That does seem odd considering all the taxonomy and philosophy since the ancient Greeks.

Yes, that's logical. I wonder, too, if science has been a bit too tolerant since it emerged from the subjective realm itself.

Yes, I believe hubris is a word I learned from reading many prior threads. [Not applied to me, of course; I'm kinda proud of my humility. ]

You might want to get some advertising estimates first.

Now that I've stopped laughing. That isn't all that bad. Maxim has a respectuful texture to it. It seems to be ambiguious enough that it might sell to both sides.

Here's one: "According to Immanuel Kant, a maxim is a subjective principle or rule that the will of an individual uses in making a decision."

And for the other camp..."a statement expressing a general truth or rule of conduct."

If you offer the definitions for the term(s) you would like created, I'll start a new thread. There are many gifted in language here. Perhaps something useful might develop.

Thinking further, if other scientists like yourself feel it is time for the creation of a new term, maybe a more public, large scale contest might be beneficial. The contest alone would serve as an awareness program.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

Those are all good ideas, including the two basic ways of looking at a "maxim" (Kant's way seems more precise and more useful in this context, but you're right that the connotations would make it an easier sell.) I think you have a crystal clear view of the possible and appropriate meanings that we are looking for-- that which distinguishes objectively and demonstrably useful ways to organize truth-knowledge from subjectively attractive modes that have little or no predictive power but elicit a "warm fuzzy feeling" of comprehension in the practitoner.

Nice and eloquent.

Is it desireable to have separate terms created to cover both the bad and worse failings of these fuzzies? Namely, one term to qualify that which offers testable predictability but has no observational evidence in hand (eg String "Theory", perhaps?). Another term to qualify that which has no testable predicability but having some observational evidence. Another term for that which offers no predicability and also has no observational evidence in hand (eg Multiverse ?????). Should we ask for the whole enchilada?

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

I think we'd do well to come away with one new term! Besides, the category that offers predictability that is untested is still science, it's more of your "incipient theory" but still a theory. If it guides us toward making those tests, it's science (if the tests are too demanding or too costly, then more's the pity, but what can you do). The category that offers no predictability but does have observational evidence I would claim does not exist as a separate entity within science (it is just a semantic restatement of the observational evidence).

Yep.

I assume this is our target term, since the lack of testable predicitions alone spells doom, since predicability is a well established requirement of the scientific method, and any fuzzy that has no observational evidence,too, is D.O.A. as a "theory", once this new term becomes established.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

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."

Then he queries, but is it science? Can it be tested? Of course he agrees that "It can be validly objected that a theory that rests on entities that are in principle unobservable cannot be described as science."

But then he reports on the other side's position: that it is conceivable that indirect evidence could be found to support the theory. But here, I must say, the positions seem pretty weak.

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 -- 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.) 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.

The second possibility is the approach I believe Alex Vilenkin took, which is a kind of tricky statistical maneuver based on the Principle of Mediocrity. The argument goes something like this: All of the "pocket universes" have different constants, physical laws, and number of dimensions. Only certain configurations will conceivably allow for "life" or "observers". But there is a range of values within each configuration where life could emerge. 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.

Well, let's see how that goes over....

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

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.]

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.

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?

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.

Is that observable even in principle? If not, how could it be science?

I'm just the door man. Expect some subsequent visitation.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

Like a lead balloon! Thanks for summarizing that argument, but if that's all they've got, it's not gonna fly. It has as many holes as a sieve, including the fact that we know so little about (1) what ranges in parameter space can lead to intelligent life, (2) what the imaginary distribution over those ranges are (Vilenkin apparently assumes the distribution is a steep power law of some kind, so we should be bumped into one edge, but how can we know that-- if it turns out we're not, they just pick a new distribution and are back in business-- no falsifiability that way), and (3) the validity of making the usual "Carter catastrophe hypothesis" that we are somehow "generic" intelligences, even though we have just now come up with the idea of multiverses (which may make us special-- what if there are parameter regimes where civilizations who come up with the multiverse idea are near the end of their viability, whereas other parameters have civilizations that live way past this concept, would our parameters not be more likely in the former group even if the latter group is otherwise more numerous?). Those uncertainties make it a can of worms.

But here's the real kicker. The argument presented in no way distinguishes a "landscape" approach to the parameters (where all the parameters are actualized somewhere in the multiverse) from any other algorithm you could imagine for how the universe got its parameters. Say, for the sake of argument, that the universal "parameter choice algorithm" is that it makes one single universe by randomly sampling over the parameter range, but if the result is nonviable it just throws it out and tries again (remember, the parameter distribution process is outside of any physics we know, so we have no way to rule out the possibility that it can interrogate the entire future of the universe and ask if intelligent life appears).

Note this approach is very similar to the core idea of the multiverse, that there is a purely statistical algorithm of some kind for choosing the fundamental constants, but it simply has no need to assume that more than one version is ever actualized. The statistics are identical, so all the Vilenkin-like arguments apply equally well, but there's no "multi" in the "verse", it's still a "uni". How would one ever distinguish these models scientifically? It would purely come down to how you imagine the algorithm, does it need to create a universe for every parameter to get life in some of them, or can it know about the future as part of the algorithm? That's the trouble with leaving the testable realm to create your fantasies-- you cannot constrain them enough to make them anything but pure guesswork and philosophical prejudice. You end up looking in the mirror and saying, "ah yes, I see".

