Ruminations on multiverses; they are not real (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, May 28, 2020, 20:42 (1428 days ago) @ David Turell

Peter Woit takes on parallel universes:

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=11767

"I never thought I would see this happen: a university PR department correcting media hype about its research. You might have noticed this comment here a week ago, about a flurry of media hype about neutrinos and parallel universes. A new CNN story does a good job of explaining where the nonsense came from. The main offender was New Scientist, which got the parallel universe business somehow from Neil Turok

"The ANITA scientists and their institution’s PR people were not exactly blameless, having participated in a 2018 publicity campaign to promote the idea that they had discovered not a parallel universe, but supersymmetry. They reported an observation here, which led to lots of dubious speculative theory papers, ... The University of Hawaii in December 2018 put out a press release announcing that UH professor’s Antarctica discovery may herald new model of physics. One can find all sorts of stories from this period about how this was evidence for supersymmetry,

"It’s great to see that the University of Hawaii has tried to do something at least about the latest “parallel universe” nonsense, putting out last week a press release entitled Media incorrectly connects UH research to parallel universe theory. CNN quotes a statement from NASA (I haven’t seen a public source for this), which includes:

"Tabloids have misleadingly connected NASA and Gorham’s experimental work, which identified some anomalies in the data, to a theory proposed by outside physicists not connected to the work. Gorham believes there are more plausible, easier explanations to the anomalies.

"The public understanding of fundamental physics research and the credibility of the subject have suffered a huge amount of damage over the past few decades, due to the overwhelming amount of misleading, self-serving BS about parallel universes and failed speculative ideas put out by physicists, university PR departments and the journalists who mistakenly take them seriously. I hope this latest is the beginning of a new trend of people in all these categories starting to fight hype, not spread it."

Comment: Part of the problem is the vast number of news outlets need startling news to draw enough readers. Thanks to Woit and Hossenfelder who try to bring sanity to the news.