The multiverse is dangerous to science

[Philip Thrift]

https://aeon.co/essays/post-empirical-science-is-an-oxymoron-and-it-is-dangerous

Theoretical physicists who say the multiverse exists set a dangerous precedent: science based on zero empirical evidence

Jim Baggott

@JimBaggott

...

Sean Carroll, a vocal advocate for the Many-Worlds interpretation, prefers abduction, or what he calls ‘inference to the best explanation’, which leaves us with theories that are merely ‘parsimonious’, a matter of judgment, and ‘still might reasonably be true’. But whose judgment? In the absence of facts, what constitutes ‘the best explanation’?

Carroll seeks to dress his notion of inference in the cloth of respectability provided by something called Bayesian probability theory, happily overlooking its entirely subjective nature. It’s a short step from here to the theorist-turned-philosopher Richard Dawid’s efforts to justify the string theory programme in terms of ‘theoretically confirmed theory’ and ‘non-empirical theory assessment’. The ‘best explanation’ is then based on a choice between purely metaphysical constructs, without reference to empirical evidence, based on the application of a probability theory that can be readily engineered to suit personal prejudices.

Welcome to the oxymoron that is post-empirical science.

...

Still, what’s the big deal? So what if a handful of theoretical physicists want to indulge their inner metaphysician and publish papers that few outside their small academic circle will ever read? But look back to the beginning of this essay. Whether they intend it or not (and trust me, they intend it), this stuff has a habit of leaking into the public domain, dripping like acid into the very foundations of science. The publication of Carroll’s book Something Deeply Hidden, about the Many-Worlds interpretation, has been accompanied by an astonishing publicity blitz, including an essay on Aeon last month. A recent PBS News Hour piece led with the observation that: ‘The “Many-Worlds” theory in quantum mechanics suggests that, with every decision you make, a new universe springs into existence containing what amounts to a new version of you.’

...

Perhaps we should begin with a small first step. Let’s acknowledge that theoretical physicists are perfectly entitled to believe, write and say whatever they want, within reason. But is it asking too much that they make their assertions with some honesty? Instead of ‘the multiverse exists’ and ‘it might be true’, is it really so difficult to say something like ‘the multiverse has some philosophical attractions, but it is highly speculative and controversial, and there is no evidence for it’? I appreciate that such caveats get lost or become mangled when transferred into a popular media obsessed with sensation, but this would then be a failure of journalism or science writing, rather than a failure of scientific integrity.

@philipthrift

[spudb...@aol.com]

So, PH, I believe, that Frank Tipler the Omega Point dude, agrees with you on this one issue. He seems to be a stickler for everything in physics to be neat and tidy and conformal. This, of course, will cause you and the rest here, to convulse with nausea on this here mailing list. But from what I was able to follow on his vid, he agrees with your contention. For me, I follow Tipler because I loved his reasoning, and an afterlife even after 10 trillion years of dust, I find irresistible. He doesn't speak of this on this vid-so you're Good to View.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFpbngtvWD8&t=15s

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[Philip Thrift]

Creepy watching the Tipler video on the Intelligent Design channel: Discovery Science, of the Discovery Institute in Seattle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute

One of the fads created in the past few decades is for scientists to make up multiverse theories to solve :"fine-tuning".

But they don't think enough to see that it could be addressed in other ways, with basically one universe, and without invoking Intelligent Design.

@philipthrift

[spudb...@aol.com]

Well, no ID, no post mortem survival. No survival means death anxiety perpetually.I just thought that Tipler sort of buttressed your opinion on things not based on observation and measurement. 'How we gonna measure a multiverse, anyways, etc?' For the ID thing, I am easy going on this because of Shermer's Last Law (as a response against AC Clarke's 3rd law), which, humorously, is: "Any sufficiently advanced alien is indistinguishable from God." 

