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Multiverse promotion continues despite a minor no-evidence setback

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From Peter Woit

Multiverse promotion continues apace, with Steinhardt one of a rather small number of physicists publicly objecting. On Monday Alexander Vilenkin will explain to the public at the American Museum of Natural History that “the Big Bang was not a unique event in cosmic history and that other Big Bangs constantly erupt in remote parts of the universe, producing new worlds with a great variety of physical properties” (see here). A recent story on livescience has Brian Greene on the multiverse. Over at Massimo Pigliucci’s Scientia Salon Coel Hellier is starting a multipart series arguing against multiverse skeptics with The multiverse as a scientific concept — part I. Nothing in Part I about the problematic issues (untestable claims that fundamental physics is “environmental”), maybe in Part II… More.

“Environmental,” yeah, is a good word. It doesn’t matter whether it is true in nature or not. It is what people paid by government buzz in coffee shops. And it just has to be true in their philosophy.

See also Multiverse bubble bust?

Comments
I wonder if it would be possible for a software program to determine whether or not it arose by accident within the constraints of the hardware platform that hosts it? Those who posit a multiverse are assuming that with enough hardware platforms, certain software can arise by accident. Our uniform experience is the opposite. Hardware platforms host software that is developed independently. The enormity of the protein search space problem confirms the intuition that the complexity of life exceeds the ability of the universe to generate it by accident (randomly). Three conclusions follow: 1. Life exists beyond the confines of the universe 2. Life within our universe was planted here 3. The universe is not closed.dgw
June 8, 2014
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Graham Farmelo on Paul Dirac and Mathematical Beauty - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfYon2WdR40bornagain77
June 7, 2014
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Darwinism, inflationism, Big Bangism, Copenhagen interpretationism, materialism, young earth creationism, etc. It's all voodoo nonsense. Almost everything that matters in science is crap. It almost feels as if some powerful evil force is trying to hide some very important truth from humanity. Why is that?Mapou
June 7, 2014
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"Which god do YOU believe in? Bazinga!" asks the wise atheist. Multiverse gives us Zeus, Thor, and the Flying Spagetti Monster. Multiverse is Heavenly. Somewhere in the Multiverse Thor is zapping an atheist. Bazinga!ppolish
June 7, 2014
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This comment nails it:
First, inflation is driven by a hypothetical scalar field, the inflaton, which has properties that can be adjusted to produce effectively any outcome. Second, inflation does not end with a universe with uniform properties, but almost inevitably leads to a multiverse with an infinite number of bubbles, in which the cosmic and physical properties vary from bubble to bubble. The part of the multiverse that we observe corresponds to a piece of just one such bubble. Scanning over all possible bubbles in the multi­verse, every­thing that can physically happen does happen an infinite number of times. No experiment can rule out a theory that allows for all possible outcomes. Hence, the paradigm of inflation is unfalsifiable… Taking this into account, it is clear that the inflationary paradigm is fundamentally untestable, and hence scientifically meaningless. http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6921
of note; Darwinism is also unfalsifiable!bornagain77
June 7, 2014
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