There's a rather ridiculous custom that prevails in almost all published scientific papers: the custom of trying to present the appearance of a single story and a single set of assertions that all of the authors agree with. So in 97% of all published scientific papers, you will get a narrative and a series of assertions, without any indication that there is disagreement among the authors about some of the claims. We virtually never see any "minority report" section in which some of the authors state opinions different from that of the main text of the paper.
This is very suspicious given that so many scientific papers present dubious causal claims, dubious factual claims, and dubious interpretations of the data that was gathered, and also given that in many fields it is common to have many authors of a paper. So when a paper with quite a few authors makes controversial claims, or makes claims that do not obviously follow from the reported facts and observations, we should ask: is there really going on some unanimity of thought? Or is it that one author (perhaps the lead author) kind of forces everyone to sign off on his subjective opinions and interpretation?
Very rarely, a scientific paper will defy this convention, and we will see a paper in which different authors are free to state their own opinions, with different sections of the paper listed as having different authors. So it is in the interesting recent paper "The sounds of science—a symphony for many instruments and voices: part II." The paper includes a very bad section by one author, and a very good section by another author.
The very bad section is a section 12 entitled "How big is nature, and how much of it can we explore?" by Roland Allen. Allen attempts to sell us the Fake Physics that is multiverse theory. The Multiverse is some idea that there are some gigantic or perhaps infinite number of other universes. Allen refers to a Multiverse classification scheme offered by Max Tegmark. Here are the first three levels of the classification scheme:
Multiverse 1: Just an extension of our universe, and not some other universe with different laws or fundamental constants. Calling this "Multiverse 1" or "Multiverse Level 1" is therefore misleading.
Multiverse 2: A vast number of other universes that each has a different set of physical laws and physical constants.
Multiverse 3: The madness of Everett's "many worlds" theory, the idea that there are an infinite number of copies in you and every one else, each different, in some infinity of parallel universes. This is the morally poisonous nonsense of Everettism.
Allen's attempt to lure you into believing in the multiverse starts with trying to get you to accept Multiverse 1, which isn't actually a multiverse at all, but just a universe like ours, in which we can't see everything with our telescopes. The misleading word trick here is comparable to the misleading word trick by which people are lured into believing in unbelievable dogmas of Darwinism, by using multiple definitions of "evolution." Here's how that scam works:
Darwinist: You know one of the definitions of evolution is just "gene pool change over time." Now I'm sure you believe in that, right? It can't be that the human species has exactly the same gene pool it had 5000 years ago, right?
Darwinism resister: Well, sure I believe in evolution in that tiny sense.
Darwinist: Okay, great, so you've accepted evolution. It's nice to know you believe that all earthly life arose from only random natural processes.
Darwinism resister: No, I didn't say that.
Darwinist: But you said you believe in evolution, and what I just said is one of the definitions of evolution.
Darwinism resister: No, I only said I believe in a little microevolution, not some "this explains it all" theory of macroevolution.
What we have here is a trick of equivocation. The trick involves starting out by using a word in one way, and then switching the definition of the word to mean something different. It's the same kind of nonsensical trickery involved if you get someone to agree that Taylor Swift is a star, and then say, "Okay, I'm glad you agree that Taylor Swift is a massive self-luminous spherical body in outer space." And similar trickery is going on with Allen's appeal to a "Multiverse 1" by which he merely means a universe like ours but bigger than we can see with our telescopes. The "Multiverse 1" of Allen and Tegmark isn't a multiverse at all.
As for the "Multiverse 3" that Allen wants you to believe it, is is just moral and intellectual madness. It's the completely nutty Fake Physics fiction of an infinite number of parallel universes in which there are infinite copies of you, each different, what is called the Everett "many worlds" theory. Allen's idea of trying to support this idea is to appeal to a little opinion poll taken at a conference led by multiverse enthusiast Max Tegmark. This is about as convincing as trying to prove the truth of the dogmas of Hindu fundamentalists by referring to a poll taken about belief in such dogmas, in which the people polled are all Hindu fundamentalists.
You should never have any moral trust in anyone believing in the Everett "many worlds" theory. Since such a person believes there are an infinite number of copies of himself that will have every possible variation of behavior, with each variation repeated an infinite number of times, we should never expect such a person to act morally or honestly. Someone who believes in the Everett "many worlds" theory will tend to be thinking something like, "There's an infinite number of copies of me that act in every possible way, so it doesn't matter how I act; there will still be an infinity of my selves who do right, and an infinity of my selves who do wrong." Never trust your children to the care of persons believing such madness, and never trust such people with your money. And never expect them to speak honestly or fairly in anything they write.
But one of the authors of the paper does talk straight to us. That person is physicist Jim Baggott. Here are some choice quotes from his section of the paper (Section 11), which begins on page 21:
"Contemporary foundational theoretical physics is largely broken. It offers nothing in which experimentalists can invest any real confidence. Theorists have instead retreated into their own fantasy, increasingly unconcerned with the business of developing theories that connect meaningfully with empirical reality.
