An attack on modern science (The limitations of science)

by David Turell , Tuesday, January 06, 2015, 01:00 (3392 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Tuesday, January 06, 2015, 01:23

dhw: There was a review in yesterday's Sunday Times of a book which should appeal to many of us: THE SINGULAR UNIVERSE AND THE REALITY OF TIME by Roberto Mangabeira Unger (a philosopher) and Lee Smolin (a physicist).-The article is behind a paywall, but the opening paragraphs are startlingly like Smolin's book I have mentioned here, The Trouble With Physics. The Times article begins:-http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/culture/books/non_fiction/article1501444.ece-> 
> dhw: Apparently they make “three statements that, if true, overturn most of contemporary physics. The statements are: time is real and therefore there are no unchanging physical laws; there is only one universe; and mathematics is of strictly limited use in explaining the cosmos.” Unger talks of “the descent of science into allegory, circulatory, special pleading and factless speculation.” Smolin talks of “crass contemporary determinism” and the “babble of neuroscientists who claim they have disproved free will and dismiss the self as an illusion.”-The reviews of the books are fascinating. The book appears to show all the holes in current theories. Google Smolin and you will find, as I have previous mentioned, he is a proponent of quantum-loop gravity theory, and thinks Strings are dead in the water.-For some of Smolin's thinking:-"Horgan: Some leading physicists, such as Tegmark, Susskind, and Greene, espouse multiverse theories plus the anthropic principle as a kind of final framework for cosmology. Comment?-Smolin: This is a sleigh of hand by which they hope to convert an explanatory failure into an explanatory success. If we don't understand the values the fundamental constants take in our universe, just presume our universe is a member of an infinite and unobservable ensemble of universes each with randomly chosen parameters. Our universe has the values it does because those make it hospitable to life.-"There is so much wrong with this as a scientific hypothesis. As I have explained in detail in three of my books and several papers, it is hard to see how it could make any falsifiable predictions for doable experiments. Claims to the contrary are fallacious, as I and others have explained in detail. I won't impose the details on your readers but just mention that these criticisms have not been answered.-"What we have to do is to propose mechanisms by which the laws and constants may have evolved which imply falsifiable predictions by which they can be checked. I have proposed two: cosmological natural selection and the principle of precedence."-To get the full flavor read the entire article in Sci Am:-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2015/01/04/troublemaker-lee-smolin-questions-if-physics-laws-are-timeless/-For further insight look at the ecstatic reviews on Amazon of the book mentioned at first.-http://www.amazon.com/Singular-Universe-Reality-Time-Philosophy/dp/1107074061/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420507299&sr=8-1&keywords=The+singular+universe-"- the universe has a history; even the laws of this early state could have been different; they could evolve; the current structure is a reflection of a process, and processes occur over time.-" But this is problem, and the authors strongly develop it: time - the time with a continuous flow and a real history of unique moments, each moment reflective of all previous moments - has been stripped from physics. The cause, the history, the symptoms and the cure for this is the subject of the book. Some symptoms: There is the current ubiquitous proclaiming of the "multiverse" - per Unger, a theoretical failure exalted to a triumph. There is Special and General Relativity with their jointly construed "block" universe, where all time - past, present, future - is frozen as a vast space - a conception with no ability to extend to and include those first moments of the universe. There is the arbitrariness of the standard model(s) of particle physics, with multiple dimensionless constants and where multiple choices for values must be made to tune a model to reality. Of the causes: one lies in a deep misunderstanding and wrong placement of the role of mathematics in our study of the real world, and Unger's chapter-long discussion of its true role was to me worth the price of admission by itself." (my bold)