Fake Physics (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Fake Physics (2017)

math.columbia.edu

44 pointsdschuetz27 comments

I find it hard to believe that there are wealthy people backing an organized propaganda campaign to promote the multiverse idea, in order to cover up the failure of string theory. Or for any other reason, really.

I find it very hard to believe too, and yet:

>I don’t think there’s anything subtle about $10 million targeted at producing this particular journalism, see: > >https://www.templeton.org/what-we-fund/grant-search/results/... > >$15 million in grant money to physicists isn’t subtle either: > >https://www.templeton.org/what-we-fund/grant-search/results/...

Author in the comments.

Agreed. However I would totally believe there is a disorganized campaign lead by people who seem to have run out of track in the current model.

I think the conspiratorial tone the author takes to this is a bit over the top but there are definitely organizations that have glommed onto some pseudoscience or another because a naive person may find it supporting some unscientific narrative they are interested in. Misguided efforts happen all the time.

Toss String Theory onto the garbage heap already.

Maybe what is worst than having steered your career in the wrong direction for decades is that there is nothing better than String Theory to instead invest in.

I'm an armchair physicist, never bought into String Theory due to the growing mathematical kludginess of the thing. But what else is there?

Rejecting strings on aesthetic grounds is no better than accepting it on aesthetic grounds.

The problem is not asthetics the problem is overfitting the data. Add enough knobs and you can approximate anything, but your simply encoding data not finding anything new.

There is an infinite amount of complexity in a randomly selected real number. A famous example of packing lots of behavior in to a small number of parameters is [0]. A physical constant that will change everything drastically if it is changed even a little bit carries just as much information as one hundred constants to which the universe is less sensitive. That's the argument behind why the fine-tuning in the standard model is an indication that it is not sufficient.

[0]https://fermatslibrary.com/s/drawing-an-elephant-with-four-c...

That argument falls flat in two ways, first we are dealing with 12-13 digits so taking about infinity is silly.

Second, the standard model is simply the most ifnomation dense way of describing ~all known observations. Nobody thinks it’s truth just accurate. So, saying it overfits the data is fine, that’s how it’s constructed. Supplanting it needs to reduce the amount of information required to describe the model or similar amounts while being more elegant to call it progress.

Not aesthetics, more like Occam's Razor.

I avoid nautilus, and find it sad to see them on the front of hn so often. They are really bending the definition of scientific journalism out of shape. I try to avoid metaphysics in my information intake thank you.

If we travel far enough superluminally into the light cone of a causally separate region where inflation has ended, presumably it might not be fake physics.

Or maybe physics is fake physics, otherwise physicists could then all put their feet up and call it a day.

Read our new article exploring these questions and also why the multiverse will speed up your computer, in this month's issue of 'Vague Scientist' - https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/beyond_the_beyond/2009/07...

The idea that people talking bollocks is some kind of a new phenomena, is a bewildering kind of meta-bollocks that has resulted from the meme of people shouting fake news.

I know otherwise intelligent people in their mid fifties, who have suddenly started insisting that you could trust the press before the internet started all this fake news.

Funny, the linked article itself links back to HN when this was previously discussed (Jan 2017):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13451310

I'm not seeing what is fake physics regarding the Nautilus article. Seems the points are legitimate. A single universe implies Boltzmann brains. The multiverse makes statistical prediction unworkable. Easy to see this from a machine learning perspective. So, we need something else.

Fortunately, here is such an alternative theory!

https://www.am-nat.org/site/law-of-information-non-growth/

Do you mind explaining why

1. a single universe implies Boltzmann brains, and

2. a multiverse makes statistical prediction unworkable?

The link you provided is taking a while to load for me, but if it's easier to just throw another link at me I'm fine reading that instead. I mainly want to understand why what you're saying is true.

The big problem is the principle of maximum entropy, which posits that all order we see is accidental. This manifests itself in various ways with current cosmological models.

http://cosmos.nautil.us/feature/120/the-crisis-of-the-multiv...

My solution is to posit the universe was created by a halting oracle, and this allows us to assume perceived order is real order.

Well, of course, scientific research is big business today, and marketing, including advertisement (of varying quality), is a major part of it.

I partially agree with your point. It's not "big business" in the sense of involving lots of people and large sums of money (a few inventions do end up being big, say blue lasers, but the research end of that work is rarely big on any business scale). The actual sums of any grant are typically shockingly low and even the sum of all government research grants is a pretty small number world wide.

However what has materially changed is that general publicity of research objectives and even some goals has been found valuable by the various research institutes (for helping get grants and donations) so that has really become important. Which, as a onetime scientist, I find a bummer.

(I felt it worth responding because the meme "research is big business" has itself been used as fake news fodder for attacking results (e.g. climate change) that some people don't like. I didn't interpret your comment that way, BTW, but still felt it needed pointing out).

I think people have trouble telling the difference between tobacco, sugar, pesticides, plastics, and other “research” and the climate change research.

Part of science certainly is covering for big business, and is itself in business doing so.

But it would be stupid for people to keep trusting “science” blindly when it’s been used repeatedly over the span of decades to cover up deadly or otherwise dangerous things.

Just call something "science" and have people with PhDs do it in universities, and people will trust it.

Who cares about the process or the quality or the funding?

Humans with PhDs would never print BS en masse to promote their individual careers, and placate their colleagues, would they?

That was precisely my point, yes.

But also that scientists are more concerned with fussing at the public how they need to “trust science”, despite that doing so historically has been questionable at times.

Perhaps people would be more willing to listen on climate change if there were more institutional credibility.

Edit: You can downvote all you want, but in the middle of a replication crisis and sinking faith in science as an institution, maybe you should think about it.

It is still better to trust in misleading science than it is to do any of the alternatives. And just because some science is misleading doesn't mean the institution itself doesn't work.

But the institution itself doesn’t work outside of a few narrow fields: the results aren’t replicable and they’re dangerous to trust.

Isn't this kind of fake physics called "Woo"?

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Science_woo

I think woo usually involves claims about how some pseudoscience nonsense can impact an average person's life. The multiverse isn't used in this way, from what I've seen.

There is a bit, for example: https://www.consciouslifestylemag.com/quantum-jumping-shift-...

But it’s definitely not very common.

Oh yeah, there is tons of various "quantum" woo. Deepak Chopra comes to mind as one of the well-known worst offenders. But I think that is separate from the OP, which seemed to mostly be about the multiverse (and actual physicists).

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