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The Hidden Reality Draws Ire From Physicists
eldavojohn writes "Scientific American is running a piece by science journalist John Horgan attacking pop physicist Brian Greene's latest offering, titled The Hidden Reality. He's not entirely alone; Not Even Wrong backs him up and reminds us of a growing list of multiverse propaganda. The journal Nature ran a short piece (subscription required) trying to remind everyone that Greene's book is more theory than fact, but apart from those three responses, the popular press seems to be gobbling up this tantalizing concept of a multiverse. NPR offers an excerpt while SFGate and The Wall Street Journal entertain us with interviews of the controversial Greene. The New York Times and Salon seem to think it's worthwhile, with Salon even calling it 'the science behind' the multiverse theory. The New York Times thought it worthwhile to give Greene an op-ed column. For better or for worse, Greene has certainly brought this great debate to the public's attention — similar to his exhibition of String Theory."
You can check out a fairly entertaining interview of Brian Greene by Stephen Colbert from last Thursday on Colbert's web site.
I can't say this will educate you further one way or another and I am certainly not qulified to weigh in on either side of the debate but the guy was pretty candid with Stephen and, well, I found it entertaining...
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
But the conservation of ire insures that an equal amount of economists will chill out.
Even scientists, when they're not being absolutely rigorous, use "theory" in the "hypothesis" sense. It's common in culture, and scientists are still human, especially when off the clock.
This is a scientific context and the summary really should be rewritten to use the more precise and accurate word "speculation", but "hur hur evolution is a theory not a fact" is so spectacularly and deliberately misinformed that no amount of rigor on the part of scientists is going to stamp it out. Those who grasp it will understand what was meant; those intent on misunderstanding will find a way to do so regardless.
He actually addressed this when he was on Colbert the other night. His point is that the maths indicate that this may be true, but that there is no way to scientifically prove it given current technology and understanding. This is similar to the fact that several aspects of Einstein's theories were indicated via math but not verifiable via experimentation. Einstein didn't even believe them. They were ultimately proven true as technology advanced to the point that the relevant experiments became possible.
The premise of his position is simply that math, while ultimately a mental exercise, can help guild the focus of scientific experimentation by indicating possibility. That's not really a controversial position in and of itself.
What the media are doing with this, on the other hand, is pretty much par for the course in science reporting.
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Absolutely. Any decent cleric can plane shift, but meeting their God (other than by the usual means) requires a very friendly DM.
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
Why all the negative spin in the summary? As far as I can tell, nobody is accusing Greene of "propaganda." Rather, this is /. propagandizing at its absolute worst.
Here's the real summary: Brian Greene has written on string theory for a popular audience in the past, and he's also fascinated by some of the more fringe-y elements of physics, such as the multiverse theory. He has a new book out. He has not taken any public stance on the Tea Party, abortion, or the Iraq war -- and honestly, I think it's sad that it seems to have become a requirement of modern journalism to pretend that he has.
Breakfast served all day!
And that's the problem. It's one thing to play with various mathematical models like M-theory, and to some extent it is science in that researchers in these areas are trying to work out mathematical models that might give us a quantum theory of gravity. But something pretty peculiar has happened, particularly with some of the string theorists, in that they tend not to speak in the normal, cautious language that physicists usually do when talking about very hypothetical models. They seem to start talking in terms that would suggest to an uninformed layman that they have the Answer, so to speak. Science journalists, sadly, are among the most gullible of laymen, and will happily give guys like Greene far to much credence, and guys like Greene in return seem to take this as an opportunity to try to fight the scientific battle in the public press, which to my mind is quite inappropriate. Greene, will of course, in front of the proper audience (his peers in the physics community) speak much more cautiously, and though I hesitate to call that duplicitous behavior, I sometimes wonder. Being a science popularizer like Sagan or Hawking, is a delicate balancing act. On the one hand you want to include hypothetical solutions to long-standing problems to give an account of the state of physics and cosmology, but at the same time you want to make sure that your layman audience understands that these are in fact hypothetical solutions, currently untestable (and with variants on M-theory and its kin, for all intents and purposes pretty much completely untestable with the level of technology at our disposal for the foreseeable future, if ever).
Another thing I don't particularly like about Greene and his gang of string theorists is that they tend to poo-poo the major competitor, loop quantum gravity. While LQG isn't currently testable either, unlike the various superstring theories, which just seem to get messier as you look at them, LQG works within the 3+1 dimensional framework of classical physics. It too may be wrong, but it has a certain attraction in its own right.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Science popularizers like Greene have to tread a careful line. They're not paid to talk about the most important work, which most people wouldn't understand. Real cutting-edge physics is comprehensible only to those extremely skilled in the art, which cuts out even the vast majority of scientists. But people like believing that they're getting dispatches from the front, especially in physics, because that's where people imagine lays the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything.
You can't even pretend to know much about string theory without some very advanced work in quantum mechanics AND general relativity, which means knowing an awful lot of very, very difficult calculus. For 99.9% even of readers of Scientific American, they're skipping straight past all of that.
