{"id":12161,"date":"2021-01-25T13:54:23","date_gmt":"2021-01-25T18:54:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12161"},"modified":"2022-02-25T10:16:54","modified_gmt":"2022-02-25T15:16:54","slug":"this-weeks-hype-61","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12161","title":{"rendered":"This Week’s Hype"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had just been thinking the other day about how little one hears recently about the multiverse, with those previously involved in heavy promotion of the idea perhaps having thought better of it. Today however, Quanta has Physicists Study How Universes Might Bubble Up and Collide<\/a>. This describes work of a sort that has become popular in recent years: study of various condensed matter systems, with a huge dollop of hype on top about quantum gravity based on some aspect of the condensed matter theory calculation having some vague relation to some calculation in some toy quantum gravity model or other.<\/p>\n

I’ve written extensively here and elsewhere about the real problem with all claims by theorists to be studying the multiverse: they’re Theorists Without a Theory<\/a>, lacking any sort of viable theory which could make the usual sort of scientific predictions. The main problem with the Quanta article is at the beginning:<\/p>\n

What lies beyond all we can see? The question may seem unanswerable. Nevertheless, some cosmologists have a response: Our universe is a swelling bubble. Outside it, more bubble universes exist, all immersed in an eternally expanding and energized sea \u2014 the multiverse.<\/p>\n

The idea is polarizing. Some physicists embrace the multiverse to explain why our bubble looks so special (only certain bubbles can host life), while others reject the theory for making no testable predictions (since it predicts all conceivable universes). But some researchers expect that they just haven\u2019t been clever enough to work out the precise consequences of the theory yet.<\/p>\n

Now, various teams are developing new ways to infer exactly how the multiverse bubbles and what happens when those bubble universes collide.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The big problem is with:<\/p>\n

they just haven\u2019t been clever enough to work out the precise consequences of the theory yet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The reference to “precise consequences” is a common misleading rhetorical move, implying that there is no problem getting “imprecise consequences”, that the problem is just getting those extra digits of numerical precision. What’s really going on is that we know of no theoretical consequences of the multiverse, precise or imprecise, because there is no viable theory. The logic here is pretty much pure wishful thinking: if you look at colliding Bose-Einstein condensates and see a particular pattern, then if you saw a pattern like that in the CMB, you could try and infer something about your unknown multiverse theory. It’s not unusual for theorists to work on speculative ideas involving some degree of wishful thinking, but this is a case of taking that to an extreme.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> One of the very few theorists who has pushed back on the multiverse ideology is Paul Steinhardt. Howard Burton has posted here<\/a> something from his interviews with Steinhardt<\/a>, which includes this from Steinhardt:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve had this discussion where I\u2019ll say, \u2018Well, what do you think about the multiverse problem?\u2019 and they reply, \u2018I don\u2019t think about it.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I\u2019ll say, \u2018Well, how can you not think about it? You\u2019re doing all these calculations and you\u2019re saying there\u2019s some prediction of an inflationary model, but your model produces a multiverse \u2014 so it doesn\u2019t, in fact, produce the prediction you said: it actually produces that one, together with an infinite number of other possibilities, and you can\u2019t tell me which one\u2019s more probable.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd they\u2019ll just reply, \u2018Well, I don\u2019t like to think about the multiverse. I don\u2019t believe it\u2019s true.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I\u2019ll say, \u2018Well, what do you mean, exactly? Which part of it don\u2019t you believe is true? Because the inputs, the calculations you\u2019re using \u2014 those of general relativity, quantum mechanics and quantum field theory \u2014 are the very same things you\u2019re using to get the part of the story you wanted, so you\u2019re going to have to explain to me how, suddenly, other implications of that very same physics can be excluded. Are you changing general relativity? No. Are you changing quantum mechanics? No. Are you changing quantum field theory? No. So why do you have a right to say that you\u2019d just exclude thinking about it?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cBut that\u2019s what happens, unfortunately. There\u2019s a real sense of denial going on.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Update<\/strong>: Ethan Siegel has an excellent piece on the basic problem with string theory<\/a> (to the extent it’s well-defined, it has too large a (super)symmetry group and too many dimensions, no explanation for how to recover 4 space-time dimensions and observed symmetry groups).<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s why the hope of String Theory, when you get right down to it, is nothing more than a broken box of dreams.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Update<\/strong>: If you’re looking for a detailed discussion of multiverse theories, of neither the usual promotional sort, nor the highly critical sort I specialize in, I can recommend Simon Friedrich’s new book Multiverse Theories: A Philosophical Perspective<\/a>. Friedrich has a blog entry about the book here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had just been thinking the other day about how little one hears recently about the multiverse, with those previously involved in heavy promotion of the idea perhaps having thought better of it. Today however, Quanta has Physicists Study How … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-hype"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12161"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12743,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12161\/revisions\/12743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}