[Elrac]

Underneath the eloquent prose and the many helpful examples and showcases, this is an anti-science hit piece.

How dare theoretical physicists develop ideas about the world around us that can't be quickly and obviously supported by real-world observations? It's apparent that science is in a crisis! We might as well just throw up our hands and place our faith in homeopathy and creationism, which are no better.

Sorry, Mr. Baggott, that's a shitty argument for a target audience of stupid people.

A counter-argument could be built on science stories like Ignatz Semmelweis' ideas about hand-washing before surgery. Semmelweis suspected that _something_ was transferred from cadavers to birthing mothers via the hands of unwashed surgeons, but he had no idea what that something was, and could certainly not provide empirical proof. He was later vindicated by the work of Pasteur and Koch. Too late for poor Dr. Semmelweis, who died in a nuthouse, but today hand washing is an essential practice in modern medicine.

Mr. Baggott is telling us that science talks about things that are obviously real, like bacteria, but also things that may or may not be, such as multiverses. He's trying to convince us that because multiverses aren't obviously real, science shouldn't be talking or even thinking about them. He's implying that science is dishonest because it claims that multiverses are real. Actually, he's the one who's being dishonest, not science.

Especially in fields where it's not feasible to stick the subject matter into a test tube, hypothesis and speculation are valid tools of science. Hypotheses are proposed with the expectation that science will later refute or substantiate them. Contrary to what Mr. Baggott brings across, this is part of science's process, a process that has proven wildly successful and valuable in the past.

Most scientists are honest; and if asked by someone interested in more than a catchy headline, they'll gladly tell you which theories are solidly supported by a wealth of evidence, which are just ideas being thrown at the wall, and which are in between. People who fail to understand this are poorly informed; people who intentionally paper over the differences are dishonest. Please, let's ignore and shame that kind of people.

[skrebbel]

> this is an anti-science hit piece.

You're needlessly painting the world black and white. Very few people are against science.

This is not a hit piece. It's just a piece that you disagree with. That's fine, and I think your comment would be a lot stronger if it was formulated as such.

EDIT: removed lots of needless snark.

[pron]

Here's an actual theoretical physicist, though, saying pretty much the same thing as the article not two weeks ago: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-crisis-in-phys... :

> Instead of examining the way that they propose hypotheses and revising their methods, theoretical physicists have developed a habit of putting forward entirely baseless speculations. Over and over again I have heard them justifying their mindless production of mathematical fiction as “healthy speculation” – entirely ignoring that this type of speculation has demonstrably not worked for decades and continues to not work. There is nothing healthy about this. It’s sick science. And, embarrassingly enough, that’s plain to see for everyone who does not work in the field.

> This behavior is based on the hopelessly naïve, not to mention ill-informed, belief that science always progresses somehow, and that sooner or later certainly someone will stumble over something interesting. But even if that happened – even if someone found a piece of the puzzle – at this point we wouldn’t notice, because today any drop of genuine theoretical progress would drown in an ocean of “healthy speculation”.

> And so, what we have here in the foundation of physics is a plain failure of the scientific method. All these wrong predictions should have taught physicists that just because they can write down equations for something does not mean this math is a scientifically promising hypothesis. String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn’t mean this math describes reality.

[lidHanteyk]

And it's just as stupid-sounding when it comes from somebody who has training and skills. Stupider-sounding, even.

It's not like theoretical physicists have a perfect track record. Prior to modern thermodynamics, there were so many failed attempts to explain heat. Remember caloric? Phlogiston? The ultraviolet catastrophe? There have been periods of time where physics advances rapidly, and periods of time where there are long stalls and no good ideas.

Additionally, it's pretty common for a theoretical idea to turn out to be extremely practical, just in a way that wasn't obvious at first. In the past 300 years, we've gone from complex numbers being "imaginary" to being standard components of quantum mechanics. While people of Cardano's time might say that square roots of real numbers aren't real, we today understand that QM requires complex amplitudes instead of classical probabilities.

It's easy to point to where people can find interesting stuff to study. Einstein's work stemmed from noting that existing models of physics did not completely predict the solar system's behavior. Similarly, when we look at what these string theorists are aiming at, they turn out to have very reasonable idiosyncratic observations that they are trying to explain. They're examining the vacuum catastrophe, they're examining the Big Bang, they're examining quantum electronics. These are the places where our theories aren't able to explain every observation coherently; these are where we need new explanations.

[thanatropism]

The orthodoxy says that "science is the scientific method", but I think we need to decouple core science as a humanitarian enterprise from the academic adventure.

We should be able to deeply criticize science to its very core without losing a rhetoric that defends vaccines and so on.