Cosmologic philosophy: multiverse/string theory die! (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, January 16, 2015, 15:06 (3599 days ago) @ David Turell

Current math's in physics go no-where. Multiverse, string theory has no proof just beautiful math. Now the objections are getting stronger:-http://bryanappleyard.com/physics-superstitions-and-allegories/-“The idea,” says physicist Lee Smolin, “that the truth about nature can be wrestled from pure thought through mathematics is overdone… The idea that mathematics is prophetic and that mathematical structure and beauty are a clue to how nature ultimately works is just wrong.”-"And in an explosive essay published last week in the science journal Nature astrophysicists George Ellis and Joe Silk say that the wild claims of theoretical physicists are threatening the authority of science itself.-“This battle for the heart and soul of physics,” they write, “is opening up at a time when scientific results — in topics from climate change to the theory of evolution — are being questioned by some politicians and religious fundamentalists. Potential damage to public confidence in science and to the nature of fundamental physics needs to be contained by deeper dialogue between scientists and philosophers….The imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is testable. Only then can we defend science from attack.-"Unger and Smolin have also just gone into print with a monumental book - The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time - which systematically takes apart contemporary physics and exposes much of it as, in Unger's words, “an inferno of allegorical fabrication.” The book says it is time to return to real science which is tested against nature rather than constructed out of mathematics. Physics should no longer be seen as the ultimate science, underwriting all others. The true queen of the sciences should be history - the biography of the cosmos.-"So when did it all go so horribly wrong? The critics would say in 1984 when a new idea - superstrings - suddenly seemed to offer physicists an escape from a dead end left behind by Einstein.-“As we see it,” write Ellis and Silk about this development, “theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any.”-"To the critics, the idea that we should believe solely in the mathematics is, first, a betrayal of science and, secondly, a demonstrable absurdity. It is a betrayal because science has always been the development of hypotheses in the mind or in the lab which are then tested against what we can find in nature - any theory must be falsifiable by nature or it is metaphysics, faith or superstition.-"Does any of this matter to you? All of it does. The rise of physics to the throne of ultimate science since the early twentieth century has, inevitably, affected ordinary life with its assumptions and not just in sci-fi. For example, contemporary determinism - the idea that everything that happens is inevitable and that our free will is an illusion - springs from twentieth century physics and has, most recently, infected neuroscience.(my bold)-"Perhaps more damagingly, the idea that the human mind, unaided except by mathematics, can encompass the universe has downgraded nature and deluded us into thinking we can do anything. We can't. Nature - human or otherwise - is the only standard by which we or our ideas can be tested. The rest is just chalk on a blackboard."