
Fake Physics (2017) - dschuetz
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9053
======
GlenTheMachine
I find it hard to believe that there are wealthy people backing an organized
propaganda campaign to promote the multiverse idea, in order to cover up the
failure of string theory. Or for any other reason, really.

~~~
JKCalhoun
Toss String Theory onto the garbage heap already.

Maybe what is worst than having steered your career in the wrong direction for
decades is that there is nothing better than String Theory to instead invest
in.

I'm an armchair physicist, never bought into String Theory due to the growing
mathematical kludginess of the thing. But what else is there?

~~~
whatshisface
Rejecting strings on aesthetic grounds is no better than accepting it on
aesthetic grounds.

~~~
Retric
The problem is not asthetics the problem is overfitting the data. Add enough
knobs and you can approximate anything, but your simply encoding data not
finding anything new.

~~~
whatshisface
There is an infinite amount of complexity in a randomly selected real number.
A famous example of packing lots of behavior in to a small number of
parameters is [0]. A physical constant that will change everything drastically
if it is changed even a little bit carries just as much information as one
hundred constants to which the universe is less sensitive. That's the argument
behind why the fine-tuning in the standard model is an indication that it is
not sufficient.

[0][https://fermatslibrary.com/s/drawing-an-elephant-with-
four-c...](https://fermatslibrary.com/s/drawing-an-elephant-with-four-complex-
parameters)

~~~
Retric
That argument falls flat in two ways, first we are dealing with 12-13 digits
so taking about infinity is silly.

Second, the standard model is simply the most ifnomation dense way of
describing ~all known observations. Nobody thinks it’s truth just accurate.
So, saying it overfits the data is fine, that’s how it’s constructed.
Supplanting it needs to reduce the amount of information required to describe
the model or similar amounts while being more elegant to call it progress.

------
tokai
I avoid nautilus, and find it sad to see them on the front of hn so often.
They are really bending the definition of scientific journalism out of shape.
I try to avoid metaphysics in my information intake thank you.

------
starbeast
If we travel far enough superluminally into the light cone of a causally
separate region where inflation has ended, presumably it might not be fake
physics.

Or maybe physics _is_ fake physics, otherwise physicists could then all put
their feet up and call it a day.

Read our new article exploring these questions and also why the multiverse
will speed up your computer, in this month's issue of 'Vague Scientist' \-
[https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/beyond_the_beyond/2009/07...](https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/beyond_the_beyond/2009/07/020709.jpg)

The idea that people talking bollocks is some kind of a new phenomena, is a
bewildering kind of meta-bollocks that has resulted from the meme of people
shouting fake news.

I know otherwise intelligent people in their mid fifties, who have suddenly
started insisting that you could trust the press before the internet started
all this fake news.

------
ThrowMeDown01
Funny, the linked article itself links back to HN when this was previously
discussed (Jan 2017):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13451310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13451310)

------
yters
I'm not seeing what is fake physics regarding the Nautilus article. Seems the
points are legitimate. A single universe implies Boltzmann brains. The
multiverse makes statistical prediction unworkable. Easy to see this from a
machine learning perspective. So, we need something else.

Fortunately, here is such an alternative theory!

[https://www.am-nat.org/site/law-of-information-non-growth/](https://www.am-
nat.org/site/law-of-information-non-growth/)

~~~
throwawaymath
Do you mind explaining why

1\. a single universe implies Boltzmann brains, and

2\. a multiverse makes statistical prediction unworkable?

The link you provided is taking a while to load for me, but if it's easier to
just throw another link at me I'm fine reading that instead. I mainly want to
understand why what you're saying is true.

~~~
yters
The big problem is the principle of maximum entropy, which posits that all
order we see is accidental. This manifests itself in various ways with current
cosmological models.

[http://cosmos.nautil.us/feature/120/the-crisis-of-the-
multiv...](http://cosmos.nautil.us/feature/120/the-crisis-of-the-multiverse)

My solution is to posit the universe was created by a halting oracle, and this
allows us to assume perceived order is real order.

------
Koshkin
Well, of course, scientific research is big business today, and marketing,
including advertisement (of varying quality), is a major part of it.

~~~
gumby
I partially agree with your point. It's not "big business" in the sense of
involving lots of people and large sums of money (a few inventions do end up
being big, say blue lasers, but the research end of that work is rarely big on
any business scale). The actual sums of any grant are typically shockingly low
and even the sum of all government research grants is a pretty small number
world wide.

However what has materially changed is that general publicity of research
objectives and even some goals has been found valuable by the various research
institutes (for helping get grants and donations) so that has really become
important. Which, as a onetime scientist, I find a bummer.

(I felt it worth responding because the meme "research is big business" has
itself been used as fake news fodder for attacking results (e.g. climate
change) that some people don't like. I didn't interpret your comment that way,
BTW, but still felt it needed pointing out).

~~~
FakeComments
I think people have trouble telling the difference between tobacco, sugar,
pesticides, plastics, and other “research” and the climate change research.

Part of science certainly is covering for big business, and is itself in
business doing so.

But it would be stupid for people to keep trusting “science” blindly when it’s
been used repeatedly over the span of decades to cover up deadly or otherwise
dangerous things.

~~~
coldtea
Just call something "science" and have people with PhDs do it in universities,
and people will trust it.

Who cares about the process or the quality or the funding?

Humans with PhDs would never print BS en masse to promote their individual
careers, and placate their colleagues, would they?

~~~
FakeComments
That was precisely my point, yes.

But also that scientists are more concerned with fussing at the public how
they need to “trust science”, despite that doing so historically has been
questionable at times.

Perhaps people would be more willing to listen on climate change if there were
more institutional credibility.

Edit: You can downvote all you want, but in the middle of a replication crisis
and sinking faith in science as an institution, maybe you should think about
it.

~~~
Retra
It is still better to trust in misleading science than it is to do any of the
alternatives. And just because some science is misleading doesn't mean the
institution itself doesn't work.

~~~
FakeComments
But the institution itself doesn’t work outside of a few narrow fields: the
results aren’t replicable and they’re dangerous to trust.

------
visualstudio
Isn't this kind of fake physics called "Woo"?

[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Science_woo](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Science_woo)

~~~
dwaltrip
I think woo usually involves claims about how some pseudoscience nonsense can
impact an average person's life. The multiverse isn't used in this way, from
what I've seen.

~~~
mikeash
There is a bit, for example: [https://www.consciouslifestylemag.com/quantum-
jumping-shift-...](https://www.consciouslifestylemag.com/quantum-jumping-
shift-reality/)

But it’s definitely not very common.

~~~
dwaltrip
Oh yeah, there is tons of various "quantum" woo. Deepak Chopra comes to mind
as one of the well-known worst offenders. But I think that is separate from
the OP, which seemed to mostly be about the multiverse (and actual
physicists).