About forty years ago particle theorists embarked on a promising journey in search of a fundamental description of matter based on the notion of ‘strings’. Lacking any kind of guidance from empirical facts, forty years later string theory and the M-theory conjecture are hopelessly mired in metaphysics, a direct consequence of over-interpreting a mathematics that looks increasingly likely to have nothing whatsoever to do with physical reality. The theory has given us supersymmetric particles that can’t been found. It has given us hidden dimensions that may be compactified at least 10 [to the 500th power] different ways to yield a universe a bit like our own. And at least for some theoretical physicists who I believe really should know better, it has given us a multiverse – a landscape (or swampland?) of possibilities from which we self-select our universe by virtue of our existence...
I’m pretty sure there was a time in which this kind of metaphysical nonsense would have been rejected out-of-hand, with theorists acknowledging the large neon sign flashing WRONG WAY....Alas, instead we get a strong sense of the extent to which foundational theoretical physics is broken....
In the meantime, popular science periodicals feature an endless stream of multiverse stories, pandering to an audience that may no longer be able to differentiate science from fringe science or pseudo-science. The very credibility of science is under threat, at a time when public trust in science and scientists is needed more than ever."
What biologists and biochemists should be doing (but are not) is giving us straight talk about the implications of what they have found out about how enormous is the purposeful hierarchical organization, information richness and component interdependence throughout large living organisms, and the accidentally unachievable functional thresholds of the systems of such organisms. What physicists should be doing (but are not) is giving us straight talk about the implications of what they have found out about how sensitive our universe is to tiny changes in its laws and fundamental constants. Here are some relevant quotes:
- "We conclude that a change of more than 0.5 % in the strength of the strong interaction or more than 4 % change in the strength of the Coulomb force would destroy either nearly all C [carbon] or all O [oxygen] in every star. This implies that irrespective of stellar evolution the contribution of each star to the abundance of C or O in the ISM would be negligible. Therefore, for the above cases the creation of carbon-based life in our universe would be strongly disfavoured." -- Oberhummer, Csot, and Schlattl, "Stellar Production Rates of Carbon and Its Abundance in the Universe."
- "The cosmological constant must be tuned to 120 decimal places and there are also many mysterious ‘coincidences’ involving the physical constants that appear to be necessary for life, or any form of information processing, to exist....Fred Hoyle first pointed out, the beryllium would decay before interacting with another alpha particle were it not for the existence of a remarkably finely-tuned resonance in this interaction. Heinz Oberhummer has studied this resonance in detail and showed how the amount of oxygen and carbon produced in red giant stars varies with the strength and range of the nucleon interactions. His work indicates that these must be tuned to at least 0.5% if one is to produce both these elements to the extent required for life." -- Physicists B.J. Carr and M.J. Rees, "Fine-Tuning in Living Systems."
- "The Standard Model [of physics] is regarded as a highly 'unnatural' theory. Aside from having a large number of different particles and forces, many of which seem surplus to requirement, it is also very precariously balanced. If you change any of the 20+ numbers that have to be put into the theory even a little, you rapidly find yourself living in a universe without atoms. This spooky fine-tuning worries many physicists, leaving the universe looking as though it has been set up in just the right way for life to exist." -- Harry Cliff, particle physicist, in a Scientific American article.
- "If the parameters defining the physics of our universe departed from their present values, the observed rich structure and complexity would not be supported....Thirty-one such dimensionless parameters were identified that specify our universe. Fine-tuning refers to the observation that if any of these numbers took a slightly different value, the qualitative features of our universe would change dramatically. Our large, long-lived universe with a hierarchy of complexity from the sub-atomic to the galactic is the result of particular values of these parameters." -- Jeffrey M. Shainline, physicist (link).
- "A mere 1 percent offset between the charge of the electron and that of the proton would lead to a catastrophic repulsion....My entire body would dissolve in a massive explosion...The very Earth itself, the planet as a whole, would crack open and fly apart in an annihilating explosion...This is what would happen were the electron's charge to exceed the proton's by 1 percent. The opposite case, in which the proton's charge exceeded the electron's, would lead to the identical situation...How precise must the balance be?...Relatively small things like atoms, people and the like would fly apart if the charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Larger structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion." -- Astronomy professor emeritus George Greenstein, "The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos," pages 63-64.
- "The overall result is that, because multiverse hypotheses do not predict the fine-tuning for this universe any better than a single universe hypothesis, the multiverse hypotheses fail as explanations for cosmic fine-tuning. Conversely, the fine-tuning data does not support the multiverse hypotheses." -- physicist V. Palonen, "Bayesian considerations on the multiverse explanation of cosmic fine-tuning."
- "The evolution of the cosmos is determined by initial conditions (such as the initial rate of expansion and the initial mass of matter), as well as by fifteen or so numbers called physical constants (such as the speed of the light and the mass of the electron). We have by now measured these physical constants with extremely high precision, but we have failed to come up with any theory explaining why they have their particular values. One of the most surprising discoveries of modern cosmology is the realization that the initial conditions and physical constants of the universe had to be adjusted with exquisite precision if they are to allow the emergence of conscious observers. This realization is referred to as the 'anthropic principle'...Change the initial conditions and physical constants ever so slightly, and the universe would be empty and sterile; we would not be around to discuss it. The precision of this fine-tuning is nothing short of stunning. The initial rate of expansion of the universe, to take just one example, had to have been tweaked to a precision comparable to that of an archer trying to land an arrow in a 1-square-centimeter target located on the fringes of the universe, 15 billion light years away!" -- Trinh Xuan Thuan, Professor of Astronomy, University of Virginia, “Chaos and Harmony” p. 235.
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