Ya, it’s tuff science to see clearly through all the thought constructs?

While you choose to highlight my statement, I would like you to know and Mark, that it was written fully acknowledging Peter’s careful warnings, as well as Cliffords, about our views on string theory and how we look at particle collider information. It’s place in the timeline.

Pretty much guarantees that any initial distortion will be compounded, and a hundred and twenty orders of magnitude is quite enough already, thanks!

While such “delusions” are good to be aware of, it is also empowering to realized, that you could be living one, and not know it?

Working to clear such delusions is a good thing, while also recognizing that this timeline did indeed began somewhere?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060508/sc_space/recycleduniversetheorycouldsolvecosmicmystery

In retrospect I amend my original comment. This later article is much better than the first.

Elliot

All the more reason not to pile-up ad hoc assumptions without fixing the problem at the root first. Pretty much guarantees that any initial distortion will be compounded, and a hundred and twenty orders of magnitude is quite enough already, thanks!

Few people are clear which parts of QFT or GR are 100% justified empirically.

Which *should* make theorists wonder quite a lot more than they do about how the heck Dirac ever possibly managed to unify QM and SR, especially since it can be shown that QFT isn’t *really* a second quantization of Dirac’s negative energy solutions.

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0401208

Nah… it makes a lot more sense to keep pushing… that’ll fix it.

“When well-known and respected physicists are over-hyping their highly speculative and almost certainly wrong ideas, it can be difficult for non-specialists to see this and get the story right. … I’ve often been pleasantly surprised at how many journalists are able to see through the hype, sometimes even when many trained physicists don’t seem to be able to. While it would be great if journalists would always recognize hype for what it is and not repeat it uncritically, it also would be great if scientists would act more responsibly and not over-hype highly speculative ideas, either their own or other people’s.” – Peter Woit

I can’t believe these comments! Nobody sees through hype, it is part of the social culture of physics. Consensus is what mainstream science is all about when you get to untested or ad hoc models fitted to measurements. Few people are clear which parts of QFT or GR are 100% justified empirically. So you get all kinds of crazy extensions based on philosophical interpretations being defended by the accuracy to which you can calculate the magnetic moment of an electron …

Nice moose picture in there to look at.

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…so that they can push their pet theories on the mainstream.

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Which might be okay if the idea was simply to get them evaluated for merrit, but “some” are simply declaring it so, and then moving-on with this, (politically), while circumventing the normal channels of what even constitutes a falsifiable theory!… is Peter’s point, I believe.

All that’s missing is the threat of death by kung-fu..

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I’m thinking it’s more-like 89 years.

I’d like to make clear that I don’t think the problem with string theory is that it is math, not physics. Some parts of string theory may be best thought of as math, but the great majority of recent work in string theory is not creating new mathematics and thus is not mathematical research. The most dangerous aspect of string theory, the anthropic landscape pseudo-science, has nothing to do with mathematics.

I’m not quite sure why Mark found this piece so disappointing. It wasn’t very good, but there’s far worse out there. When well-known and respected physicists are over-hyping their highly speculative and almost certainly wrong ideas, it can be difficult for non-specialists to see this and get the story right. While there are lots of examples of journalists who write up what scientists tell them in an overly-credulous way, not really understanding what is going on, I’ve often been pleasantly surprised at how many journalists are able to see through the hype, sometimes even when many trained physicists don’t seem to be able to. While it would be great if journalists would always recognize hype for what it is and not repeat it uncritically, it also would be great if scientists would act more responsibly and not over-hype highly speculative ideas, either their own or other people’s.

We’ve had a eighty freaking years of physicists, when explaining QM (and to a rather lesser extent relativity) aggressively preferring to explain things as “Gee Whiz, the universe is the strangest thing out there, far beyond the ken of the human mind” rather than “things are different when they are small; here’s what we understand; here’s what we don’t”.
Who can be surprised when the chickens come home to roost, when journalists now accept whatever they’re fed uncritically? Physics has wasted the chance over the last 80 yrs to provide a realistic view of the world to the public.

It’s an expansion/recollapse model.

Nope… try again:

http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2006-02/msg0073320.html

… not to mention first principles…

… that don’t deny the anthropic principle.

Because I’m not afraid to recognize that the AP indicates that we ARE the mechanism… *duh*

Sure, there is a passing attempting to explain anthropic principles and the like — although he seems to be quoting a working definition verbatim, rather than trying to come up with a better way of phrasing things — but what’s really missing is a broader context. That’s why it reads, as Mark says, like a press release. There s only a passing attempt to talk about where it fits with the prevailing theory, never mind the entire field. Of course, books have been written about that, and this is just a short, truncated news story. I’m guessing time and space limitations got in the way of decent reporting. It happens.

By virtue of my profession, I’m sympathetic to how difficult it is to get good, hard science into the news at all, and to do a complex topic like cosmology justice when faced with tight deadlines, severe space restrictions and harried editors who may not “get it.” And frankly, we all have our “lazy days” when we just don’t put out that extra effort to raise a story from acceptable to good. I haven’t read any of Randerson’s other writing. Let’s hope this isn’t typical.

Anyway back to the article. I think the comment about “first principles” actually makes sense. The subtext is that the anthropic principle is ad-hoc and thrown in to explain things that can’t be explained otherwise.

Although not particularly informative, I don’t think for a layperson’s article it was horrible. Just not great.

Elliot