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"As long as you have funding, quantum gravity is basic research at its finest. If not, it’s pretty much useless knowledge."

Hm. That bears thinking about.

pseudomathematical priestly class

Would that be string theory, which doesn't seem to lead to any falsifiable experiments? Smolin is very critical of string theory for that reason. It's apparently mathematically plausible but doesn't seem to lead anywhere.

"Science is prediction, not explanation" - Fred Hoyle

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> "Science is prediction, not explanation." - Fred Hoyle

I don't know about string theory, but this is totally wrong. Exploiting a simple correlation gives you the ability to predict to a certain extent, but that's not science, that's numerology. I couldn't find the source of the quote, but I looked up the guy and found what I expected. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Other_controversies:

Hoyle also supported the following controversial hypotheses and speculations:

The correlation of flu epidemics with the sunspot cycle, with epidemics occurring at the minimum of the cycle. The idea was that flu contagion was scattered in the interstellar medium and reached Earth only when the solar wind had minimum power.

[...]

The best predictive model I've ever made tied rotavirus seasonality to prom dress sales.

Science is explanation, which suggests testable predictions.

Hoyle wrote an entire — very entertaining — book at as indictment of the Big Bang hypothesis, which he didn't like. It's called "The Black Cloud".

Black holes would be different if string theory is right. There would be no singularity, for instance, and no interior. String theory black holes (which are called fuzzballs) would emit slightly different gravitational waves when they merge. We should have sensitive enough gravitation wave detecters in the not too distant future to check this.

There was a PBS Space Time episode on fuzzballs last November [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=351JCOvKcYw

I feel that when the words 'shut up and calculate' were uttered, physics flew off into la-la land, and that without a backing of natural philosophy science became an engineering discipline at best and a cargo cult at worst. - It is a non sequitur to go from lack of understanding to saying there is nothing to understand. It would have been more honest to declare that Newton was correct in studying the occult, and that truth is yet to be revealed to our humbled minds.

So, "priests" because they don't know about the spirit of inquiry that gave rise to natural philosophy; this sublime tradition that they have misunderstood.

“Shut up and calculate” is to physics what “premature optimization” and “security through obscurity” are to computer science. Meaning that the people who know the actual contexts in which these phrases arose are simply weary of explaining their meanings to people who imagine that they understand them, and have long since given up.

Smolin himself has basic (like high school, early college) mistakes in his published books. Maybe it's the editor screwing it up but combining that with Distler saying how he didn't put the effort in to understand certain stuff in grad school and it looks bleak for him.

That's kind of an odd statement for an astronomer.

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