Comment on Multiverse

• BrainInABox@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The one I replied too. The habit of immediately and smugly going “It can’t be falsified and is therefore the same as the tooth-fairy!” to any ideas that class with their intuition is very much a well worn cliche of reddit style pseudo-intellectual “I fucking love science” types. Bonus points if it is falsifiable.

  And yes, falsifiablity is a part of science, but this idea that science means going “if you don’t have a definite experiment that you can perform right now then the idea is stupid and wrong and you’re an idiot for even talking about it” is massively reductive at best and flat out wrong at worst, and if these people applied it in all cases - rather than just to the ones that their gut feeling is against - they’d be throwing out a huge amount of ideas that are most definitely science.

  I mean jesus, imagine how arrogant you would have to be to discard all of the very detailed work extremely talented scientists have done in on Quantum Foundations as being no different to believing in the tooth fairy.

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  • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I see. Thank you for your more explanatory reply. I must not hang out in the right circles, because I haven’t seen that enough to see it as a cliché. Perhaps the commenter was not dismissing multiverse theory because of a gut reaction, but because they’re fed up themselves with popular and un-falsifiable speculation being treated as science.

    The incredible thing with these weird results is they are falsifiable - this “spooky action at a distance” that famous pre-redditor Albert dismissed as nonsense. Bell’s inequality, that lies at the heart of the trouble, is experimentally demonstrable.

    But there’s a gap between that science and the interpretations of it. And maybe coming from they popular end, it’s easy to see the wilder speculations as nothing more than unprovable imagination.

    But in the end, after re-writing much of my comment, I have to concede the point. I feel you’ve made a bit of a straw man to attack, but I agree a thing can seem unapproachable scientifically - non-falsifiable - but still be valid science. Even in this area, IIRC, part of the debate over the main quantum mechanics interpretations is quite whether they can be falsified or experimentally differentiated: and that itself takes time and logic and mathematics… it takes science!

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    • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I must not hang out in the right circles, because I haven’t seen that enough to see it as a cliché.

      Possibly. Give it time I suppose

      Perhaps the commenter was not dismissing multiverse theory because of a gut reaction, but because they’re fed up themselves with popular and un-falsifiable speculation being treated as science.

      Perhaps, but you’d have a hard time tying to convince Princeton University that the the paper they gave Hugh Everett a PhD in Physics for is in fact “not science” and is in fact more like “the boogey man or the tooth fairy.” Or trying to convince the scientific community that people like Sean Carroll and David Deutsch and all the other physicists doing work in Quantum Foundations from a many worlds perspective aren’t scientists.

      this “spooky action at a distance” that famous pre-redditor Albert dismissed as nonsense.

      I’m sorry, but this is just straight up not true; Einstein absolutely did not dismiss entanglement as nonsense

      But there’s a gap between that science and the interpretations of it.

      Different “interpretations” (really they are different theories) absolutely have experimental differences. Some aren’t performable today, but if that is your criteria, then the Higgs Boson was like the tooth fairy for decades. But even beyond that some are performable, and have been performed, we have done test for dynamical collapse interpretations. Had they come back positive they would have falsified Many Worlds, ie. they are literally a form of falsification.

      And maybe coming from they popular end, it’s easy to see the wilder speculations as nothing more than unprovable imagination.

      And many worlds is not one of those wilder speculations that is nothing more than unprovable imaginations.

      that itself takes time and logic and mathematics… it takes science!

      Indeed, which means not dismissing and idea as nonsense without understanding it.

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