It's sad what's happened to physics. I remember being at an SPIE meeting for optical physics; some of my work on X-ray microscopes was being presented there. I happened upon a giant auditorium filled to the nostrils with people debating life on other planets. Debating. Life on other planets. These folks were full time thinking about this. They weren't doing anything about it; it reminded me of a weed-and-beer-fueled bull session in a dorm room, except all these people were effectively professional exobiologists being paid to have weed and beer fueled bull sessions on exobiology. It didn't even rise to the level of an interesting Science Fiction short story. This at a conference for people doing actual science, people who develop telescopes, optical computers and other optical doodads, as well as new mathematical techniques to master different kinds of optical tricks.

The "physicist" who has this big idea is actually a cosmologist and the first few sentences of his wiki page indicate he is a fairly fruity one. Cosmology itself has gone off in embarrassing directions, and is vastly too large in comparison to its actual importance to the human race. I'm not sure anything has actually been figured out by a professional Cosmologist, though they use cool math sometimes. The actual cosmological results we have come from people doing actual science; astronomers, radio engineers, nuclear physicists, stat mech guys. Mind you, if cosmology could actually figure things out, I'd be all for it, but it seems they mostly do "gee whiz" think pieces which feature some differential geometry and noodle theory. And, apparently, untestable mystical whoop-dee-do about consciousness.

I'm gonna get off my high horse in a minute, but this sort of "celebritization" of science is obnoxious. People used to hang on the words of Fermi and Einstein, and considered their weird speculations to be interesting because those men proved their scientific acuity in other domains; actually increasing human understanding of nature. Now a days we canonize guys like this to do the "gee whiz" think pieces that people enjoy reading articles about ... and they are not of the caliber to justify anyone paying attention to their weird ideas. They're speculative types: science fiction authors who know some impressive math. They don't deserve the appellation of "scientist" let alone "physicist" as they do not study nature in a scientific manner. While Peter Woit has done some admirable work exposing the impostures of the noodle theorists, we really need someone to cleanse the temple of science of such people in general.