UFO Religions

Of Sophistry and Antagonism Toward Fine-Tuning

I found this recent post entitled, “Is This the Dumbest Ever ‘Refutation’ of the Fine-Tuning Argument Ever?” worth the read (and a bit funny). It’s about some very poor thinking on the part of British philosopher Anthony Grayling with respect to his disdain of the fine-tuning argument often associated with the intelligent design movement.

I don’t often post things like this here, but examples like this are worth it. Part of the debate over the likelihood of ET life is linked to the debate over the alleged probability that other planets *must* be out there capable of supporting ET life. The other side is the “rare earth” view — that earth is alone (or probably alone) in being home to intelligent life and even complex life forms. That view is consistent with the fine-tuning argument, which posits earth is capable of supporting life because the universe is “fine-tuned” to make that possible. The term naturally implies intelligent design, but there are some fine-tuning proponents that don’t make God part of the equation.

Technorati Tags: aliens, extraterrestrials, fine-tuning

The Higgs-Boson Hype

I like to post on things like this every so often to remind readers that science can be marred by, and married to, hype. I was reading through some recent posts by mathematician Peter Woit on his Not Even Wrong blog this morning and came across several items worth offering my own readers here. After all, the multiverse and associated ideas are inextricably part of the ET life and deep space travel issues. I like Woit because he insists that mainstream ideas be probed for internal coherence and not simply embraced for their (pardon the pun) symmetry on the surface of things. Reminds me a lot of my dissertation work on the “obvious” evolution of Israelite monotheism. Anything but.

For those new to Woit, he is a mathematician at Columbia University whose PhD (Princeton) is in theoretical physics. He is most known for his book, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law.

The first of Woit’s posts that caught my attention was entitled, “The Ultimate Guide to the Multiverse.” Some excerpts:

Yet another cover story about the Multiverse can be found this week at New Scientist, which calls it The Ultimate Guide to the Multiverse. As just one more in a long line of such stories over the last decade, a trend that shows no signs of slowing down, one can be pretty sure that this is not the yet the “ultimate” one, nor even the penultimate one.

The content is the usual: absolutely zero skepticism about the idea, and lots of outrageous hype from the usual suspects (Bousso, Tegmark, Susskind, etc.) We’re told that scientists are now performing tests of the idea, even at the LHC. The LHC test has been a great success: Laura Mersini-Houghton used the multiverse to predict that the LHC would not see supersymmetry, and that prediction has worked out very well so far.

This past week also saw the premiere of the Multiverse episode of Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos series on PBS. It’s more or less an hour-long infomercial for the Multiverse, with the argument against it pretty much restricted to some short grumpy comments by David Gross about how he didn’t like it. Brian’s pro-multiverse argument was that many new advances in physics are all pointing to a multiverse, and he showed support for the idea as resting on a three-legged structure. One of the legs was string theory, and I’ve described elsewhere recently how circular reasoning makes this one very shaky.

The multiverse propaganda machine has now been going full-blast for more than eight years, since at least 2003 or so, and I’m beginning to wonder “what’s next?”. Once your ideas about theoretical physics reach the point of having a theory that says nothing at all, there’s no way to take this any farther. You can debate the “measure problem” endlessly in academic journals, but the cover stories about how you have revolutionized physics can only go on so long before they reach their natural end of shelf-life.

Another post of a couple days ago saw Woit defending himself against ad hominem attacks from mainstream string theorists: “String and M-Theory: Answering the Critics.” Again, some excerpts.

Mike Duff has a new preprint out, a contribution to the forthcoming Foundations of Physics special issue on “Forty Years of String Theory” entitled String and M-theory: answering the critics. Much of it is the usual case string theorists are trying to make these days, but it also includes vigorous ad hominem attacks on Lee Smolin and me (I’m described as having an “unerring gift for inaccuracy”, and we’re compared to people who campaign against vaccination “in the face of mainstream scientific opinion”).

