Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken G
One can't say it is a theory that piggybacks on cosmology or string theory and then say that the reason it is science has nothing to do with those other theories.
|
Ah, yes. Even worse is the connection to a spherical world. How could he make such an error? A spherical world goes back to at least Aristotle, and they had hard evidence to support it, including the associated movement of the stars for north and south travelers, and the respetive solar shadow angles with hypothesized lattitudes. "Where's the beef?". Aristotle had it; Tegmark, aparently, has none. Worse, I wonder if the greatest imaginable extrapolation one could make would be to take a quantum event and conclude there are multiple unverses? Even if he is right, he is wrong to claim he must be.
I am still surprised at how some scientists seem at ease with abusing the precious term of theory. Your efforts have greatly heightened that awarness. Yet, the "why they do it" still puzzles me. Your scientist hat metaphor seems to fit, admittedly; once a scientist, always a scientist. This minimizes their ability to confront far worse woo-woos if hypocricy is in their own camp.
Quote:
|
Yes, I'm afraid his own words serve as refutation enough. How could someone as smart as Tegmark, with as much physics acumen as he has, not see the absurdity in claiming that "finite space" is experimentally unsupported, as though infinite space had experimental support?
|
Yes, and your question is like mine, what gives? Getting back into my fix-it mode, this makes me question how likely any new, appropraite term would be accepted, which protected the term "theory" from abuse, but would assign some degree of credibility or merit to the wantabe theory.
A new term should, somehow, distinguish the more legitimate wantabee theories from the ones that ain't ever gonna happen. What makes the multiverse
thark different than today's astrology? Does it have some mathematical elegance, if there is any? Can the quantum story assist them, after all? Some distinction between it and Sillyville would need to be part of the term's definition. Any ideas?