Blinded Me With "Science"

by rrusczyk, Nov 5, 2008, 4:06 PM

OK, I pulled this out of a football column that digressed:

Gregg Easterbrook wrote:

Once, in science, an idea that cannot be falsified was presumed meaningless; now it's presumed true! The "multiverse," the "brane," the compacted dimensions assumed by string theory -- these notions are received with perfect seriousness in contemporary departments of physics though all are unobservable, and based on what's known so far, can neither be proved nor disproved. Just like God, only better for getting tenure. As priests of the Middle Ages could tell you, pronouncements sound heftier if you call on a colossal cosmic force you don't explain, such as "ripples in the very fabric of space."

But I think he's on to something with some of these observations...

science

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Well, actually, multiverses make sense.

If you have two walls, and one has a vertical slit, and you shine a light through that slit, you'll get a single vertical bar on the opposite wall, right? And if you make a second slit and shine the light again, instead of getting two vertical bars, you'll get a series of alternating dark and light bars. Make another slit, and the number of light bars will halve. But that doesn't make sense, does it? More slits, fewer bars? When people believed everything was waves, this made sense, but Einstein showed that everything's made of particles. Photons can't act the way they seem to be acting, in an interference pattern, like the way waves would, but yet they do. So something must be interfering with the photons, and to me it makes sense that it would a multiverse, multiple universes constantly splitting and interfering with these photons.

Just my two cents. I might be wrong.

by isabella2296, Nov 5, 2008, 9:50 PM

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He's not arguing that the multiple universes hypothesis is wrong--he's arguing that it is "not even wrong". Specifically, he's arguing that it is not yet science. In Easterbrook's view of science (which seems like a reasonable view), a scientific model should have some predictive power, and not be merely descriptive. To date, multiple universes and string theory have shown no predictive power at all, and so can arguably be said to not yet be science.

by rrusczyk, Nov 5, 2008, 10:50 PM

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An AoPS admin reads TMQ?! That is so awesome!

I completely agree with Easterbrook's opinion.

by cf249, Nov 8, 2008, 6:24 AM

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well, yes, I think it's readily acknowledged that at this point, string theory has no predictive power. so ... what's the point ? are we supposed to simply stop thinking about this stuff ? say ``we can't make any further progress here'' and go do chemistry instead ?

it also seems a bit inaccurate to say that string theory is readily accepted as true in various physics depts etc -- obviously, when researchers are talking about the subject, they don't preface every sentence with ``assuming string theory is true'' since that would waste a lot of time, but I'm sure they're aware of the fact that it has not yet been empirically tested.

by MysticTerminator, Nov 13, 2008, 3:18 PM