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Originally Posted by Cougar
So Paul Davies, who is an excellent writer, finally gets to the crux of the matter and points out that "many scientists hate the multiverse idea." They say it's "a speculation too far," "fantasy," and "intellectually bankrupt."
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That seems to be the consensus here, too.
But, those words appear glued to tomatoes. Loaded questions are bad enough, loaded answers can be taken hard, too.
This only elevates my sense that a real term needs to be created to serve science in a less tomato active venue. [If another doesn't initiate a separate thread on this, I will, but I thought it best to wait till Monday when more members are active.]
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The first possibility seems awfully inapplicable in this case, but he points out that if a theory as a whole enjoys good experimental support -- like General Relativity...
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Does GR support it or is the support found in the fact that it doesn't refute it? It seems to be more of an extrapolation beyond GR's bounds. Just because one corn flake looks like Illinois, doesn't mean zillions of others have to exist. How many states must exist in order for one to look like Illinois? How many flakes don't understand the difference.
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...-- one can have fair confidence that it can apply to regions we cannot observe even in principle -- like inside black holes. (This was the point made by Spaceman Spiff, I believe.)
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I think Ken's response was quite impressive. What if there is a 5th force that is an emergent property arising only when beyond the event horizon? Could we ever know about it?
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This may have some validity with regard to GR, but of course the multiverse idea currently "enjoys" NO experimental support, so it's got quite a ways to go just to get some indirect evidence. This argument goes nowhere to support multiverses.
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Yes.
But it does seem to be GR that has triggered the multiverse ideas. If it demonstrates fine tuning, then the leap is to assume there must be others that have different dial settings.
My limited search for historical references in the distant past have come up short of anyone expressing such views. The Greeks saw plurality in isolated worlds (
kosmoi). Pliny (23 - 79BC) argued that if you have more than one universe, you would need to have more than one Nature; this was ridiculus to them. It seems the thinking was either for a finite universe or an infinite universe, but not multiple universes. Bruno might have liked it, but he favored an invinite universe.
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If by observing our own values we find that our pocket universe is much, much more bio-friendly than it "needs to be" for life to emerge, then... something's fishy. The multiverse idea predicts that our values for the vital parameters that affect life should be fairly close to the "edge," beyond which the pocket universe would not be bio-friendly. So if we find our pocket universe is a "million miles" from that edge on the side of bio-friendliness, then the multiverse idea would be falsified. Therefore, it's (sort of) scientific.
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Is that observable even in principle? If not, how could it be science?
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Well, let's see how that goes over....
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I'm just the door man. Expect some subsequent visitation.