Not Even Wrong

I hadn’t heard much about Dinesh D’Souza since the Reagan era when for some mysterious reason his views were widely promoted in the media. He has continued since then to play the role (supposedly according to the New York Times Magazine) of “one of America’s most influential conservative thinkers.” His last book was The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11, and he has a new one out called Life After Death: The Evidence. In a recent magazine interview he explains the main thesis of the book, that string theory has vindicated Christian theology by proving the existence of heaven and hell (they’re out there in the multiverse somewhere).

How might science explain heaven and hell as places that could exist?

Scientists now posit through string theory the presence of multiple realms, multiple dimensions. One of the implications of the big bang is that space and time had a beginning, and that space and time are properties of our universe. If that’s true, then outside our universe or beyond our universe, there would be different laws of space and time, or no space and no time.

The idea that our universe may not be the only one and that there may be other universes operating according to different laws is now coming into the mainstream of modern physics. So the Christian concept of eternity, which is God outside of space and time, is rendered completely intelligible. It opens up possibilities that would have seemed far-fetched even for science fiction a century ago.

Update: Here’s the link to the interview: String Theory and Heaven.

Update: One more. Last night I watched a spectacularly bad Sci-Fi movie, Annihilation Earth, brought to the world by the Syfy channel. I don’t think it’s a movie that really can be spoiled for you, so here’s a plot synopsis: three supercolliders in Geneva, Orleans and Barcelona are providing power for Western Europe. Scientists who designed them realized that in a certain configuration the critics were right, and the Higgs field would get out of control and form a black hole that would destroy the earth. Evil Arab terrorists hack into one of them and reconfigure it to self-destruct. The remaining two are all that is keeping the Higgs field from expanding exponentially and causing the black hole that will annihilate everything. One of the scientists refuses to believe the other when he explains this to him, because of the color of his skin and the fact that he’s an Arab too (although he doesn’t look it). So, in the final scene he shuts down one of the remaining super-colliders and the Earth is annihilated. I guess the film-makers should be congratulated on this innovation in sci-fi film-making, ending the film with the scientists not saving the Earth but destroying it.

One effect of Nature’s embargo policy is to encourage the spread of wild rumors. It’s almost part of the mission statement of this blog to participate in this, so I feel I must link to this.

Update: Nature unequivocally denies that they will be publishing a CDMS paper on the 18th. The collaboration does plan to reveal the results of their latest run on that date. The wild rumor that they have seen WIMPS and will reveal all on the 18th remains in force…

Update: There’s now a statement on the CDMS web-site, saying that there will be two talks on December 17, and plans to submit a paper to the arXiv before the talks.

Over the past two days, CERN has been hosting a program consisting mostly of talks by Nobel prize winners in high energy physics, under the title 50 Years of Nobel Memories in High Energy Physics. It has been a while since anything Nobel Prize worthy has been discovered in HEP, so the speakers of necessity are all getting on a bit in years. The talks pretty much all seem worth paying attention to. Many of them are now on-line, and of the few I’ve had a chance to look at, the comments by Burt Richter about the ILC/CLIC issue were notable, as well as Veltman’s explanation of the possible significance of not finding a Higgs.

I started watching the webcast towards the end of David Gross’s talk, in time to hear him give his usual praiseworthy defense of physics against anthropic pseudo-science. Weinberg’s talk by video-conference was unfortunately cut short, since he thought it would be an hour long, but it was just scheduled for half an hour.

CERN DG Heuer ended the program by thanking everyone, and looking forward to the first run of LHC collisions at reasonable intensity with the detector magnets on (although only at 450 GeV), which is now scheduled for Saturday.

Update: Videos of the talks are now available here and I’ve watched a few of them. One interesting thing I noticed was Frank Wilczek’s talk about QCD, where his response to a question about AdS/CFT was “I’m not as impressed as I should be.”

I watched the first two episodes of Michio Kaku’s Sci-Fi Science show last night (for a review, see here). The format of the show is that Kaku uses supposedly real physics to design on his laptop a revolutionary new device, then unveils it at the end of the show to a group of sci-fi fans for what I guess is supposed to be a form of peer review. The adoring fans are suitably impressed. In the first episode the device was a warp drive, in the second a portal to other universes, based on a big accelerator and “negative matter”. In both cases “negative energy” played a big part.

Neither episode involved a non-negligible amount of legitimate science, instead treating the physics in a completely misleading way. The second episode included participation by Max Tegmark, Alan Guth and Neil Turok. I wonder if they’ve seen the final product and what they think of it.

Andrew Sullivan, under the title String Theory and Miracles quotes part of a blog posting entitled One reason science is having trouble banishing religious thinking at the Democracy in America site (the original posting text is not there right now, may reappear) which notes that the spectacle of physicists widely promoting to the public the string theory multiverse is having the following effect:

It’s not always readily apparent to non-physicists why this kind of talk is less supernatural than a belief in the persistence of the soul after death….

But strictly in terms of how the argument between theists and atheists plays out in the public domain, there is a different quality to the tenets that are emerging on the atheistic, particle-physics side of things these days.

The string theory multiverse pseudo-science has done a huge amount of damage to the interests of string theory within the academic community, but it also threatens to do damage to the understanding and image of science among the public. Unfortunately, while there is more and more physics content in US popular media, it is often in the form of string theory-based pseudo-scientific nonsense rather than real science. For examples of this, see a new article in the Denver Post which catalogs some of this (while arguing that it’s a good thing):

TV is working through the shock of the age of terrorism and dismay at the broken boundaries of science, right before our eyes. Parallel universes? Bending time? Alternate dimensions? Some heavy-duty thoughts are seeping into prime time every week.

To the extent that TV reflects the culture at large, these shows seem to be saying we’re on the cusp of major change — technological, scientific, political or emotional. We may not have answers but we’re aware of expanding questions. In 2009, it has become accepted for folks on the couch to converse about the space-time continuum. Not that we understand string theory, but we recognize it when it pops up in TV scripts, peppering a spy thriller. “Lost” pushed the way with its dialogue about “moving the island,” leading fans to discuss time-shifting, wormholes and Einstein’s relativity theory.

Really.

The newer shows are picking up the string (theory) and running with it. There are hopeful signs in all this. The sci-fi series depict humans taking control of the planet, voting in favor of free will and standing up for the species. Maybe TV can provide some wishful thinking.

Update: Lubos has more Kaku.