String Theory, Multiverse, The Large Hadron Collider
Multiverse mania started seriously among string theorists around 2003, with a defining event Susskind’s February 2003 The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory. At the time I was finishing up writing what became the book “Not Even Wrong”.. For many years I found it impossible to believe that this pseudo-scientific point of view would get any traction.. It has become clear recently that we’ve now reached that end-point. From the new video of his discussion with Rovelli, it’s clear that David Gross has given up. No more complaints about the multiverse from him, and his vision of the future has string theory solving QCD 80 years from now, nothing about it ever telling us anything about where the Standard Model comes from
Unzicker, *Bankrupting Physics
Smolin, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution
A vocal minority of cosmologists proclaims that the universe we see around us is only a bubble in a vast ocean called the multiverse that contains an infinity of other bubbles. And, whereas it is safe to hypothesize that the galaxies we can see are typical of the rest of our universe, one must regard the other invisible bubbles as governed by diverse and randomly assigned laws, so our universe is far from typical of the whole. This, together with the fact that all, or almost all, of the other bubbles are forever out of range of our observations, means the multiverse hypothesis can never be tested or falsified. This puts this fantasy outside the bounds of science. Nonetheless, this idea is championed by not a few highly regarded physicists and mathematicians.
It would be a mistake to confuse this multiverse fantasy for the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. They are distinct ideas. Nonetheless, they share a magical-realist subversion of the aim of science to explain the world we see around us in terms of only itself. I would suggest that the harm done to clarity about the aim and purpose of science by the enthusiastic proponents of the multiverse would not have been possible had not the majority of physicists uncritically adopted anti-realist versions of quantum physics.
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