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The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature
of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous
departure from the scientific method. Many of today’s theorists — chief
among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis
— appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful
or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them.
Ellis and Silk accused these theorists of “moving the goalposts” of
science and blurring the line between physics and pseudoscience. “The
imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is
testable,” Ellis and Silk wrote, thereby disqualifying most of the
leading theories of the past 40 years. “Only then can we defend science
from attack.”
full:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151216-physicists-and-philosophers-debate-the-boundaries-of-science/
From the January Harper's (behind a paywall):
"Before the Big Bang: The physics and metaphysics of the creation of the
universe"
By Alan Lightman
The quantum cosmologists are aware of the vast philosophical and
theological reverberations of their work. As Hawking says in A Brief
History of Time, many people believe that God, while permitting the
universe to evolve according to fixed laws of nature, was uniquely
responsible for winding up the clock at the beginning and choosing how
to set it in motion. Hawking’s own theory provides an explanation for
how the universe might have wound itself up — his method of calculating
the early snapshots of the universe has no dependence on initial
conditions or boundaries or anything outside the universe itself. The
icy rules of quantum physics are completely sufficient. “What place,
then, for a creator?” asks Hawking. Lawrence Krauss, a physicist,
reaches a similar conclusion in his book A Universe from Nothing, in
which he argues that advances in quantum cosmology show that God is
irrelevant at best.
One would expect most quantum cosmologists to be atheists, like the
majority of scientists. But Don Page, a leading quantum cosmologist at
the University of Alberta, is also an evangelical Christian. Page is a
master computationalist. When he and I were fellow graduate students in
physics at Caltech, he used to quietly take out a fine-point pen
whenever confronted with a difficult physics problem. Without flinching
or pausing, he scribbled one equation after another in a dense tangle of
mathematics until he arrived at the answer. Although he has collaborated
with Hawking on major papers, Page parts ways with him on the subject of
God. He recently told me, “As a Christian, I think there is a being
outside the universe that created the universe and caused all things.
God is the true creator. All of the universe is caused by God.” In a
guest column on Carroll’s blog (which is called The Preposterous
Universe), Page sounds simultaneously like a scientist and a theist:
One might think that adding the hypothesis that the world (all that
exists) includes God would make the theory for the entire world more
complex, but it is not obvious that is the case, since it might be that
God is even simpler than the universe, so that one would get a simpler
explanation starting with God than starting with just the universe.
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