Article Why scientists are mesmerized by the multiverse

[C C]

https://cosmiclog.com/2024/01/15/scienti...ultiverse/

INTRO: The multiverse may be a cool (and convenient) concept for comic books and superhero movies, but why do scientists take it seriously?

In a new book titled “The Allure of the Multiverse,” physicist Paul Halpern traces why many theorists have come to believe that longstanding scientific puzzles can be solved only if they allow for the existence of other universes outside our own — even if they have no firm evidence for such realms.

It’s easy to confuse the hypotheses with the hype, but Halpern says there’s a huge difference between the multiverse that physicists propose and the mystical realm that’s portrayed in movies like “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”

“Some people accuse scientists of trying to delve into science fiction if they even mention the multiverse,” Halpern says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “But the type of science that people are doing when they talk about the multiverse is real science. It’s far-reaching science, but it’s real science. Scientists are not saying, ‘Hey, maybe we can meet another Spider-Man and attack Kingpin that way.'”

...] For physicists, however, the multiverse isn’t a matter of wondering where they’d be if they went for an MBA rather than a Ph.D. Instead, the idea pops up in several scientific contexts. Quantum mechanics gave rise to deep questions about how the act of observation affects the reality being observed. The effort to answer those questions led some physicists to theorize that reality splits into different versions that go their separate ways, in line with what’s now known as the Many Worlds Interpretation.

[...] Halpern points out that it took decades for physicists to find sufficient evidence for the existence of dark matter and dark energy, black holes and gravitational waves — long-shot efforts that led to Nobel Prizes... (MORE - missing details)

[Magical Realist]

I don't believe in a multiverse of endless universes. To me it's invoking a much more unlikely situation just to explain a much less unlikely situation. Besides, there's just no evidence for it. Science should focus on what can be empirically proven not just on what can be imagined. Leave the multiverse for sci fi authors and movie directors.

[C C]

Every "mainstream" claim in the past about the limit of existence -- about it being such and such finite -- has failed. The last (major one) being the conviction, before the early 20th century, that what was later relabeled as our galaxy (the Milky Way) was the extent of the universe. IOW, we've gone through the equivalent of "multiverse" transitions before and then changed the goalposts after wards, to obscure them having happened. 

[...] the multiverse hypothesis is an unprovable “theory of anything” and therefore shouldn’t be considered science.

This negative declaration lacks proof itself. It's an appeal to false possession of omniscience, especially complete knowledge about the future. 

There are several different origins and thus categories for a multiverse (including the cosmological inflation kind). There is no single door in physics/cosmology that is open and inviting such, or that they are all dependent on.

These possibilities are not like ghost and angel beliefs that developed outside mathematical and lab science activity. They instead fell out of the latter.

I'm willing to admit that even God (to a warranted degree) is "verifiable" in theory, via no longer remaining hidden. But God is extraneous, is not even a member of or offshoot of the above activity.

So where do these dogmatic declarations about futility actually stem from? They are propaganda stemming from personal preferences resting in either scientism or creationism (slash ID). The latter detests multiverse hypotheses because they undermine a unique spiritual reason for why this particular universe (sporting a planet like Earth and its solar system) came about.

And a precursor of scientism was logical positivism (LP), which detested metaphysics (a tradition scientism still tentatively clings to). LP fell to the wayside because it could not validate itself with its own standards.

"LP itself (as a proposition) cannot be proven by means of experience, in principle or otherwise, beyond the admittedly highly meaningful proof of our own existence. Not only does 'proof by experience'; require axioms such as causality and inference to define 'proof'' by experience, but no possible experiment could prove LP to be correct any more than an experiment could prove the law of induction to be correct. It is an axiom, one of many possible, equally unprovable assertions of ways to determine truth, falsehood, or meaning. [...] Therefore, LP is meaningless. I don't know what you mean when you say that meaning can only be ascertained by the possibility of an experiential proof as that statement has no possibility of an experiential proof." --Robert G. Brown

For instance, I've probably dissed superstring theory in the past as a fruitless venture. But those and future occasions as well are just personal preferences briefly appropriating LP-like dictums to "fund" propaganda against superstrings. Ultimately, my enmity rests purely in a subjective assessment that superstrings has been a waste of resources for several decades. It's a philosophical or political prescriptive "ought" rather than the "is" of omniscient knowledge that "_X_  is truly not the case". Salved by the fact that I know nothing I declare will ever make a dent in stopping it.

Mere venting carries no consequences with respect to being tormented by conscience, as long as it is venting about something that is invincible to your protests, criticism, etc.

[Syne]

Claims of it being unprovable are more tenable and less scientism than the inverse, as our current understanding of physics says there's no way to prove it. But the claim that multiverses exist is pure scientism. Just people having a quasi-religious belief in something that just helps the math work out.