Is speculation in multiverses as immoral as speculation in subprime mortgages?

[Moontanman]

Is speculation in multiverses as immoral as speculation in subprime mortgages?

By John Horgan | Jan 28, 2011 05:50 PM

 

I'm becoming a moralistic prig in my dotage. Someone dear to me just proudly told me that her son, a freshly minted Harvard grad, is training to be an investment banker. This privileged young man, I grumbled, should try to make the world a better place rather than playing in a rigged, high-stakes gambling racket.

 

I apologized later—and vowed privately to be less self-righteous in my judgments of others' career choices. After all, I ain't exactly Gandhi. But then I read Brian Greene's new book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (Knopf, 2011), and my moral hackles got all quivery again. (Weird coincidence alert: In 2006, the publisher RiskDoctor, Inc., released a book titled Options Trading: The Hidden Reality.) A physicist at Columbia University, Greene is an immensely talented science explicator who has brought physics to the masses through his smart, witty bestsellers, The Elegant Universe (turned into a television series narrated by Greene) and The Fabric of the Cosmos.

 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=is-speculation-in-multiverses-as-im-2011-01-28&WT.mc_id=SA_SA_20110216

[imatfaal]

I must admit I have very little patience for journalists who mock and deride world experts - it all seems to come down to "I don't understand it, it has no immediate technological benefit, and its gonna take many more years for it to be testable" Well - Yes, it's advanced and cutting-edge theoretical physics. I have no proof to this statement - but i am fairly certain that John Horgan could not follow the maths that underlies the work of physicists such as hawking, susskind, greene, and witten (they gave him a fields medal FCOL) - and without the maths any understanding is shallow at best

 

Advancing knowledge cannot be regimented and held to a timetable; sometimes it seems to stay still whilst various ideas are tried and fail - then it leaps forward. We can either be a society that constrains science and stagnates or one that embraces the highly speculative and theoretical and advances

[D H]

I have the same problem as does Horgan with respect to some aspects of theoretical physics. I'm not a fan of the many-worlds interpretation. Quantum mechanics is weird enough as-is. Just shut up and calculate. Leave the stupid metaphysical interpretations out of it, please.

[Mr Skeptic]

Is speculation in multiverses as immoral as speculation in subprime mortgages?

 

Does speculation mean the same thing as speculation?

[swansont]

I think Neil deGrasse Tyson does an admirable job of blasting Horgan's position out of the water in the interview linked here

http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/7955

 

Science is driven by passion and curiosity, and it's not up to Horgan to decide what a scientist should think about, or write about.

[D H]

I think Neil deGrasse Tyson does an admirable job of blasting Horgan's position out of the water in the interview linked here

http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/7955

 

Science is driven by passion and curiosity, and it's not up to Horgan to decide what a scientist should think about, or write about.

We must be living in parallel universes here. I don't see how Tyson's argument has anything to do with Horgan's complaint against Greene's book. Horgan's complaint is that Greene is no longer being a scientist when he talks about non-communicating universes. He is being something that IMO is the antithesis of being a "scientist" -- the word "religious proselytizer" comes to my mind.

[swansont]

We must be living in parallel universes here. I don't see how Tyson's argument has anything to do with Horgan's complaint against Greene's book. Horgan's complaint is that Greene is no longer being a scientist when he talks about non-communicating universes. He is being something that IMO is the antithesis of being a "scientist" -- the word "religious proselytizer" comes to my mind.

 

I was referring to the position of the nonscientist dictating what the scientist should be doing. Why should Greene not be allowed to write a book like this? I haven't read it, so I don't know if he misrepresents this as something other than conjecture extrapolated from the science. Does he?

 

I don't understand the objection. To me, it is reminiscent of the complaints of scientists getting involved in politics, as if once you're deemed a scientist, that everything you do must be science.

[A Tripolation]

I was referring to the position of the nonscientist dictating what the scientist should be doing. Why should Greene not be allowed to write a book like this? I haven't read it, so I don't know if he misrepresents this as something other than conjecture extrapolated from the science. Does he?

 

I have nothing to add except that I'm going to be attending a talk by Greene in less than one hour.

[D H]

I was referring to the position of the nonscientist dictating what the scientist should be doing. Why should Greene not be allowed to write a book like this?

