"Wacky" Science

There's a piece up at The American Thinker which levels the ever-popular accusation that science has abandoned falsifiability, and is spinning theories merely because scientists think they sound cool. Dr. Jonathan David Carson writes:

The problem that scientists face is that they can often build a myriad of mathematical models that all describe the physical systems they are investigating. They may have no way to choose one among all the others and may never have a way. If we're lucky, they will choose the one that seems most beautiful to them. If we are unlucky, they will choose the one that seems most likely to unsettle the public, as when Scientific American says that each of us has an infinite number of alter egos far away in space, that we really exist in only two spatial dimensions and gravity is an illusion, and so on. None of these bizarre assertions is remotely falsifiable.

The scientific establishment uses falsifiability the way postmodernists use deconstructionism: selectively, to tear down the ideas of their enemies but not to apply to their own ideas. The deconstructionist will happily deconstruct your ideas, but never his own. You say something about economic growth or Islamofascism, and he wants to talk metaphysics. Just don't bring up metaphysics when he condemns Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. We can't believe in God because religion is unfalsifiable. We can believe in an infinite number of other universes from which no information can ever reach us. Western governments literally spend tens of billions of dollars annually in support of such lunacy.

The problem with this thesis is, at least when we're talking about the sciences*, these wacky theories face one of two fates. Either get tested against the real world, or if no one can think of a way to test them, they get discarded as irrelevant.

Remember, a theory is a model which attempts to wrap up some aspect of the universe in a neat, compact package. Newton's laws wrap up a dizzying array of the way objects move about in one equation. Newton didn't decide F=mA simply because he liked those three letters, and Einstein didn't decide on E=mc² because he thought mc³ was too high and mc¹ was too low.

Some of the wacky ideas science has come up with result when the more commonsense ideas fail to work. Quantum mechanics came about because the best models of the 19^th Century predicted that an oven hot enough to cook food should bathe the user in deadly ultraviolet or X-ray radiation every time he opens the door. Since that didn't happen, scientists got to work trying out different models to account for the discrepancy.

When we get to matters like the infinite number of alter egos far away in space, I think Dr. Carson is taking liberties with what is being said. Scientific American is not saying that each of us definitely has an infinite number of alter egos out in space, it's saying that if the universe is in fact infinite, it would follow that every possible arrangement of matter -- no matter how unlikely –- in any finite volume of space repeats an infinite number of times. After all, if you multiply any probability, no matter how small, by infinity, the result is infinite.

Now this is a bizarre result, but it follows perfectly from the math, and from the starting assumptions, any of which could be wrong.

• Firstly, the universe need not be infinite in extent. Infinity is, after all, pretty darn big, and there are lots of options short of that. All the article cited was saying is, from where we sit, using the best observations we have available, it looks infinite. It seems to be, at the very least, considerably larger than the piece we can see from our telescopes.
• Secondly, the article assumed that if the entire universe is chopped into pieces the size of what we can observe, every possible different arrangement of atoms in that volume of space – from completely empty to as many as we can cram in – will show up. The thing is, although the numbers involved are huge, there is only a finite number of ways to arrange atoms in a particular volume of space. In an infinite universe, sooner or later, you have to start repeating combinations. But maybe every possible arrangement doesn't show up at the frequency the odds would allow for. Maybe some arrangements, like the arrangement in this portion of space that is assembled into Earth with its six billion inhabitants, simply don't repeat. Not an infinite number of times, not even once.
• Thirdly, the article assumed that you can duplicate everything that matters about a piece of the universe by copying every particle, its position, its momentum, its energy level, and so on in another area of space. So that if you took all the molecules that make up a rock and arrange other molecules of the right type in a perfect copy of the arrangement that exists in that rock, you will have created an identical rock somewhere else. More to the point, the article assumed the same thing applied to a rose, or a dog or cat, or to you or me. If there is some component to my being – call it a "soul" – which can't be captured in a list of the particles that I'm built from, the argument breaks down.

Furthermore, while this is a bizarre result, and while it may or may not be true, since any possible alter egos we may have are unimaginably far away, their existence is not likely to matter to us in the least. Our chance of ever running into any of them is so small, these alter egos might as well not exist.

All this woolgathering aside, though, many of the wackiest ideas in science, including "dark matter" and "dark energy", are being proposed because what we know exists isn't working out. Just like the 19^th century oven which failed to emit the x-rays theory said it should, we have 20^th and 21^st century galaxies that are spinning too fast to stay together if the only sources of gravity are what we can see. Conclusion: there has to be a lot of matter there we can't see. Furthermore, it has to be distributed in certain ways and not in others, or the gravitational pull they create would be in different directions. We can also rule out a lot of possibilities because they would leave signs of their presence. Super sized black holes, for instance, would leave traces of their existence.

So we have this mysterious stuff. Right now, the most science can say about it is, here's a list of what this stuff isn't. We can make guesses about what it is, but then we have to see what the side-effects of introducing that amount of any mysterious new substance would be. We can even try various revisions to how we think gravity works – say, proposing a correction that is only noticeable at certain distances. But then what does that do to the history of the universe? Does it still expand at the rate we see in telescopes? Do gas clouds still come together to form solar systems and planets?

Each proposed change in any model of how some part of the universe works has effects on all the other models. If, instead of saying that the universe is expanding, we assume light is "slowing down" or losing energy, that has implications in chemistry, nuclear physics, and indeed, throughout the universe. We can imagine light "slowing down" to address one question, but then we have to see what it does to other questions. What are the side effects?

Questions like that are subjected to vigorous falsification, and most of them wind up being falsified when they fail to account for the data in someone else's field of expertise. (That's why we've seen such a dizzying array of notions about how the universe is put together. Someone keeps coming up with facts that aren't compatible with the new theory.)

But in all fairness, Scientific American is not saying we all have an infinite number of alter egos because the authors like the concept of having lots of twin brothers. It's saying that if we decide to go with the notion of an infinite universe, an infinite number of [unreachable] alter egos will be one of the logical consequences of that idea. (If you don't like it, come up with something else – but it'd better explain the data at least as well as what we've got.)

So why is this an issue?

Four sentences from the end of his piece we have the bona contention:

We can't believe in God because religion is unfalsifiable. We can believe in an infinite number of other universes from which no information can ever reach us.

I wonder. Does Dr. Carson want God to be falsifiable?

The infinite number of other universes, at least as described in the Scientific American article, is falsifiable. All you need to do is produce some data to show that our universe has an edge. If you can do that, our universe is no longer infinite, and the main premise of that article collapses.

What possible data can Dr. Carson cite, or what possible observation can he propose, that would prove God nonexistent? I'm not sure that's even a valid question to ask about God, but it's the question you have to ask if you want to bring God under the umbrella of science.

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* I won't comment on deconstructionism, because I can't find an explanation of it that both makes sense and doesn't sound like it was published in The Onion.