Which means, in essence, telling comforting lies. That's common in education, simplifying a subject to the point where it's essentially false. It's common in science (cf. genetics), but in other fields as well. History, as taught in schools, is so far from reality that college professors have to spend a full year (at least) undoing the damage.
It's similar to the situation with space research: most of the actual science is done by the robots, but people like the human stories associated with manned flight. The real science is done practically with the rounding errors in the budget.
In the case of string theory, that means that a bunch of people doing interesting but (bluntly) irrelevant speculation get far, far more attention than they deserve. It's not that they're right, wrong, or Not Even Wrong. People want to know what they're doing, because they've been told that we're Just Around The Corner from The Big Answers. It's a lie, and essentially everybody familiar enough with the work knows it. But they also know it's where the funding comes from.
I mean seriously... a multi-billion-dollar supercollider? How on earth does that get funded? Because a bunch of people who can't tell a fermion from a boson imagine that they're part of a grand human experiment. And maybe, in the grand human scheme of things, it is worth the money, though I personally doubt it. Still, it's the dirty little secret of scientific work: popularizers write a lot of books about stuff that's really of very little earthy interest, in order to attract enough attention to the field of science to keep the actual work going on. The grad students counting bacterial colonies or coming up with new protein folding algorithms or other tedious stuff that slowly an un-telegentically advances understanding.
I don't like the little turf war going on between the string theoriests, who get more attention than they deserve, and the anti-string-theorists, who are doing equally unproductive work. Both are intriguing speculations that might one day be of intense interest, but at the moment are of little value either practical or philosophical. They get attention only because they're right at the edge, but most of us are so far from the edge that they'd be invisible under any other circumstances. Both should be left to labor diligently in quiet, and let their little funding turf war be lumped in with the rest of the academic bickering rather than become a great philosophical debate.
Someone who whines that the multiverse theory must necessarily be false because it leads him to uncomfortable conclusions regarding his personal belief in morality has no business criticizing any scientific theory, no matter how speculative it is.
And seriously people, pseudoscience? You are claiming that Susskind and Hawking engage in pseudoscience, like Deepak Chopra?
This criticism isn't based on scientific merit, this is envy of popular attention.
By that same logic, though, you can flush most of Einsteins work too. We do not posses, nor are we likely to posses in our lifetimes barring alien intervention, the technology to directly test and observe either the General or Special theories of relativity.
Well I guess then you must believe in alien intervention because its all happened already:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
As a physicist, I believe that the many-world interpretation of quantum physics is the best because it is more practical than its competitors.
The first major competitor is the theory that the world is deterministic and its just our lack of knowledge that causes us to perceive a non-deterministic world. The problem with this is that we have no evidence in favor of this proposition and to the extent we have any evidence it is *against* this proposition.
The other major competitor is the theory that the wave function of the whole universe collapses every time we make a measurement. This agrees very well with experiment as long as the person asking the question is the one doing the measurement, but it has a major problem: since wave functions don't collapse unless measured, what counts as a measurement? For example, does collapse only happen when *I* make a measurement? If so, why should I be uniquely privileged? Alternatively, does collapse happen whenever some human being makes a measurement --- that is, if I perform the Schroedinger's cat experiment but with a person instead of a cat inside the box, then has the wave function collapsed even if I never open the box (assuming it is perfectly insulated)?
The advantage of the many-worlds interpretation is that it solves the problem of measurement by *not* treating measurement as being an special-case exception to the rules; it postulates that the wave function of the universe never actually collapses. Given this, how do we make sense of the fact we human beings *do* observe such a collapse? The answer actually appears right in the math: when we demand that a particle in a mix of states tell us which state it is in, it causes us to become entangled with the particle so that a *portion* of the universe splits into two states: one with the particle in the first state and us seeing it in the first state, one with the particle in the second state and us seeing it in the second state, and so on. So from the perspective of each of the observers the wave function has collapsed even though it never did. What happens then if you put an observer in a box and have him or her make a measurement? The answer also appears in the math: although the universe splits inside the box, it does not split outside the box.
This might seem fanciful, but it is something that we can actually test. Although we cannot put human beings in a box for ethical reasons, we can put increasingly large systems in the box that act as "observers" of some particle (by engineering an interaction between the observer and the particle) and then perform interference experiments to determine whether the wave function in the box has collapsed or not. Every such experiment we have performed has shown that the wave function does in fact *not* collapse inside the box but rather splits.
So what is the mathematical difference between being inside the portion of the universe that splits and being outside it? It is simple: if you are outside the portion that splits, then the wave function of the universe can be expressed as a tensor product between you and splitting portion. If you are inside the portion that splits, then this can never be the case.
Thus it turns out that measurement *already falls out of quantum mechanics* in a mathematically rigorous and observer-independent fashion, as long as we are willing to accept that a consequence of this is that from the view of someone external to the universe there is a (mathematically rigorous) sense in which there are multiple copies of you and I within the universe. Sure, if we don't like this consequence we can add a rule that gets rid of it by specifying that the wave-function collapses, but then you have to introduce some arbitrary rule that specified that some macroscopic bodies have the power to cause a collapse but not others. Now in fairness, there do turn out to be mathematically rigorous ways to do this and some of them even provide testable predictions so one of them might be proven correct one day, but there is
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