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

Which are way better than yours

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. In Brazil, an evangelist religious prick is on the command of the ministry of science and technology. What happens is that content related with religion is being censored in Brazil. I'm not being able to find articles on Wikipedia related with paganism for example, because jesus freak head pesophiles are being ignorants about other people's way of belief.

Re:old wisdom

[Hylandr]

So in other words we really don't know but the rhetoric keeps the grant money flowing.