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Oct 7, 2019 at 3:12 PM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> So, PH, I believe, that Frank Tipler the Omega Point dude, agrees with you on this one issue. He seems to be a stickler for everything in physics to be neat and tidy and conformal. This, of course, will cause you and the rest here, to convulse with nausea on this here mailing list. But from what I was able to follow on his vid, he agrees with your contention. For me, I follow Tipler because I loved his reasoning, and an afterlife even after 10 trillion years of dust,

I finished reading Tipler's book "The Physics Of Immortality" on Friday March 15 1996 and liked it and I sent a post about it to the Extropian List that same day. At the time, nearly 24 years ago, I said the reason I liked his book was that:

"Tipler's Omega  Point Theory makes a bunch of predictions, practical predictions that should be able to be tested for in the next 4 or 5 years. Tipler himself states that every one of these predictions must turn out to be correct or the entire theory is dead in the water."

Well lets see how his predictions turned out"

"* Tipler predicts that the universe is closed: I think most would say it's probably open, Tipler says they're wrong. "

It turned out it was Tipler that was wrong and not only was he wrong Tipler was spectacularly wrong! The expansion of the universe is not reversing, it's not even slowing down, it is accelerating. 

"* Tipler predicts that the Higgs boson must be at 220 +- 20 GeV: If he's  correct then when the CERN Large Hadron Collider goes on line in 1999 it will find it almost immediately."  

The Higgs boson wasn't found until 2012, the delay wasn't Tipler's fault but his prediction was dead wrong, the mass of the Higgs boson turned out to be 125.3 +- 0.4 GeV

"* Tipler predicts that the Hubble constant must be less than or equal to 45" 

Today there is still disagreement over the exact value, some say its 66.9, another group says its 69.8, and another group says its 74.0, and yet another group says its 82.4; but nobody thinks its anywhere near 45.

So what is Tipler up to today? Well...back in 2007 the poor man went a little funny in the head, you know, just a little funny, and he went and did a silly thing; he wrote another book saying we should look for divine DNA on the Shroud of Turin and check for radiation around the tomb of the Blessed Virgin Mary that was caused by an intense beam of neutrinos that must have shot out of the bottom of her feet thrusting her upward into heaven.

John K Clark

[spudb...@aol.com]

I don't know if I disagree with you, JC (Bwah!) and like Tipler nevertheless. I mean to say that I am not disagreeing with your statements that Tipler's Standard Model back then has not kept up with what has been discovered. I don't worry about Jesus, too much and am sorry that the dude didn't return because of species needs all the help it can get. My point was that lots of physicists bend things to not accomodate a simple pic of the universe, and invoke endless universes which is very hard to prove. I still like Carrolls book, and in the long run, what's the diff?

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 7 Oct 2019, at 20:49, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

https://aeon.co/essays/post-empirical-science-is-an-oxymoron-and-it-is-dangerous

Theoretical physicists who say the multiverse exists set a dangerous precedent: science based on zero empirical evidence

Any one saying that even one universe exist say something with zero physical evidence. The very expression “physical evidence” is begging the question in metaphysics.

Mechanist metaphysics implies that the physical reality emerges from arithmetic, in a precise way, and nature gives the east same physics, as far as we can judge today, and this without hiding consciousness and the first person under the rug. So, I would say that the empirical evidences today is for 0 universes, but many dreams (computations seen from inside, or moralised through the universal machine theory of self-reference.

Physical evidences are dream-able. They cannot be direct evidence for anything ontological. Einstein, at least, was ware of the mystery of the existence of the physical universe, and took it as a religion, which is the correct attitude if one believe in such a thing. 

Bruno

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[Lawrence Crowell]

On Monday, October 7, 2019 at 5:42:02 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Oct 7, 2019 at 3:12 PM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> So, PH, I believe, that Frank Tipler the Omega Point dude, agrees with you on this one issue. He seems to be a stickler for everything in physics to be neat and tidy and conformal. This, of course, will cause you and the rest here, to convulse with nausea on this here mailing list. But from what I was able to follow on his vid, he agrees with your contention. For me, I follow Tipler because I loved his reasoning, and an afterlife even after 10 trillion years of dust,

I remember reading Tipler's book Physics of Immortality and thinking it was nuts. He had ideas about hyper-tech beings surviving the collapse of the universe beyond the Planck range and so forth and with an asymptote on time there is some infinite time. The book though has a nice set of appendices that are a decent quick reference on some physics. He did come out with something about the cosmology of the Trinity or some such thing. I skipped that. I think he has gone off the rails. 

