Two theorists recently proposed a way to find evidence for an idea famous for being untestable: string theory. It involves looking for particles that were around 14 billion years ago, when a very tiny universe hit a growth spurt that used 15 billion times more energy than a collision in the Large Hadron Collider.
Scientists can’t crank the LHC up that high, not even close. But they could possibly observe evidence of these particles through cosmological studies, with the right technological advances. More.
All such claim fly in the face of the main point: If everything is true somewhere, tests are meaningless. Tests belong in universes where only some things are true, not a multiverse where everything is.
But why would evidence matter in the face of so compelling a popular thesis: Somehow, somewhere, everything is true (David Berlinski)?
And as the estimable mathematician Peter Woit puts it, re other views,
This week’s hype comes to us from Discover Magazine, which has Is Our Universe One of Many? Here’s How We Can Find Out. Needless to say, the author doesn’t actually tell us how we can find out, just repeats the usual “maybe we’ll see bubble collisions” argument often discussed here. We’re also told that
It is important to keep in mind that the multiverse view is not actually a theory, it is rather a consequence of our current understanding of theoretical physics.
It seems that our “current understanding of theoretical physics” is the string theory landscape. If you ask what the evidence is for string theory, you’ll be given the usual circular reasoning that we don’t have evidence because of the multiverse.
See also:But who needs reality-based thinking anyway? Not the new cosmologists
and
In search of a road to reality
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