His Critique of Scientist Overconfidence Is Sharp, But He Should Broaden His Focus

At the "Not Even Wrong" blog, mathematician Peter Woit recently asks, "Whose job is it to explain to the public that they were misled by overenthusiastic scientists?" For many years Woit has taken on the job of explaining to the public how the public is being misled by a belief community of overenthusiastic physicists called string theorists.  Woit has long posted at this "Not Even Wrong" blog site, which you can reach here. By now he has been posting at the blog site for twenty years. 

The site started out to help publicize his book "Not Even Wrong," which is a critique of a type of groundless physics speculation called string theory. Woit has published some very lucid posts that have criticized the overconfidence of speculative physicists and multiverse theorists.  But while he has shown himself to be someone who is skillful at "pulling back the wizard's curtain" by exposing the bluster and bluffing of physicists passing themselves off as "grand lords of knowledge," Woit has confined such a skill to too narrow a field of study. Similar bluffing and bluster is going on in many other areas of science that Woit rarely writes about. 

Woit has written 163 posts with a tag of "Multiverse Mania." In these posts he criticizes pretty well the extravagance and dogmatism of people who appeal to the idea of a vast collection of universes, without having any observational basis for such speculations. But as far as I can see. Woit has never shown much insight as to what caused multiverse speculations to arise. In his 2018 post "15 Years of Multiverse Mania" he says this: 

"KKLT did not mention anthropics and the multiverse, but less than a month later Lenny Susskind published The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory, a call to arms for anthropics and a founding document of Multiverse Mania. He immediately went to work on writing a book-length version of string theory multiverse propaganda aimed at the public, The Cosmic Landscape, which was published in 2005."

The full title of that book makes very clear what Susskind's motivation was in promoting the idea of the multiverse. The title was "The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design."  Susskind was very bothered by the reality of cosmic fine-tuning, the fact that in many ways our universe has laws and fundamental constants that seem very fine-tuned to allow our universe to be compatible with the existence of intelligent life, against all odds.  The multiverse is a gigantically extravagant and utterly fallacious attempt to evade the implications of such a reality, the implication that our universe is the work of a purposeful agency. The multiverse theorist appeals to some infinity or near-infinity of universes, claiming that if there is such an infinity or near-infinity, having one life-compatible universe would not be so improbable.   

This theoretical maneuver is futile, because by imagining a multiverse you do not change the odds of any one universe being compatible with the existence of life.  Similarly, if I imagine an infinite universe filled with an infinite number of gamblers playing poker, that does nothing to change the odds of me being dealt three royal flushes while playing poker in a particular poker session. For a full discussion of all of the reasons why multiverse reasoning utterly fails to explain cosmic fine-tuning, read my posts here and here.  

The factors that inspired multiverse speculations are depicted in the visual below:

The arising of multiverse claims was an act of desperation by people such as Susskind who were clearly bothered by how fined-tuned our universe is:

The desperation of an appeal to the multiverse was part of the evolution (or should we say the devolution) of materialism:

Although writing 160+ posts with a tag of "Multiverse Mania," Woit seems to have failed to perceive the analgesic motivations of the multiverse idea. The idea was a desperate attempt at pain-relief by physicists and others who were very bothered by the mounting evidence that our universe was very  precisely fine-tuned to allow intelligent life to exist in it. 

 

String theory was an offshoot of a simpler theory called supersymmetry theory, and that theory arose mainly as an attempt to sweep under the rug one of the many examples of cosmic-fine tuning, an example involving the Higgs boson/Higgs field. Scientists are puzzled by why the Higgs field has the strength it has, and they say that it seems to require fine-tuning to 15 decimal places or more. This is a problem called the hierarchy problem or the naturalness problem. 

As a Daily Galaxy article once put it, “Using theory as it currently stands, the mass of the Higgs boson can only be explained as the result of a random fine-tuning of the physical constants of the universe at a level of accuracy of one in one quadrillion.” Aaccording to this scientific web site, “one has to hypothesize that the several correction terms cancel out to a part in 10^34 (a hundred billionths of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth), if one is to make the Higgs mass smaller than a lead brick.” 

The causal relation between string theory and supersymmetry theory is shown by the following query of the Google Ngram viewer, showing references in books to the two theories:

We see above the rise and fall of supersymmetry, a theory (like string theory) never supported by observations. 

Woit often does a good job of exposing the bluffing and bluster of overconfident scientists pretending to understand grand matters that they don't understand. But despite twenty years of posting to his "Not Even Wrong" blog, he has never seemed to broaden his scope to a more general treatment of the different types of belief communities of overenthusiastic scientists who are misleading the public, largely to serve their own vested interests.  The overconfidence of string theorists is not some freak occurrence in which some tiny group of scientists act differently from the way 99% of scientists act. The overconfidence of string theorists is just one example of a pattern of dysfunction that is extremely common in the world of scientific academia.  There are quite a few other scientist communities guilty of the same kind of very severe overconfidence, dogmatism, bad research methods and frequently erring and dishonest speech that we so often see in the community of string theorists. And some of those overconfident scientist communities are very much bigger and much more influential than the tiny community of string theorists. 

Woit should read my 63 posts with a tag of "overblown hype" to get ideas on how he might broaden his very narrow critique which has covered only a small fraction of the overenthusiastic scientists misleading the public. String theorists and supersymmetry theorists are only a small fraction of the scientists who abundantly use a technique I call math-spraying. The technique involves the abundant use of speculative mathematics to try to give a scientific aura to speculations that are not well-rooted in observations, or perhaps entirely unrooted in them.