Re: [asa] The Multiverse - Physics or Metaphysics?

No, I was not referring to string theory but rather to the Big Bang cosmology.

I am not sure I agree with your portrayal of string theory. While I
agree that it may be hard to provide testable predictions.

As far as experiment is concerned, string theory has already proposed
many interesting research topics, and while string theory may be only
testable at high energy, it hardly seems to be scientifically vacuous
in the sense of ID. Compare string theory to for instance Einstein's
theory of relativity. As a good theory, it did capture all the
behaviors at low speed. Science needed to advance (although not too
much) to allow Einstein's theory to be tested.

As a side-note, I have often be warning of people mindlessly repeating
claims by creationists, in this case Bethell seems to have been taken
in by ID. See http://recursed.blogspot.com/2007/09/bethell-buffoon.html

I have found quite a few ID proponents who have taken ID's claims as a
gospel, especially the ones about complex specified information,
without really understanding the equivocation involved.

On 9/9/07, philtill@aol.com <philtill@aol.com> wrote:
> Pim, you wrote:
>
> > Rather than rely on some really irrelevant statements by individual
> > scientists, whether it be Dawkins or some physicist opposed to string
> > theory, one should attempt a larger view of science.
>
> and in a prior post you wrote:
>
> > Ah but the fact that the most successful cosmology also predicts
> > multiverses makes the concept quite a bit more interesting than a 'x
> > did it' ad hoc explanation.
>
> If I understood, you are referring to string theory as "the most successful
> cosmology." I would caution care here, because string theory has not made
> any testable predictions and so it is dubious that it can claim any success
> at all. It has been formulated to be consistent with what we know in
> nature, but in trying to make it consistent, so many unobservable dimensions
> and extra degrees of freedom had to be put into the theory ad hoc that it
> ended up predicting this "string landscape" that is so large that now you
> can get any answer imaginable and not just what we observe.

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Received on Sun Sep 9 19:44:25 2007