Re: [asa] Re: Anthropic Principle, "proof," and "explanations"

There is nothing in the articles from Tegmark that I have read that
constitutes a legitimate scientific test. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Furthermore, his writings on Level IV mutliverses sound more religious than
many sermons I hear on Sunday, and I attend a conservative church. I seem to
recall some possible tests using wormholes--which themselves have never been
detected. If so, there is little difference between using a wormhole to
detect another universe than proposing to find an angel, and then ask the
angel if God really exists. The distinction that "it is in principle,
testable" has limitations in its power to denote a theory as scientific.

On Dec 7, 2007 11:45 PM, PvM <pvm.pandas@gmail.com> wrote:

> Actually there are some predictions made about multiverses although
> with our present technology we may not be able to resolve the issue in
> a satisfactory manner. That's an important distinction.
>
> http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/multiverse.html
>
> <quote>
> I survey physics theories involving parallel universes, which form a
> natural four-level hierarchy of multiverses allowing progressively
> greater diversity.
>
> * Level I: A generic prediction of inflation is an infinite
> ergodic universe, which contains Hubble volumes realizing all initial
> conditions - including an identical copy of you about 10^{10^29}
> meters away.
> * Level II: In chaotic inflation, other thermalized regions may
> have different effective physical constants, dimensionality and
> particle content.
> * Level III: In unitary quantum mechanics, other branches of the
> wavefunction add nothing qualitatively new, which is ironic given that
> this level has historically been the most controversial.
> * Level IV: Other mathematical structures give different
> fundamental equations of physics.
>
> The key question is not whether parallel universes exist (Level I is
> the uncontroversial cosmological concordance model), but how many
> levels there are. I discuss how multiverse models can be falsified and
> argue that there is a severe "measure problem" that must be solved to
> make testable predictions at levels II-IV.
> </quote>
>
>
> What is more likely? We have no way to measure the likelihood of God
> and Ockham is no help here since multiverses follows from a single
> scientific theory.
>
> What is more scientific? I do not see any way to address this. In fact
> God seems to be a far more complex explanation. One may very well
> conclude similarly that God is a convenient 'explanation' for
> religious people who rule out natural origins of the universe for
> obvious reasons.
>
>
>
> On Dec 7, 2007 10:33 AM, Ted Davis <TDavis@messiah.edu> wrote:
> > However, IMO the multiverse hypothesis is equally unscientific -- at
> least,
> > not yet. No more scientific than ID or creation ex nihilo. It makes no
> > predictions about our universe that can be tested, and it is actually a
> far
> > more complex hypothesis than the idea of one God creating one world in
> one
> > specific way. That is, it fails Ockham's razor quite drastically, by
> > multiplying entities way beyond necessity, so far so indeed that we
> can't
> > even count them. It functions, IMO, as a kind of "god-of-the-gaps" for
> the
> > non-theist, who rules out creation for obvious reasons but still needs
> an
> > infinite (or quasi-infinite) entity to fill in the gaps in the
> explanation.
>
> To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
> "unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
>

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Sat Dec 8 08:07:40 2007