LC

[Philip Thrift]

On Tuesday, October 8, 2019 at 8:22:10 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 7 Oct 2019, at 20:49, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

https://aeon.co/essays/post-empirical-science-is-an-oxymoron-and-it-is-dangerous

Theoretical physicists who say the multiverse exists set a dangerous precedent: science based on zero empirical evidence

Any one saying that even one universe exist say something with zero physical evidence. The very expression “physical evidence” is begging the question in metaphysics.

Mechanist metaphysics implies that the physical reality emerges from arithmetic, in a precise way, and nature gives the east same physics, as far as we can judge today, and this without hiding consciousness and the first person under the rug. So, I would say that the empirical evidences today is for 0 universes, but many dreams (computations seen from inside, or moralised through the universal machine theory of self-reference.

Physical evidences are dream-able. They cannot be direct evidence for anything ontological. Einstein, at least, was ware of the mystery of the existence of the physical universe, and took it as a religion, which is the correct attitude if one believe in such a thing. 

Bruno

x emerges from arithmetic is not grounded, because arithmetic is not grounded. Whatever syntactic specification of arithmetic one starts with (that is at least as expressive as Peano Axioms) has an unfixed semantics ("nonstandard models"). There are other arithmetics for hyperarithmetical  theory.

Where Jim Baggott gets it wrong; All theories have nonempirical premises encoded in their language. Even though EFE (Einstein Field Equations) may be a useful tool for predictions of data collected in instruments, their expression in terms of a continuous space+time is not empirical.

@philipthrift

 

[spudb...@aol.com]

Tipler, and now Sean Carroll as well? :-) 

-----Original Message-----
From: Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com>
To: Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com>

Sent: Tue, Oct 8, 2019 9:28 am
Subject: Re: The multiverse is dangerous to science

On Monday, October 7, 2019 at 5:42:02 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

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[Alan Grayson]

It could just be a useful approximation in order for calculus to be applied. However, experiments have been done, and so far no deviation from spatial continuity has been detected. Not sure about time continuity. AG 

 

[Philip Thrift]

A traditional calculus alternative that could match the "continuity"-appearing  empirical data is fractional/fractal calculus.

A Tutorial Review on Fractal Spacetime and Fractional Calculus

International Journal of Theoretical Physics · November 2014

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266398625_A_Tutorial_Review_on_Fractal_Spacetime_and_Fractional_Calculus

@philipthrift 

[Alan Grayson]

Was Fractional Calculus known when E developed GR? AG 

[Philip Thrift]

Fractal calculus and its geometrical explanation

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211379718311951

Fractal calculus

The fractal calculus is relatively new ...

...

@philipthrift

 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 8 Oct 2019, at 19:17, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tuesday, October 8, 2019 at 8:22:10 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 7 Oct 2019, at 20:49, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

https://aeon.co/essays/post-empirical-science-is-an-oxymoron-and-it-is-dangerous

Theoretical physicists who say the multiverse exists set a dangerous precedent: science based on zero empirical evidence

Any one saying that even one universe exist say something with zero physical evidence. The very expression “physical evidence” is begging the question in metaphysics.

Mechanist metaphysics implies that the physical reality emerges from arithmetic, in a precise way, and nature gives the east same physics, as far as we can judge today, and this without hiding consciousness and the first person under the rug. So, I would say that the empirical evidences today is for 0 universes, but many dreams (computations seen from inside, or moralised through the universal machine theory of self-reference.

Physical evidences are dream-able. They cannot be direct evidence for anything ontological. Einstein, at least, was ware of the mystery of the existence of the physical universe, and took it as a religion, which is the correct attitude if one believe in such a thing. 

Bruno

x emerges from arithmetic is not grounded, because arithmetic is not grounded. Whatever syntactic specification of arithmetic one starts with (that is at least as expressive as Peano Axioms) has an unfixed semantics ("nonstandard models”).

