Another positive discussion of the need for falsifiability:-http://www.salvomag.com/new/articles/salvo33/proving-grounded.php-"But today, some scientists want to throw falsifiability overboard. They hope by doing this to protect the concept of the multiverse. Put simply, there is currently no evidence for the existence of any universes other than our own, making the theory of the multiverse unfalsifiable. But if the proposal to dispense with falsifiability were accepted, that would be very convenient for naturalist atheists. They could then argue that any stream of events that occurs in our universe may well have occurred differently in any one of an infinite number of other universes. So no inferences (other than their own) could be drawn from a given state of affairs here in the only world for which we have information. -****-"Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the observed Universe, some researchers called for a change in how theoretical physics is done. They began to argue—explicitly—that if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it need not be tested experimentally, breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical. We disagree. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper argued: a theory must be falsifiable to be scientific. "

dhw: He appears to have made the amazing discovery that words can mean whatever you want them to mean. "Nothing" now means something, or perhaps even everything. The possibilities of this game are endless, but I think I'll stick to cricket, in which all the players know that "in" means in, and "out" means out, and "nought" means nought.
> 
> Romansh: Krauss: "But I don't really give a damn what "nothing" means to philosophers; I care about the "nothing" of reality."-But the 'nothing of reality' is something, quantum potentiality in our space-time. And I thought Krauss likes philosophers. Rom, he can't be defended in his own words.
And like all of us he has no idea what preceded this universe.

Krauss: What drove me to write this book was this discovery that the nature of "nothing" had changed, that we've discovered that "nothing" is almost everything and that it has properties. That to me is an amazing discovery."-dhw: He appears to have made the amazing discovery that words can mean whatever you want them to mean. "Nothing" now means something, or perhaps even everything. The possibilities of this game are endless, but I think I'll stick to cricket, in which all the players know that "in" means in, and "out" means out, and "nought" means nought.-Romansh: Krauss: "But I don't really give a damn what "nothing" means to philosophers; I care about the "nothing" of reality."-You don't have to be a philosopher to dispute the claim that “nothing” means almost everything and has properties. It makes nonsense of language, and if he doesn't give a damn about language, why should we give a damn about the games he plays with it?

Ed Feser takes on Krauss:-http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/09/15760/-"The closest Krauss comes to justifying his thesis is in the following passage:-science is an atheistic enterprise. “My practice as a scientist is atheistic,” the biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote, in 1934. “That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career.” . . . In my more than thirty years as a practicing physicist, I have never heard the word “God” mentioned in a scientific meeting. Belief or nonbelief in God is irrelevant to our understanding of the workings of nature . . .-***-"Of course, the fallacy in the latter “argument” is obvious. That we need make no reference to X in the course of doing Y doesn't prove that X does not exist. We need make no reference to general relativity when studying dentistry, but that doesn't cast doubt on Einstein's discovery. We need make no mention of the physiology of tapeworms when engineering bridges, but that doesn't mean that reports of people having tapeworms are all bogus. Similarly, the fact that scientists need make no reference to God when doing physics, biology, or any other science doesn't prove—or even suggest—that the existence of God is doubtful.-***
"Krauss might reply that, unlike checkers, dentistry, or engineering, science covers all of reality; thus, if God exists, evidence for his existence ought to show up in scientific inquiry.-There are two problems with such a suggestion. First, it begs the question. Second, it isn't true.-"It begs the question because whether science is the only rational means of investigating reality is precisely what is at issue between New Atheists like Krauss and their critics. Traditional philosophical arguments for God's existence begin with what any possible scientific theory must take for granted—such as the thesis that there is a natural world to be studied, and that there are laws governing that world that we might uncover via scientific investigation.-"The arguments claim that, whatever the specific empirical details turn out to be, the facts that there is a world at all and that there are any laws governing it cannot be made sense of unless there is an uncaused cause sustaining that world in being, a cause that exists of absolute necessity rather than merely contingently (as the world itself and the laws that govern it are merely contingent).-***-"Similarly, what science uncovers are, in effect, the “rules” that govern the “game” that is the natural world. Its domain of study is what is internal to the natural order of things. It presupposes that there is such an order, just as the rules of checkers presuppose that there are such things as checkers boards and game pieces. For that very reason, though, science has nothing to say about why there is any natural order or laws in the first place, any more than the rules of checkers tell you why there are any checkers boards or checkers rules in the first place.-"Thus, science cannot answer the question why there is any world at all, or any laws at all. To answer those questions, or even to understand them properly, you must take an intellectual vantage point from outside the world and its laws, and thus outside of science. You need to look to philosophical argument, which goes deeper than anything mere physics can uncover.-***-"You needn't take my word for it. People otherwise sympathetic to views like Krauss's have been very critical of his amateurish attempts at philosophy—including atheist philosopher Massimo Pigliucci and even Krauss's fellow New Atheist Jerry Coyne. Philosopher of physics David Albert (who, unlike Krauss, knows something about both physics and philosophy) has been particularly hard on Krauss.-"His fellow scientists don't need Krauss's advice, but perhaps he would profit if more of them told him to give it a rest already. In particular, he could do with less militancy and mouthing off, and more effort acquiring some actual basic knowledge about the ideas he is criticizing."-Comment: Why I don't read Krauss.

Krauss needs o attend this new conference at Perimeter Institute in Canada. Someone is thinking clearly:-http://blog.physicsworld.com/2015/06/22/why-converge/-"Turok explains that the “large bandwagon” of the last 30 years has not found experimental support. The bandwagon in question is the Standard Model of particle physics established in the 1970s, which, he says, people have been elaborating ever since. “Grand unified theories, supersymmetry, string theory, M-theory, multiverse theory,” he lists. “Each is not particularly radical, but is becoming ever more complex and arbitrary.”-"To illustrate the lack of experimental support for these ideas, Turok describes how many people were hoping string theory would represent a radical development; but since string theory - as currently interpreted - leads to the multiverse, Turok describes it as the “least predictive theory ever”.-"Indeed, experimental support has not been found for other extensions of the Standard Model either. “We have discovered the Higgs and nothing else,” says Turok, “yet the vast majority of theorists had been confidently predicting WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles) and supersymmetric particles…Theorists are walking around in a bit of a stunned silence.” He adds that it could turn out to be right that all sorts of other particles are needed along with the Higgs - but that thought seems to be misguided.-“'My view is that this has been a kind of catastrophe - we've lost our way,” he says. “What we need are ideas as simple and radical as in the start of the 20th century with quantum mechanics.'”-"So what might these ideas look like? Turok explains how observations have shown that the universe is simpler than we ever expected - in contrast to our theories, which are becoming ever more complex. For example, Planck has mapped the CMB (cosmic microwave background) sky and we have found that only two numbers are needed to describe it. The hydrogen atom is another example of something that can be described with a simple model - only three numbers are required.-“'Yet theories about multiverses, et cetera, have all kinds of parameters,” says Turok. “The theories are just way more complicated than the phenomena.'”