Duff explains that his motivation for answering the critics is that we have been successful on the public relations front, supposedly responsible for the British EPSRC “office rejecting” without peer review grant proposals on string theory. I know nothing of this, but I think it’s clear to everyone that the perception of string theory among physicists has changed, and not for the better, over the past decade. One dramatic way to see this is to notice that at this point, US physics departments have essentially stopped hiring string theorists for permanent appointments (i.e. at the tenure-track level).

Duff’s article contains an appendix about this, in the form of a “FAQ”, where he explains that he approved the text of the press release headlined “Researchers discover how to conduct first test of ‘untestable’ string theory” which is misleading hype by any standard. Initially someone who was successfully misled in the Imperial media team added the subtitle “New study suggests researchers can now test the ‘theory of everything’”, which was later removed. Duff claims that Shelly Glashow, Edward Witten and Jim Gates told journalists that they didn’t agree with this because of the “theory of everything” subtitle, implying that otherwise they were fine with the “first test of ‘untestable’ string theory” business (except for Gates noting that in any case this is just supergravity, not string theory). It would be interesting to hear from the three of them if they’re really on-board with this “first test of ‘untestable’ string theory”.

Technorati Tags: multiverse, Peter Woit, physics, skepticism, string theory

A Blow to Inter-Dimensional ETs?

I’m not sure if the death of the multi-verse theory described in this obituary is correct, or if correct, whether that kills off the possibility of any other universe (shy of all the layers of the multi-verse).  I’m also not convinced that “other universe” is an adequate synonym for “alternate plane of reality” even though we use the former phrase to mean the latter all the time. If these two concepts are not identical, then having no other universes would not necessarily be problematic for those who post ETs are from another dimension, or those Christians who opt for aliens as “spiritual entities” (demons for the most part; note that the “spiritual world” needs to be another plane of reality).  Perhaps there are several reality planes within our single universe – ? Or maybe the problem is *this particular theory* of the multi-verse.

Any thoughts on the terminology problem or the general issue?

Technorati Tags: multiverse, skepticism, string theory, superstring, SUSY, universes

Finally Something Paul Davies Wrote That Doesn’t Make Me Cringe

Those of you who frequent this blog know that, on more than one occasion, I’ve wondered why anyone takes Paul Davies seriously when he writes anything pertaining to religion. Perhaps this is a sign of the impending apocalypse, but he’s finally produced something that doesn’t make me cringe.  Davies wrote recently that “in light of modern physics discoveries, materialism is not the most viable philosophy.” No kidding.

Davies flash of religious coherence appears in his contribution to a new Cambridge title, Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press 2010). For some commentary on how Davies’ admission is inconsistent with the way intelligent design theorists are often treated, see this from Uncommon Descent.

Technorati Tags: Davies, materialism, physics, theism

Physics, Cosmology, and Theistic Religion

Periodically on this blog I make note of theoretical physics and its implications for theism (better, it’s support for theism). In that light, I want to draw your attention to two recent posts responding to a recent case made for how current views of cosmology purportedly rule out a need for a creator-God. The most recent example was that of Stephen Hawking, critiques of which (by physicists and mathematicians) I’ve posted here before. Today, though, I want to highlight some responses to a 2006 piece that is apparently getting new attention on the web.

The 2006 essay was by Keith Parsons, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston-Clear-Lake. Parsons outlined his reasons for rejecting the case for a Divine Creator in an essay entitled, No Creator Need Apply: A Reply to Roy Abraham Varghese. The essay was rebutted recently by Paul Herrick in his piece, Job Opening: Creator of the Universe – A Reply to Keith Parsons (2009). Even more recently, two posts over at Uncommon Descent caught my interest. You can read them here and here.

This discussion over cosmology and theism illustrates why arguments for and against ET life are *not* the same as arguments for and against God. Apples and oranges. That’s something I’ll come back to.

Technorati Tags: cosmology, creator, God, Hawking, Parsons, physics