Cosmologic philosophy: more comment on current dead end (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, June 25, 2018, 21:31 (2343 days ago) @ David Turell

Another review of Hossenfelder's book:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/how-physics-lost-its-way/?utm_source=n...

"I became a science writer in part because I believed their claims, but by the early 1990s I had become a skeptic. The leading contender for a theory of everything held that all of nature’s particles and forces, including gravity, stem from infinitesimal, stringy particles wriggling in nine or more dimensions.

"The problem is that no conceivable experiment can detect the strings or extra dimensions. In 1991, I raised the issue of testability with string theorist Edward Witten, whom some say is the greatest living physicist. He emphasized the “incredible consistency, remarkable elegance and beauty” of string theory. “Good wrong ideas are extremely scarce,” he assured me, “and good wrong ideas that even remotely rival the majesty of string theory have never been seen.”

"Basically Witten was saying that string theory is too beautiful to be wrong. When I interviewed him in 2014, he said he was still confident that string theory is “on the right track,” even though it remains as lacking in evidence as ever.

***

"tells the story of Hossenfelder’s disillusionment, her realization that subjective factors, such as an obsession with beauty, have infected physics. Aesthetic considerations guide physicists’ judgments of strings, inflation, supersymmetry, multiverses and the many different interpretations of quantum mechanics.

"Physicists seem to adhere to Keats’s old aphorism that truth equals beauty. In the absence of data, that principle reduces physics to a matter of taste, not truth. You like string theory and Bach, I prefer loop-space theory and the Beatles. “I’m not sure anymore that what we do here, in the foundations of physics, is science,” Hossenfelder writes. “And if not, why am I wasting my time with it?”

***

"Hossenfelder lists cognitive biases that, in addition to aesthetic preferences, have undermined physics. They include confirmation bias, the sunk-cost fallacy and the social desirability bias. Explaining the latter, Hossenfelder remarks, “You don’t tell the tribal chief your tent stinks if behind you stand a dozen fellows with spears.” Hossenfelder nonetheless bravely declares that “this tent stinks.”

"Cognitive biases, of course, beset not just physics but science as a whole. They help to explain science’s replication crisis and diminishing returns. “Almost all scientists today have an undisclosed conflict of interest between funding and honesty,” Hossenfelder writes.

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"There is something almost unbearably poignant and, yes, beautiful about humans striving to accomplish a grand goal after repeated failures. But as Hossenfelder asks, “How long is too long to wait” for physicists to succeed? Good question. At what point, if ever, will physicists conclude that they cannot complete their quest, because the riddle of existence is unsolvable?"

Comment: Yes, the question of' why is there something instead of nothing?' has no reachable answer. Faith must intervene.