Has Physics Gotten Something Really Important Really Wrong? (npr.org)

Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes an article from NPR: Some researchers now see popular ideas like string theory and the multiverse as highly suspect. These physicists feel our study of the cosmos has been taken too far from what data can constrain with the extra "hidden" dimensions of string theory and the unobservable other universes of the multiverse... it all adds up to muddied waters and something some researchers see as a "crisis in physics."
The article quotes Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin, the authors of a new book arguing that "Science is corrupted when it abandons the discipline of empirical validation or dis-confirmation. It is also weakened when it mistakes its assumptions for facts and its ready-made philosophy for the way things are." And according to this analysis of the book, what they're proposing is "to take a giant philosophical step back and see if a new and more promising direction can be found. For the two thinkers, such a new direction can be spelled out in three bold claims about the world. There is only one universe. Time is real. Mathematics is selectively real."

Comments

Re:My thoughts...

[Aighearach]

The problem is that in cosmology predictions only predict the next prediction, and the data behind most of the hypotheses is worthless edge data.

Actual predictions about the distribution of stuff in space that have had good measurements are continuing to come in mostly wrong; for example, the Earth's radiation belts were recently measured and were not as predicted. A spacecraft recently made it to the solar heliopause, and no surprise but (spoiler alert!) it was not as predicted.

Compare that to real physics being done at lab-scale, where they make predictions and then when they get a chance to observe the real thing, it comes out correct to many, many places, it comes out correct to the sensitivity of the sensor, at the middle ranges of the sensors where they give good data.

Mainstream cosmology like "Big Bang" is based entirely, 100% on data that is by their own theory at the edge of what any sensor can detect and is therefore worthless based on everything we know about sensors. Sensors suck at the edges of what they can detect; all of them. "Gosh the physics at the most distant in time place we can see... looks simpler!" It sounds just like, "Gosh, the trees on the horizon that I can just barely make out... look simpler!" If you believe in the Big Bang, you'd have to believe that it can never be well established as a theory, because you'd never be able to make a reasonable observation. It is as un-provable an idea as Creator Deity. What if photons just get red hair as they age, and they die at 14b years? What if there is some sort of very weak force pulling on them, slowly shifting them red as they age, and we'd need a lab with a beam at least a few hundred light years long to start to detect it? We have no way of knowing what we don't know at that scale! And cosmology is like that almost everywhere you look.

The few people working on real, measurable phenomena reaching Earth with signals in the good ranges of sensors, of course, are often doing good work. The workings of the Sun are able to be predicted much better than, for example, the working of Earth's magnetics, or the shape of the solar system. But the work on the Sun is largely driven by the work being done at the small scale in nuclear physics, so it is no surprise that they have real numbers to work with.

You can smell how rotten the field has gotten when the data doesn't disprove the prediction, instead "there must be a bunch of invisible stuff we can't see because if some invisible stuff did exist, it would make the numbers match the prediction." It is bad enough to fit the theory to the observation, but in cosmology you don't even have to make the fit; you just have to assert that maybe a fudge factor can exist, and give it a name, and now you can just use it in calculations.