In “The Ultimate Guide to the Multiverse” (Not Even Wrong, November 28, 2011) Peter Woit comments on the recent pep rally for the multiverse over at New Scientist:
Yet another cover story about the Multiverse can be found this week at New Scientist, which calls it The Ultimate Guide to the Multiverse. As just one more in a long line of such stories over the last decade, a trend that shows no signs of slowing down, one can be pretty sure that this is not the yet the “ultimate” one, nor even the penultimate one.
The content is the usual: absolutely zero skepticism about the idea, and lots of outrageous hype from the usual suspects (Bousso, Tegmark, Susskind, etc.) We’re told that scientists are now performing tests of the idea, even at the LHC. The LHC test has been a great success: Laura Mersini-Houghton used the multiverse to predict that the LHC would not see supersymmetry, and that prediction has worked out very well so far. There’s a companion editorial Neutrinos and multiverses: a new cosmology beckons, which tells us that the multiverse is now orthodoxy, backed by “almost everything in modern physics” …
It is orthodoxy, but it is not demonstrated As a matter of fact, the Large Hadron Collider tests have been very disappointing to multiverse fans in key areas for which they were anxiously awaiting hopeful results – we’ve documented a fair bit of that here at UD News.
But now we are told, “Laura Mersini-Houghton used the multiverse to predict that the LHC would not see supersymmetry, and that prediction has worked out very well so far.” Her prediction wasn’t big news at the time. But hold on, there’s more: As it happens – and this wasn’t big news either – here at UD News, we used the Ghost of Christmas Past to predict that the LHC would not see supersymmetry.
Oh, what’s that you say? Well, so ruddy what if there’s no evidence that the Ghost of Christmas Past exists? There’s no evidence that the multiverse exists either. Like the Ghost, it is a construct of certain people’s imaginations. And the most reasonable explanation for the absence of supersymmetry is that it doesn’t exist either, as Woit noted.
Strange are the contortions of the pop science mags, struggling to keep alive an idea nature does not need.
*See, for example: Higgs boson: Find it in one year or bust, top physicists say and
Glitzy new cosmology centre’s opening shadowed by disappointing Higgs boson news