Milky Way

[MisterVeritis]

That's the only one you can agree in.

And once again, I tend to agree.

[carolina73]

Yes, but we are not supposed to question the political hacks either. What happens when if you disagree with the political hacks your voice is silenced or worse?

Then you are an idiot is their response. Same as the man made global warming crowd. Agree 100% with us or you are cancelled.

[Chris]

To add to the discussion: if the multiverse theory is true, were they all created with the same Big Bang? I think under quantum theory the answer is yes.

And with the multiverse science immediately runs into trouble.

Big Bang blunder bursts the multiverse bubble reported in Nature volume 510, page9 (2014):

When a team of cosmologists announced at a press conference in March that they had detected gravitational waves generated in the first instants after the Big Bang, the origins of the Universe were once again major news....

...The results were hailed as proof of the Big Bang inflationary theory and its progeny, the multiverse. Nobel prizes were predicted and scores of theoretical models spawned. The announcement also influenced decisions about academic appointments and the rejections of papers and grants. It even had a role in governmental planning of large-scale projects.

...Now, serious flaws in the analysis have been revealed that transform the sure detection into no detection. The search for gravitational waves must begin anew. The problem is that other effects, including light scattering from dust and the synchrotron radiation generated by electrons moving around galactic magnetic fields within our own Galaxy, can also produce these twists....

But it's worse than just one bit of evidence being falsified.

...The BICEP2 incident has also revealed a truth about inflationary theory. The common view is that it is a highly predictive theory. If that was the case and the detection of gravitational waves was the ‘smoking gun’ proof of inflation, one would think that non-detection means that the theory fails. Such is the nature of normal science. Yet some proponents of inflation who celebrated the BICEP2 announcement already insist that the theory is equally valid whether or not gravitational waves are detected. How is this possible?

The answer given by proponents is alarming: the inflationary paradigm is so flexible that it is immune to experimental and observational tests. First, inflation is driven by a hypothetical scalar field, the inflaton, which has properties that can be adjusted to produce effectively any outcome. Second, inflation does not end with a universe with uniform properties, but almost inevitably leads to a multiverse with an infinite number of bubbles, in which the cosmic and physical properties vary from bubble to bubble. The part of the multiverse that we observe corresponds to a piece of just one such bubble. Scanning over all possible bubbles in the multi*verse, every*thing that can physically happen does happen an infinite number of times. No experiment can rule out a theory that allows for all possible outcomes. Hence, the paradigm of inflation is unfalsifiable.

This may seem confusing given the hundreds of theoretical papers on the predictions of this or that inflationary model. What these papers typically fail to acknowledge is that they ignore the multiverse and that, even with this unjustified choice, there exists a spectrum of other models which produce all manner of diverse cosmological outcomes. Taking this into account, it is clear that the inflationary paradigm is fundamentally untestable, and hence scientifically meaningless.

What, the furthest reaches of science are not falsifiable, are not, thus, scientific!?!?

[Peter1469]

The multiverse theory is pseudoscience in the strict sense of the term.

I don't lump theoretical physics into pseudoscience. I believe that it is linked with quantum theory.

[Standing Wolf]

And with the multiverse science immediately runs into trouble.

Big Bang blunder bursts the multiverse bubble reported in Nature volume 510, page9 (2014):



But it's worse than just one bit of evidence being falsified.



What, the furthest reaches of science are not falsifiable, are not, thus, scientific!?!?

Unfortunately, some will see this sort of incident as confirmation that an entire scientific theory is wrong, or that it's "just a guess". And the media is no help in that regard, as they tend to attach a headline to stories like this that suggests, falsely, that the Big Bang, evolution, whatever it happens to be, has somehow been called into question, which is not the case at all. Competing theories on the details, even errors in calculation or the deliberate falsification of data, do nothing to negate the evidence for the main theory itself.

[Chris]

Unfortunately, some will see this sort of incident as confirmation that an entire scientific theory is wrong, or that it's "just a guess". And the media is no help in that regard, as they tend to attach a headline to stories like this that suggests, falsely, that the Big Bang, evolution, whatever it happens to be, has somehow been called into question, which is not the case at all. Competing theories on the details, even errors in calculation or the deliberate falsification of data, do nothing to negate the evidence for the main theory itself.

It should be taken that way. It should be taken as the, let us say, edges of science are not scientific in that they are not falsifiable, in that there is no evidence available to test hypotheses. In short, science has its limits.

This is not a story from the media or even popular science. Nature: "Nature is a weekly international journal publishing the finest peer-reviewed research in all fields of science and technology on the basis of its originality, importance, interdisciplinary interest, timeliness, accessibility, elegance and surprising conclusions." The author, Paul Steinhardt, is a professor of physics at Princeton University.

Why? Because science is at heart skeptical. Because threads like this one do a disservice to science.

[MisterVeritis]

It should be taken that way. It should be taken as the, let us say, edges of science are not scientific in that they are not falsifiable, in that there is no evidence available to test hypotheses. In short, science has its limits.

This is not a story from the media or even popular science. Nature: "Nature is a weekly international journal publishing the finest peer-reviewed research in all fields of science and technology on the basis of its originality, importance, interdisciplinary interest, timeliness, accessibility, elegance and surprising conclusions." The author, Paul Steinhardt, is a professor of physics at Princeton University.

Why? Because science is at heart skeptical. Because threads like this one do a disservice to science.

This highlights how science, over time is self correcting.

[Mister D]

The multiverse is not a scientific theory. I'm not suggesting the multiverse theory is wrong. I am simply saying it's not science, strictly speaking.

[MisterVeritis]

The multiverse is not a scientific theory. I'm not suggesting the multiverse theory is wrong. I am simply saying it's not science, strictly speaking.

Agree. It is not yet a theory.

[Chris]

This highlights how science, over time is self correcting.

It highlights how science is incomplete, tentative, and probabilistic. And always will be. If you're looking for certainty or absolutes, science is not the place to look.