This week’s New Scientist has an article by Jim Baggott and Daniel Cossins entitled Beyond Experiment: Why the scientific method may be old hat, which deals with the recent controversy over attempts to excuse the failure of string theory by invoking the multiverse. The article (unfortunately behind a paywall) does a good job of describing the nature of the controversy: what do you do when it becomes clear your theory can’t be tested? Do you follow the conventional scientific norms, give up on it and work on something else, or do you try and find some kind of excuse, even if it means abandoning those norms?
Much of the article deals with the issues raised at the recent Munich conference (discussed here). Two of those quoted (Dawid and Gross) are not multiverse partisans, instead argue that the motivations that got people interested in string unification more than 30 years ago are good enough to justify indefinitely pursuing the theory, no matter how bad things look for prospects of connection to experiment. On the other hand:
Their enthusiasm is far from universal, and some physicists are downright alarmed. Woit warns that the need for empirical vindication could be pushed so far into the background as to be invisible. Carlo Rovelli, a theorist at the University of Aix-Marseille in France, believes that this scenario has already come to pass. Rovelli … argues that the last thing we need is a system that legitimises failed theories. “A theory is interesting when it teaches us something new about the real world,” he says. “Not when it becomes a house of cards that delivers nothing but university positions.”
On the question of the string theory multiverse as science, those gathered at the Munich conference were pretty uniformly hostile. As a proponent of this, the article quotes only one person, who wasn’t there:
Sean Carroll, a theorist at the Caltech Institute of Technology at Pasadena and a leading advocate of the multiverse, insists that if anyone is being unscientific, it is those physicists who seek to enforce outmoded philosophical principles and impossibly high standards. “People support these theories because they offer the best chance of providing a useful account of the data we actually do collect here in our universe.”
I’m not sure how the string theory multiverse provides an account of data we have collected that is “useful”, except in the sense of “useful to those who don’t want to give up on string theory.”
Carroll has explained his views in more detail here, arguing that falsifiability is an idea that needs to be retired, to be replaced by “empiricism”. “Empiricism” seems to mean “ability to account for the data”, with “the multiverse did it” an acceptable way to account for data, even if not falsifiable. He’ll be giving a talk on this at the American Astronomical Society meeting in San Diego this summer, with abstract:
A number of theories in contemporary physics and cosmology place an emphasis on features that are hard, and arguably impossible, to test. These include the cosmological multiverse as well as some approaches to quantum gravity. Worries have been raised that these models attempt to sidestep the purportedly crucial principle of falsifiability. Proponents of these theories sometimes suggest that we are seeing a new approach to science, while opponents fear that we are abandoning science altogether. I will argue that in fact these theories are straightforwardly scientific and can be evaluated in absolutely conventional ways, based on empiricism, abduction (inference to the best explanation), and Bayesian reasoning. The integrity of science remains intact.
Carroll’s argument seems to be that the conventional understanding of how science works that we teach students and use to explain the power of science has always been wrong. Falsifiability by experiment isn’t necessary, instead, what is the “absolutely conventional” way to do science is “empiricism, abduction (inference to the best explanation), and Bayesian reasoning”. I’d never heard of abduction as a basis of science before. If you believe Wikipedia, this goes back to Charles Sanders Peirce, whose view in later years was:
Abduction is guessing. It is “very little hampered” by rules of logic. Even a well-prepared mind’s individual guesses are more frequently wrong than right. But the success of our guesses far exceeds that of random luck and seems born of attunement to nature by instinct (some speak of intuition in such contexts).
As for “Bayesian reasoning”, I would have thought that Polchinski’s Bayesian calculation of an “94% chance” of a multiverse would have conclusively shown the absurdity of that.
