Fake Physics

The discovery of the transistor didn't bring an iPhone overnight. Same with many other scientific discoveries that had to go through a long engineering phase. I see a similar trend happening now with quantum computation, which has seen great leaps over the past 20 years and continues to accelerate in both academia and industry.

It's my opinion that, at least in America, we live in a less intellectually disciplined and intellectually favored society. Anti-intellectualism, even in nominally educated portions of society, seems to be on the rise. This unfortunately has the effect of making science look stagnant to the larger population, and unless there are gadgets of instant gratification that science explicitly produces, it'll remain somewhat obscure to folks uninterested in advancement for the sake of advancement.

As for the multiverse stuff, I'm not sure why you think that it has to do with the arbitrary selection of constants. The multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn't say "anything happens and it all happens in separate multiverses", but rather that—in simple terms—non-deterministic events like measurements bifurcate into separate universes. But QM still posits that the results of these non-deterministic events are each probable, and each obey the same laws of physics equally. In other words, it has a more "butterfly effect" on us, keeping physical constants as truly constants, not a "splitting of universal laws effect".

I think that the quantum computer guys think that they are about to deliver as well.

Many of the scienctists of that post war era were hounded mercilessly for decades ever after, throughout the cold war.

If one were to try and obfuscate a scientific field, and introduce enough confusion such that whirlpools of disagreement ensnare the casual hobbyist, how would that take shape?

No, this is absolutely wrong. There are entire families of solutions to the measurement problem and we have no firm idea which one is correct. There are even multiple mechanisms to get behavior that looks like this but is based on very different, often less weird, principles (see e.g. Einselection).

> It means most of the fundamental constants are arbitrary, for one thing.

No, this is wrong and unrelated. You're confusing two ideas. One is where the universe "forks", as you say, during eigenstate collapse, the other is that there is a space of universes with different physical constants. These are unrelated. Eigenstate collapse doesn't change physical constants.

Why, isn't that un-testable as well, even more so than stringtheory, pretty much by definition?

also read Woit's sensible reply to that comment and MT's re-reply. I agree Woit is polarizing but maybe not unnecessarily.

because the problems he points out are not hidden in the dark corners of the internets but all over the mainstream media - and arxiv too, and backed with millions of dollars.

Don't just look away from a very real concern.

In general, Symmetry is an excellent site; they describe themselves as "An online magazine about particle physics" and are funded by the US Department of Energy, via Fermilab and SLAC. Recommend having a closer look http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/

- There have been dozens of 'bumps' in the data that went away over the past several years. The Standard Model still stands and there's no BSM physics that we've found. I'd bet the bump goes away just like the recent 750 GeV bump.

- The magnetic moment of the proton and antiproton being the same is also not BSM physics at all.

The problem is that fundamental elementary physics continues to boringly grind along and validate the standard model and things that we already knew had to be found (Higgs, LIGO).

The result in the popular press, though, is that multiverse mania has taken over, which is a non-solution to the problem. You'll actually find arguments that we stop thinking about alternatives to string theory and just assume it works because its beautiful, but it can never be measured--which is not a scientific argument.

500 years from now if we haven't made any progress we might wind up going "meh, probably string theory, but we'll never know", but its too soon to throw in the towel yet.

I agree that reading this blog by itself is jumping into the middle of the conversation, and terms are not explained. The multi-verse has been discussed there for years, so occasional readers may assume it is the many-worlds stuff, but it is a very different beast.

That's important to know as a critical thinker.

http://nautil.us/about (heading "Nautilus has received financial support from")

Seems a little unfair to only mention the philosophical outlier.

I see the list of "advisors" on that page has some pretty respectable names, too. That may not be worth much - who knows how much influence they have over the content - but having some venerable academics willing to associate their names with your output like that is surely at least a small signal in favour of legitimacy.

You're right as far as you go, but actually nature doesn't care what anyone thinks. One thing to question is how the establishment got to be established. If it was primarily through physical strength, heredity, or persuasion (as is more true for the bulk of history), then they are no more likely to be right than a plebe (except that p(persuasive | true) > p(persuasive)). But it's more true than in most of history that the odds of being an elite are much higher if you can consistently make correct predictions about the world.

It's true that we don't have a central authority to give us an objective reality, but we don't need one either. Reality is there if only you choose to observe it closely. I think the best technique for dealing with the soup of information is to find bona fide experts with a track record of providing correct explanations and giving what they say more weight.