Way back when, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the organization that issues the Academy Awards or Oscars) would often give awards for films that were morally uplifting. The Academy gave its Best Picture award to the following morally uplifting or morally inspiring stories:
- To Kill a Mockingbird, mainly a story of a lawyer fighting racial prejudice in the southern US.
- Gandhi, the story of a man's lifelong effort to combat colonialism in a nonviolent way.
- Schindler's List, the story of a man bravely striving to save Jews from the horrors of Hitler's Holocaust.
- 12 Years a Slave, the story of a man surviving the horrors of slavery and racial prejudice.
- Dances With Wolves, the story of a man teaming up with American Indians to resist their oppression by land-grabbing expansionists.
But what is the latest picture to win the Best Picture award from the Academy? Alas, it is a picture called Everything Everywhere All at Once, promoting the morally corrosive nonsense of parallel universes theory. That type of thing is the opposite of something morally inspiring. Anyone who believes in the crazy notion that there are an infinite number of copies of himself in parallel universes is a person who should not be expected to act in a moral manner. For example, if such a person is driving along a road and spots a freezing child lying on the road, he may say, "It makes no difference what I do now, for there will be an infinite number of parallel universes in which the child freezes to death, and an infinite number of parallel universes in which the child lives."
Besides the fake physics multiverse nonsense of infinite parallel universes, there is also the fake physics nonsense of claiming an infinity of universes, each with a different set of laws or fundamental constants. Using the term "rabbit hole" stemming from the story of Alice in Wonderland in which Alice enters a world of fantasy after going down a rabbit hole, we can say those who advance such multiverse nonsense have gone way down into a rabbit hole bunker. When a person finds himself in such a bunker, it's a sign that things have gone very wrong. One spring long ago some government leaders found themselves hiding down in a bunker, and they had hoped at such a time they would instead be strutting around triumphantly in Moscow, Paris and London, not hunkered down in that bunker. Similarly the scientists of the Cold War era hoped that by the early twenty-first century they would end up in some grand state of explanatory triumph, with some elegant sensible-sounding "theory of everything," not in some crazy multiverse "last resort" hideout where they had to resort to loony-sounding appeals to some infinity of universes. No scientist around 1960 wanted to end up down some rabbit hole of claiming some infinity of universes.
The visual above gives you a little idea of why physicists went down the rabbit hole of the multiverse. It was a desperate futile measure they took to escape evidence they had found that the laws and fundamental constants of our universe have very precise fine-tuning to allow for the existence of intelligent beings, civilizations and long-lived stable stars like our sun, the kind of fine-tuning that would be incredibly improbable in any random universe.
It seems that some of our multiverse claimants may be losing the fawning approval they once enjoyed in the mainstream. Consider the case of a recent
interview with physicist Leonard Susskind, appearing in the CERN Courier, a publication of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, a large international group in charge of some of the world's biggest particle accelerators. Susskind spouts the same old multiverse baloney he's been pushing for decades. Susskind calls his version of the multiverse "the landscape," a term he introduced in a book that made it very clear his multiverse was all about trying to escape evidence the universe was well-designed. Susskind makes this groundless claim:
"I would say the best explanation for the patterns we see in cosmology and particle physics is a very diverse landscape of possibilities and an extremely large universe – a multiverse."
Among many
other cases of cosmic fine-tuning, physicists had discovered what looked like very precise fine-tuning regarding the Higgs Boson or Higgs mass, which I discuss in my post
here. Physicists tried to evade this fine-tuning with a wildly speculative theory called supersymmetry, which was the "foundation of sand" for an even more wildly speculative family of theories called string theory. All of the predictions of supersymmetry failed, and the particles it predicted were never found. To try to sweep under the rug this failure, the string theorist Susskind gives us this bit of hair-splitting:
" I call that string theory with a capital 'S', and I can tell you with 100% confidence that we don’t live in that world. And then there’s string theory with a small 's' – you might call it string-inspired theory....The string landscape is one such guess. It’s not based on absolutely precise capital-S string theory, but on some conjectures about what this expanded small-s string theory might be."
You get the idea? Susskind is trying to preserve his string theory landscape multiverse fantasy by telling us that it is only string theory with a capital "S" that has been ruled out, not string theory with a small "s." This hair-splitting is like when a wife finds her husband naked in bed with his naked mistress, and the husband says, "Don't worry, darling: this merely shows that I have been unfaithful with a small 'u,' not unfaithful with a capital 'U.' "
Alas our interviewer fails to ask Susskind a single tough question, and lets him get away with trying to sell a totally failed theoretical program (multiverse theory and string theory) as some kind of success, even though not one particle of evidence supports it. It's the same old deal in which some editor or science journalist pitches nothing but the softest of softball questions instead of asking tough questions to scientists who are telling us tales that an astrologer would blush when telling. But at least someone at the CERN Courier has done his or her job properly. That person has titled the interview "Lost in the Landscape." The very mainstream CERN Courier thereby signals to us that it has no confidence in the explanatory snake oil Susskind is selling.
Multiverse theorists have tried to sell their fantasies as some kind of new-fangled stuff. But thinking like multiverse theory is older than the Colosseum of Rome. The idea that special and fantastically improbable arrangements can be explained by imagining some infinity of combinations dates back to the materialism of the Epicureans. Epicureans such as Lucretius (who died about 50 BC) tried to explain how humans exist on a planet with such enormous biological order. The explanation was simply that order had arisen from incredibly lucky combinations of atoms, combinations that we would never expect to occur in, say, a trillion years of time, but which we might expect to occur if the universe had existed for an infinite length of time. Lucretius stated the doctrine on this page of his De Rerum Natura: "So much can letters by mere change of order
Accomplish; but these elements which are atoms
Can effect more combinations, out of which
All different kinds of things may be created."
The "infinite atomic combinations" idea of the Epicureans was never a credible explanation for the order humans observe, because it never explained human reproduction and morphogenesis: the marvel of how a speck-sized zygote is able to progress to become the trillion-times more organized state of the human body. With an infinity of atomic combinations, you might end up (maybe once in a gazillion octillion of eons) with a planet full of human bodies arising from random combinations of atoms. But such combination luck in the past could never explain why there constantly occurs in the present throughout the human species an enormous organizational effect in which speck-size zygotes lacking any specification for making a human body gradually progress to become the vast hierarchical organization of a human body. You can never explain such a thing through any theory of cosmic luck in the past. You need something gigantically more: a theory of why there occurs vast organizational effects in the present, over a time scale of only nine months. The atomic combinations theory of the Epicureans was no such theory, and multiverse speculations are no such theory. Theories of luck in the past cannot explain gigantic organizational effects occurring so abundantly in the present.
Postulating a multiverse to explain our fine-tuned universe is futile, because such a speculation does nothing to make our universe more likely. The relevant ratio here is the ratio between successful universes (allowing civilizations such as ours) and unsuccessful universes (ruling out such civilizations), and you do not make any change in such a ratio by imagining more universes. As an explanation for why our universe is so fine-tuned, the multiverse is both bunk with a small "b" and bunk with a capital "B."
There is zero evidence basis for believing in any idea of parallel universes, and no logical basis for believing in any such fantasy. So why do we keep reading about such nonsense? Largely because it serves as clickbait. We must remember that nowadays science journalism is all thoroughly entangled with an economic profit system in which bunk stories that are interesting-sounding are rewarded because they serve as clickbait that helps generate profitable revenue from ads that appear on online sites. Interesting-sounding nonsense is incentivized under such an economic reality. Follow the money, and you may understand why this toxic rubbish is being foisted on us.
No comments:
Post a Comment