That is true for any theory in which you can prove that there is a universal machine (in the mathematical sense of Post, Church, Kleene, Turing, etc.

A fortiori that remains true for any physics in which we can build a universal machine, that is, a computer.

There are other arithmetics for hyperarithmetical  theory.

With generalised Church-turing thesis. Yes, that exists and plays some role concerning the “analytical truth”, which plays some fundamental role for all the self-referential modes. But those are not new arithmetic, hyper arithmetical concerns the base of the analytical, and belongs to the phenomenology of the arithmetical.

Where Jim Baggott gets it wrong; All theories have nonempirical premises encoded in their language. Even though EFE (Einstein Field Equations) may be a useful tool for predictions of data collected in instruments, their expression in terms of a continuous space+time is not empirical.

OK.

Bruno

@philipthrift

 

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[Bruno Marchal]

Me neither. Digital Mechanism makes one observable at least ranging on the continuum, but it is possible that it concerns only the frequency operator. There is a continuum of computational extensions, as the universal dovetailer dovetails also on the input, including the elements of any possible field like R, C, H or O. (H = the quaternion, O = the octonion).

My body is locally a machine entails that we are confronted to many non mechanical entities, just by the first person indeterminacy. But now, many of them can be equivalent with respect to the prediction, so “counting” the worlds is beyond the mathematics available today, and it is not clear if such counting makes sense.

I got recent clues that the high cardinals might play a role in the origin of space, which is a “quantum” (in the arithmetical sense) phenomenon.

Bruno

 

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Oct 7, 2019 at 2:49 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

https://aeon.co/essays/post-empirical-science-is-an-oxymoron-and-it-is-dangerous

> the so-called Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are universes containing our parallel selves, identical to us but for their different experiences of quantum physics. These theories are attractive to some few theoretical physicists and philosophers, but there is absolutely no empirical evidence for them.

I would maintain that the 2 slit experiment is, not proof, but evidence that Many Worlds is right because if it is right then the odd results from that experiment is exactly what you should expect to see; and if it's not right and those other worlds do not exist then, to be compatible with observation, new physics must be postulated, such as in Ghirardi-Rimini–Weber theory (GRW).  GRW modifies the Schrodinger equation so it's no longer completely deterministic (Einstein would not have liked that) and as a result on very rare random occasions, about once every hundred million years, the wave function of a particle spontaneously collapses for no reason at all. Despite claims, made by those who haven't read it, that Carroll's book doesn't talk about alternatives to Many Worlds he goes into much more detail about GRW than I have here, but please note that the bottom line fact is there is absolutely no empirical evidence that GRW theory is true. So is GRW also a danger to science?

 John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

I did a search of his book [ https://books.google.com/books?id=f16IDwAAQBAJ ] and though he does write about Feynman diagrams I don't see anything about path integrals. 

That would be a curious omission.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.04178

Path integrals, spontaneous localisation, and the classical limit

Bhavya Bhatt, Manish Ram Chander, Raj Patil, Ruchira Mishra, Shlok Nahar, Tejinder P. Singh

(Submitted on 13 Aug 2018 (v1), last revised 31 Jan 2019 (this version, v3))

We recall that in order to obtain the classical limit of quantum mechanics one needs to take the ℏ→0 limit. In addition, one also needs an explanation for the absence of macroscopic quantum superposition of position states. One possible explanation for the latter is the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber (GRW) model of spontaneous localisation. Here we describe how spontaneous localisation modifies the path integral formulation of density matrix evolution in quantum mechanics. (Such a formulation has been derived earlier by Pearle and Soucek; we provide two new derivations of their result). We then show how the von Neumann equation and the Liouville equation for the density matrix arise in the quantum and classical limit, respectively, from the GRW path integral. Thus we provide a rigorous demonstration of the quantum to classical transition.

@philipthrift

[John Clark]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 1:35 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I did a search of his book [ https://books.google.com/books?id=f16IDwAAQBAJ ] and though he does write about Feynman diagrams I don't see anything about path integrals. 

