Far out cosmology: more about the silly multiverse theory (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, July 16, 2019, 19:45 (1955 days ago) @ David Turell

Ethan Siegel's definition of scientific truth is that there are theories that fit observation, but no more:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/07/13/ask-ethan-what-does-truth-mean-...

"In many ways, the human endeavor of science is the ultimate pursuit of truth. By asking the natural world and Universe questions about itself, we seek to gain an understanding of what the Universe is like, what the rules that govern it are, and how things came to be the way they are today. Science is the full suite of knowledge that we gain from observing, measuring, and performing experiments that test the Universe, but it's also the process through which we perform those investigations. It might be easy to see how we gain knowledge from that endeavor, but how do scientists arrive at the idea of a scientific truth?

***

"There are no absolute truths in science; there are only approximate truths.

"Whether a statement, theory, or framework is true or not depends on quantitative factors and how closely you examine or measure the results.

"Every scientific theory has a finite range of validity: inside that range, the theory is indistinguishable from true, outside of that range, the theory is no longer true.

***

"Science is not about finding the absolute truth of the Universe. No matter how much we'd like to know what the fundamental nature of reality is, from the smallest subatomic scales to the largest cosmic ones and beyond, this is not something science can deliver. All of our scientific truths are provisional, and we must recognize that they are only models or approximation of reality.

"Even the most successful scientific theories imaginable will, by their very nature, have a limited range of validity. But we can theorize whatever we like, and when a new theory meets the following three criteria:

"it achieves all of the successes of the prevailing, pre-existing theory,

"it succeeds where the current theory is known to fail,

"and it makes novel predictions for hitherto unmeasured phenomena, distinct from the prior theory, that pass the critical observational or experimental tests,

"it will supersede the current one as our best approximation of a scientific truth.

"All of our currently held scientific truths, from the Standard Model of elementary particles to the Big Bang to dark matter and dark energy to cosmic inflation and beyond, are only provisional. They describe the Universe extremely accurately, succeeding in regimes where all prior frameworks have failed. Yet they all have limitations to how far we can take their implications before we arrive at a place where their predictions are no longer sensible, or no longer describe reality. They are not absolute truths, but approximate, provisional ones.

"No experiment can ever prove that a scientific theory is true; we can only demonstrate that its validity either extends or fails to extend to whatever regime we test it in. The failure of a theory is actually the ultimate scientific success: an opportunity to find an even better scientific truth to approximate reality. It's being wrong in the best way imaginable."

Comment: This view of science and truth requires observation of something. Multiverse conjectures cannot do this, and are worthless.