You and I might not be living in parallel universes, but we sure are focusing on different aspects of Horgan's article. It appears you took focused on the title and inferred something from that. I focused on these two sentences:

 

My beef with Greene is this: He has become a cheerleader for the descent of theoretical physics into increasingly fantastical speculation, disconnected from the reality that we can access empirically. ... In his new book Greene takes us even further away from reality, asking us to consider not just hypothetical particles but entire universes that lie beyond the reach of our instruments.

 

Telling the lay community that something that is inherently unobservable is true (and Greene does write that way) is, IMO, a disservice to science. One interpretation of the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics is that those many worlds are real parallel universes. MWI is but one of many metaphysical interpretations of quantum mechanics. The many worlds = multiple universes is a metaphysical interpretation atop a metaphysical interpretation.

 

My opinion: Do your QM calculations in any way you want, but don't pretend that the interpretation you choose to view the counterintuitive QM world is "real". It is your calculations that are real. If you want, you can call this the meta-shutup and calculate interpretation of quantum mechanics.

[DrRocket]

You and I might not be living in parallel universes, but we sure are focusing on different aspects of Horgan's article. It appears you took focused on the title and inferred something from that. I focused on these two sentences:

 

 

 

Telling the lay community that something that is inherently unobservable is true (and Greene does write that way) is, IMO, a disservice to science. One interpretation of the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics is that those many worlds are real parallel universes. MWI is but one of many metaphysical interpretations of quantum mechanics. The many worlds = multiple universes is a metaphysical interpretation atop a metaphysical interpretation.

 

My opinion: Do your QM calculations in any way you want, but don't pretend that the interpretation you choose to view the counterintuitive QM world is "real". It is your calculations that are real. If you want, you can call this the meta-shutup and calculate interpretation of quantum mechanics.

 

 

I think that there are two completely different ideas here being treated as one.

 

Hugh Everett's "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, the subject of his dissertation under John Archibald Wheeler, is one. Everett's interpretation of QM is not my favorite, but it is simply an interpretation and nothing more. It produces precisely the same predictions as does QM under the Copenhagen interpretation, and is therefore experimentally indistinguishable from it. It is perfectly valid, just as valid as the usual textbook QM.

 

On the other hand the "landscape" of Susskind is an entirely different kettle of fish. I have read Susskind's book, but not the more recent book by Brian Greene (though a copy has now been ordered). My impression is that Greene's multiverse is, if not identical to, at least very similar to Susskind's "megaverse" which realizes his "cosmic landscape".

 

I have to agree with your assessment of the untestable being presented to the lay public as "true" as being, at the very least, a disservice. It is in fact a self-serving disservice, IMO bordering on fraud.

 

The idea behind the "landscape" is roughly as follows:

 

1. String theory has failed to meet its its initial goal of producing a unique mathematically consistent theory of the fundamental forces. Despite the inability to rigorously define any string theory, it appears to some string proponents that there are something like 10^500 consistent string theories. (Witten seems notably absent from this group.)

 

2. These string theories are so compelling in their beauty that they must ALL be true and there is a, take your pick -- pocket universe, baby universe, etc -- in a larger, again take your pick -- multiverse, megaverse, etc -- in which the laws of each of these string theories govern physics.

 

3. In fact, by misapplying probability theory it is concluded that infinitely many copies of each pocket universe must exist. This of course ignores the lack of any probability space in which to apply probability theory -- noted very kindly as "the measure problem", by the more honest but ignored by at least Susskind.

 

4. With the megaverse in hand proponents then apply "anthropic reasoning" to explain why we find ourselves in a pocket universe in which the laws of physics are "fine-tuned" for life as we know it. They then thumb their noses at deists having concocted a "scientific" explanation for the laws of our little piece of the multiverse.

 

5. In all of this advocates conveniently ignore their ability to produce any single concrete theory that actually matches the known physics of our pocket. With 10^500 choices available, the right one must be in there somewhere !

 

So far as I can tell this story is the result of three things: 1) militant atheism converted to its own dogmatic religion, 2) embarrassment that years of string theory and other research have produced no clear concrete candidate for a "theory of everything", and 3) the recognition by the writers that they are mortal and have a very limited amount of time left.

 

The proponents are safe, in that the theory being advocated is not testable, even in principle, so no one can prove them wrong. On the other hand, and for the same reason, no one should care.

 

What would be useful, but much harder and not as profitable as sensational books written for the naive and gullible, would be to find a no-kidding predictive theory that describes the physics that we can actually, at least in principle, observe.