{"id":6758,"date":"2014-03-09T15:39:01","date_gmt":"2014-03-09T19:39:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6758"},"modified":"2014-03-12T11:32:55","modified_gmt":"2014-03-12T15:32:55","slug":"multiverse-mania-at-wikipedia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6758","title":{"rendered":"Multiverse Mania at Wikipedia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The quality of Wikipedia entries about mathematics is often quite good, but unfortunately the same cannot be said for their entries about physics.  I happened to take a look today at the Wikipedia entry for <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Multiverse\">Multiverse<\/a>, which is an outrageously one-sided promotional piece for pseudo-science.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s hard to know where to start with a document like this, and I&#8217;ve neither the time nor the Wikipedia expertise to start trying to edit it to something sensible (at this point I&#8217;d suggest that the most sensible edit would be to remove the whole thing).<\/p>\n<p>I include just a couple of random examples of problems with the entry.  The &#8220;criticism&#8221; section has little actual criticism, just some mild comments from Ellis and Davies, together with positive quotes from them about the multiverse as a research program.  Nothing from Gross or Steinhardt, for instance. Much of the &#8220;criticism&#8221; section is actually defense of the multiverse through claims about experimental evidence from Mersini-Houghton that I don&#8217;t think anyone except her takes seriously. Other claims of experimental evidence are completely outrageous, for instance we read that &#8220;Recent research has indicated the possibility of the gravitational pull of other universes on ours.[22]&#8221; where reference [22] is to a Planck collaboration paper which states the exact opposite (&#8220;There is no detection of bulk flow&#8221;).<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a good case to be made that I pay too much attention to popular media nonsense about the multiverse.  Unfortunately Wikipedia is taken a lot more seriously by the public than magazine stories.  At this very moment, hundreds of high school students may be copying material out of it for their assigments&#8230;<br \/>\n<strong><br \/>\nUpdate<\/strong>:  Some people have written to tell me about the appearance of the multiverse in the new <em>Cosmos<\/em> program that started last night.  I saw just 20 minutes of the end of the program, missed that part.  Presumably Tyson will deal with this in more detail in a later episode, so I&#8217;ll wait to write more about this then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The quality of Wikipedia entries about mathematics is often quite good, but unfortunately the same cannot be said for their entries about physics. I happened to take a look today at the Wikipedia entry for Multiverse, which is an outrageously &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6758\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","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":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-multiverse-mania"],"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\/6758","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=6758"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6763,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6758\/revisions\/6763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}