More Crackpots

5 Responses to More Crackpots

1. Peter says:

   May 21, 2004 at 3:34 pm

   I heard Linde talk about inflation and the landscape at Davis, and his talk was no more crackpot than others. Still I don’t understand why he thinks it is a good idea to sit around promoting the idea that maybe we live in a universe created by an intelligent being who may try and communicate with us through the fundamental parameters of physics. That’s definitely over the line into serious crackpot territory.
2. Anonymous says:

   May 21, 2004 at 1:27 pm

   As far as I know Linde’s idea is not new. It is his version of inflationary scenario, called chaotic inflation. The only new component in the story is its connection to string landscape.
3. erinj says:

   May 19, 2004 at 1:21 pm

   This idea has already appeared before in science fiction (Gregory Benford’s `Cosm’) and is not science. So I agree, Peter, I’m awaiting the arrival of the `SuperCosmos’ bandwagon, hope to leap on it, publish trillions of papers on it (say, at one a month) and become an eminent physicist with permanent tenure and a big office.

   If an `eminent’ physicist like Linde can borrow such ideas and promote them as science, what is the scientific world coming to?

   Perhaps the book store clerk who placed that copy of F. David Peat’s `Superstrings’ book I once found in the science fiction section was doing the right thing after all…

   (Incidentally, I’ve just seen a book titled `Superstrings and Other Things: A Guide to Physics’, by Carlos Calle, and it’s a British product… as if superstrings are established physics! The shame of it – using string theory’s hype and media presence to sell a book about physics!)

   Given that the vague term “landscape” keeps cropping up in association with strings, perhaps somebody should write up a glossary of string theory buzz-words/phrases or `flavours of the month’ for easy later reference, which would also help chart the mess the `theory’ has gotten itself into.
4. Simplex says:

   May 19, 2004 at 1:00 pm

   Peter, great blog!
   I have to admit Linde’s interview (in which I detected humor and irony) could be gravely misconstrued and abused by a religious Told-you-so.

   But the journalist warned his readers about Linde’s irony before getting into it:

   “Linde, it should be said, is famous for his mock-gloomy manner, and these words were laced with irony. But he insisted that this genesis-in-a-lab scenario was feasible, at least in principle…”

   and he included this rather irreverent quote from Linde:

   ‘”You might take this all as a joke,” he said, “but perhaps it is not entirely absurd. It may be the explanation for why the world we live in is so weird. On the evidence, our universe was created not by a divine being, but by a physicist hacker.”‘

   I suspect there is nothing new here, just Linde’s usual schtick. And it sounded as if Linde’s imagined Hacker was communicating to us mainly, if at all, by chosing basic dimensionless constants like the ratio of proton to electron mass
   1836.152…
   if a nut wanted to decode those digits and discover the ten commandments then he could have already started working on the number pi.

   “But then Linde thought of another channel of communication between creator and creation—the only one possible, as far as he could tell. The creator, by manipulating the cosmic seed in the right way, has the power to ordain certain physical parameters of the universe he ushers into being. So says the theory. He can determine, for example, what the numerical ratio of the electron’s mass to the proton’s will be. Such ratios, called constants of nature, look like arbitrary numbers to us: There is no obvious reason they should take one value rather than another…But the creator, by fixing certain values for these dozens of constants, could write a subtle message into the very structure of the universe…”

   I guess I want to say I wasn’t as shocked as you and Linde seems less goofy than Sarfatti to me—and more entertaining.
5. Chris Oakley says:

   May 19, 2004 at 12:34 pm

   Personally, I subscribe to the views of the Jatravartid People of Viltvodle Six. They firmly believe that the entire universe was sneezed out of the nose of a being called The Great Green Arkleseizure. They live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming Of The Great White Handkerchief.

   But seriously … however wacky people may think Linde or other’s ideas about Cosmology, it is hard to prove them wrong. Why? Because (in my humble opinion, obviously) Cosmology is not a science, and probably never will be. Maybe it would help if people concentrated on ideas that can be proved wrong.

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