The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith

[Hoosiernorm]

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/12/0083720

In the fifth century B.C., the philosopher Democritus proposed that all matter was made of tiny and indivisible atoms, which came in various sizes and textures—some hard and some soft, some smooth and some thorny. The atoms themselves were taken as givens. In the nineteenth century, scientists discovered that the chemical properties of atoms repeat periodically (and created the periodic table to reflect this fact), but the origins of such patterns remained mysterious. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that scientists learned that the properties of an atom are determined by the number and placement of its electrons, the subatomic particles that orbit its nucleus. And we now know that all atoms heavier than helium were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars.

The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the fully explained: the hue of the sky, the orbits of planets, the angle of the wake of a boat moving through a lake, the six-sided patterns of snowflakes, the weight of a flying bustard, the temperature of boiling water, the size of raindrops, the circular shape of the sun. All these phenomena and many more, once thought to have been fixed at the beginning of time or to be the result of random events thereafter, have been explained as necessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature—laws discovered by human beings.

This long and appealing trend may be coming to an end. Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.

[crashtech]

My admittedly anthropomorphic conception of a Creator is that of a very curious cat, setting in motion vast numbers of realities, each with as many varying "laws" of physics, which to Him might better be called "parameters."

[Typhoon]

The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the fully explained: the hue of the sky, the orbits of planets, the angle of the wake of a boat moving through a lake, the six-sided patterns of snowflakes, the weight of a flying bustard, the temperature of boiling water, the size of raindrops, the circular shape of the sun. All these phenomena and many more, once thought to have been fixed at the beginning of time or to be the result of random events thereafter, have been explained as necessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature—laws discovered by human beings.

This long and appealing trend may be coming to an end. Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.

The problem is not physics, but a group of theoretical physicists who, having spent the last 3 or 4 decades on non-productive, non-predictive. non-theories such as supersymmetry, strings, loops, and superstrings, are now staring into the abyss at the twilight of their careers - a predictive testable Theory of Everything having eluded them.

The rest, the vast majority, of theoretical and experimental physics has never been healthier.

A debate between theorists in the string and loop camps is more like a debate between doctrinaire protestants and catholics or marxist-leninst and trotskyites than between scientists. In other words, it's purely ideological and subjective rather than empirical - based on experiment.

What these groups do excel at is promoting their views to the lay press and through them the general audience.

Theoretical physicists, on the other hand, are not satisfied with observing the universe. They want to know why. They want to explain all the properties of the universe in terms of a few fundamental principles and parameters. These fundamental principles, in turn, lead to the “laws of nature,” which govern the behavior of all matter and energy.

No. Not why but how.

Why is philosophy and religion. How is science.

Philosophy and religion: why does the universe exist?

Science: how does the universe operate?

There is zero experimental evidence for the anthropomorphic principle.

Invoking it is a rather desperate act by the string theorists who are faced with the apparently insurmountable problem of about 10^520 possible vacuum states to choose from as the one representing our universe. All this tells us is that the string hypothesis lacks a key criteria to be a theory of physics - predictions that can be tested, ie., falsifiable.

Until string and other such theories actually make testable predictions, and those predictions are supported, rather than rejected by experiments, then there is no point in taking any such pronouncements seriously. Or to be fair, one should take such claims as seriously as prophesies of an imminent Rapture Rupture or Mayan calendar doomsday

[Parodite]

Philosophy and religion: why does the universe exist?

Science: how does the universe operate?

The why of philosophy often paved the way to the how of empirical science. Good scientists always know how to ask their why, of course