The Greeks may have had more sense that we do! But I note another interesting point, which is that none of the arguments we've seen so far that the multiverse is a scientific model even mention string theory, so they could have been formulated as soon as humanity asked the question "why does the universe support life?" and did not immediately invoke gods. That kind of shoots down the idea that somehow the idea emerges naturally from string theory and so if the latter is science, the former is too. Maybe we just haven't heard their best argument yet.

The philosophical debate as to whether we can believe in existence of unexperienced is not a new one. In fact it has been argued since the dawn of logic by the greatest philosophers our planet has had. It is a fundamental issue and also applies to issues such as existence of one god and after life (like it or not).

Source


Though it may seem obvious at a 1st glance that, what we can only imagine is not sufficient proof as to its existence there are issues that we all believe without experiencing directly.

I have never been to Antarctica. Should I completely ignore its existence?

At the moment of feeling very hungry should I stop believing that there exists such a thing as the state of satiety?


Perhaps the most important issue here is not that, if extra universes exist or not but that, why does it matter to us.

If by definition we will never experience any features of the "other universes" if any, then why do we care? (Not suggesting we should stop to care but asking why do we indeed care to know)

Another issue here is if all of what we know is purely based on logic and direct/indirect experience, or instinct/intuition/global-conciseness has something to do with our beliefs. Instinct is a real factor and is programmed into our knowledge. Without the basic instincts we would not be able to understand/learn anything (not even language).

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"They reasoned that an object situated at the center and related equally to the extremes in every direction can have no impulse to move in any specific direction. In fact, they compared the situation of such an object with that of a man violently but equally hungry and thirsty, standing at the same distance from food and drink and unable to decide in which direction to move." - Aristotle

My experience is this (and of course I'm not a scientist, just an interested bystander):

I often feel frustrated by the 'unobservable', be it multiverses, God, whatever... or by the fact that I've just 'wasted' the last hour thinking about it. (There are always lawns to mow, after all.)

But, you just don't know what you don't know. So you're always sucked back in by the possiblity that next little bit of insight is just around the corner. Something to do with the instinct to explore I suppose...

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If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it... of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms...
Albert Einstein

This sounds like a nice lick, but I don't get it.

Somehow, I received a special report from Scientific American, written by Max Tegmark. I thought it appropriate for this discussion.

“Parallel Universes: Not just a staple of science fiction, other universes are a direct implication of cosmological observations”.

“The idea [of a parallel universe] is supported by astronomical observations.” Further, “the simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 10^28 meters from here.”

The very next sentence has the irony I like to see, “ This distance is so large that it is beyond astronomical,….” [If only he would think longer how true that is, and its rather obvious implications.]

It is all really quite simple, you know, “The estimate is derived from elementary probability and does not even assume speculative modern physics, merely that space is infinite (or at least sufficiently large) in size and almost uniformly filled with matter, as observations indicate.” [I hope those aren’t the cosmological observations he referred to above.]

Here’s a nit, “Yet the borderline between physics and metaphysics is defined by whether a theory is experimentally testable,…”. So, if it is untestable, then it is a metaphysics theory.

Gee, I can’t get past the first page…. “The frontiers of physics have gradually expanded to incorporate ever more abstract (and once metaphysical) concepts such as a round Earth, invisible electromagnetic fields, time slowdown at high speeds, …”. I have a hunch y’all didn’t know all this was metaphysics once.

Of course, the last statement was the lead in to…” Over the past several years the concept of a multiverse has joined this list.”

One more than I must stop… “ The key question is not whether the multiverse exists but rather how many levels it has.” Just what is wrong with you people?

On it goes (couldn't stop)… frog view, bird view, multiple paths of wave function, quantum mechanics of ergodicity, …. And. “The scientific theories of parallel universes, therefore, form a 4-level hierarchy… In the coming decade, dramatically improved cosmological measurements of the microwave background, and the large-scale matter distribution will support or refute Level 1… Level II….”.

He also states that further evidence will come if success is achieved for quantum computers, since they exploit parallelism.

Oddly, he does admit that “multiverse theories” are vulnerable due to their postulations that we can never observe.

Finally, “A common feature of all four multiverse levels is that the simplest and arguably most elegant theory involves parallel universes by default. To deny the existence of those universes, one needs to complicate the theory by adding experimentally unsupported processes and ad hoc postulates: finite space, wave function collapse and ontological asymmetry.”

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

None of this means it isn't possible. It just means that if it can't be observed it isn't part of us. ...and if we CAN detect another Universe, then it becomes part of our own, which negates the meaning of multiverse.

The point is that one cannot argue the multiverse idea passes from metaphysics to physics on the backs of scientific theories about cosmology and strings if the justifications one uses that multiverses are scientific do not invoke any of the empirical connections from those other subfields. Those subfields are what I might call "image spaces" for taking observational projections of reality (assuming this can even be done in string theory, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt), but multiverses don't inhabit those image spaces if one can discuss them independently of those image spaces. And if is to be its own image space, then it needs its own empirical projections, its own body of relevant predictions and data collections. 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.
Exactly, it's a classic case of "having it both ways"-- multiverses are supposed to be the most natural interpretations of cosmological observations, yet they exist at distances that are beyond those very observations. His rhetorical dance seems to borrow support from the same observations he needs not be constrained by-- that's some trick.

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? Also, wave function collapse is what you get if you don't make experimentally unsupported philosophical claims about the meaning of quantum mechanics (as Bohr well understood). And as for "ontological asymmetry", I have no idea what he means by that, but simply labeling something an "asymmetry" does not make it ad hoc--usually it is the assumption of a symmetry that is ad hoc!

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.

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 protecte