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Multiverse. Nutshell. No Nutcracker.

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From Columbia math prof Peter Woit:

The Guardian has a podcast up today featuring Robert Trotta and David Wallace called The Multiverse in a Nutshell. It’s largely more of the usual uncritical multiverse hype that has been flooding the public expositions of fundamental physics for years now. Trotta gives the usual promotion of the cosmological multiverse, with no indication there is any problem with it. He assures us that this is being tested (by looking for “bruises” in CMB collisions). As far as I can tell, the Planck results released today, like all CMB data, show no evidence for anything like this. It appears that the Planck people don’t even think this is worth mentioning. The public channels used for this hype will never report the fact that there’s nothing there, instead they will just endlessly talk about this as something “scientists are looking for.”

Take it from a Canadian, whose country is forced to spend huge sums on public broadcasting and puts up with free or nearly free newspapers filing the Recycle box: Defund all public broadcasters now. They are no longer needed in the world of the GPS, and are easily co-opted for—if we are lucky—merely stupid causes like the one described above.
O’Leary for News

Comments
GREAT quote from an interview with Paul Steinhardt that is referenced in the article linked: "Unfortunately, what has happened since is that all attempts to resolve the multiverse problem have failed and, in the process, it has become clear that the problem is much stickier than originally imagined. In fact, at this point, some proponents of inflation have suggested that there can be no solution. We should cease bothering to look for one. Instead, we should simply take inflation and the multiverse as fact and accept the notion that the features of the observable universe are accidental: consequences of living in this particular region of the multiverse rather than another. To me, the accidental universe idea is scientifically meaningless because it explains nothing and predicts nothing. Also, it misses the most salient fact we have learned about large-scale structure of the universe: its extraordinary simplicity when averaged over large scales. In order to explain the one simple universe we can see, the inflationary multiverse and accidental universe hypotheses posit an infinite variety of universes with arbitrary amounts of complexity that we cannot see. Variations on the accidental universe, such as those employing the anthropic principle, do nothing to help the situation. Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those properties." http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/12/01/physicist-paul-steinhardt-slams-inflation-cosmic-theory-he-helped-conceive/OldArmy94
December 5, 2014
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Huh? Why the attack on public broadcasters?Bob O'H
December 5, 2014
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God help us loss of information brought about by random mutations, natural selection and drift has made people a bit doodally. See Darwinian evolution does explain everything!!!!!Andre
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