That would be a curious omission.

Huh? I don't see what you're driving at. Path integrals are a method of calculation not a quantum interpretation, even the very inventor of the path integral approach admitted it, that's why he was never entirely satisfied with what he had created, and that why he never stopped saying "nobody understands quantum mechanics".  

And do you think GRW theory is also a danger to science just as Many Worlds is? Should everybody just stick with Shut Up And Calculate and stop asking difficult questions?

 John K Clark 

[Philip Thrift]

On Friday, October 11, 2019 at 1:14:20 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

 Path integrals are a method of calculation not a quantum interpretation ...

Path Integrals and Reality

Adrian Kent

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.6565.pdf

We define the idea of real path quantum theory, a realist generalization of quantum theory in which it is postulated that the configuration space path actually followed by a closed quantum system is probabilistically chosen. ... The ultimate vision of those who take path integral quantum theory as fundamental to all of physics is a path integral formulation of quantum gravity and quantum cosmology.

 

And do you think GRW theory is also a danger to science just as Many Worlds is? Should everybody just stick with Shut Up And Calculate and stop asking difficult questions?

 John K Clark 

Beats me.

@philipthrift 

[John Clark]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 2:43 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Path Integrals and Reality

Adrian Kent

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.6565.pdf

> We define the idea of real path quantum theory, a realist generalization of quantum theory in which it is postulated that the configuration space path actually followed by a closed quantum system is probabilistically chosen. ... The ultimate vision of those who take path integral quantum theory as fundamental to all of physics is a path integral formulation of quantum gravity and quantum cosmology.

And how does that differ from the Shut Up And Calculate quantum interpretation?

>> do you think GRW theory is also a danger to science just as Many Worlds is? Should everybody just stick with Shut Up And Calculate and stop asking difficult questions?

 

> Beats me.

It doesn't beat me, I find those questions to be remarkably easy. And the answers to both is a big fat NO!

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

On Friday, October 11, 2019 at 1:59:04 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 2:43 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Path Integrals and Reality

Adrian Kent

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.6565.pdf

> We define the idea of real path quantum theory, a realist generalization of quantum theory in which it is postulated that the configuration space path actually followed by a closed quantum system is probabilistically chosen. ... The ultimate vision of those who take path integral quantum theory as fundamental to all of physics is a path integral formulation of quantum gravity and quantum cosmology.

And how does that differ from the Shut Up And Calculate quantum interpretation?

I'll bet you Adrian Kent's paper* (did you read it?) is netter than Shut Up And Read Sean Carroll's Book On Many Worlds.

* "It gives a clear physical meaning to the paths and to probabilities associated with them. It also suggests a clear and conceptually unproblematic way of justifying from first principles the appearance of quasiclassical trajectories."

@philipthrift 

[John Clark]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 3:12 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'll bet you Adrian Kent's paper* (did you read it?) is netter than Shut Up And Read Sean Carroll's Book On Many Worlds.

I won't even ask you if you read it because I know you didn't, I didn't either but at least I skimmed it and found it said:

"This motivates exploring ways to go beyond standard quantum theory, for example by adding extra mathematical structure (as in de Broglie-Bohm theory  or new dynamical laws (as in GRWP models)."

And Carroll talks in detail about both Broglie-Bohm theory and GRWP models in his book, so what is this "curious omission" you accuse Carroll of making? And the above is entirely consistent with Carroll saying that Hugh Everett did not add anything new to quantum mechanics, instead he just stripped out a lot of extraneous stuff because Many Worlds does not need to "add extra mathematical structure" to make it fit observation. The only purpose of that extra mathematical stuff is to get rid of many worlds, it does nothing else. And
William of Ockham must be spinning in his grave.

 John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

In any case, Kent dismisses Many Worlds. One World is enough:

One world versus many: the inadequacy of Everettian accounts of evolution, probability, and scientific confirmation

Adrian Kent

https://arxiv.org/abs/0905.0624

Against Many-Worlds Interpretations

Adrian Kent

https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9703089

@philipthrift