the fact that there’s nothing there, instead they will just endlessly talk about this as something “scientists are looking for.”
Take it from a Canadian, whose country is forced to spend huge sums on public broadcasting and puts up with free or nearly free newspapers filing the Recycle box: Defund all public broadcasters now. They are no longer needed in the world of the GPS, and are easily co-opted for—if we are lucky—merely stupid causes like the one described above.
– O’Leary for News