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After reading a few blog posts and interviews with Peter Woit, I think I can say he's definitely a little bit "fringe" as far as physics is concerned. He does t

After reading a few blog posts and interviews with Peter Woit, I think I can say he's definitely a little bit "fringe" as far as physics is concerned. He does try to stick to the science (of sorts) but using some philosophizing he makes critiques like here: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/why-string-theory-is-still-not-even-wrong/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/why-string-... "This is however a straw man argument: the problem with such research programs isn't that of direct testability, but that there is no indirect evidence for them, nor any plausible way of getting any." Sure, we might not have a plausible way of testing it today but that doesn't mean there won't be in the future. 2000 years ago people were on the right track that the Earth is round but couldn't "test it" but going around it. I'm sure the prospect of going round the earth back then seemed as distant as testing a multiverse today. He also calls other reputable physicists "pseudo-science", which is aggressive and over the top. All in all, he doesn't seem to present a logical critique beyond "it's not testable", all while using circular logic that "not being testable" is sometimes beneficial: "Many ideas that are "not even wrong", in the sense of having no way to test them, can still be fruitful, for instance by opening up avenues of investigation that will lead to something conventionally testable."

h0l0cube 7y ago
> 2000 years ago people were on the right track that the Earth is round but couldn't "test it" but going around it. Fun fact: Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth and the tilt of its axis around ~200 BC, by comparing the angles of shadows at two locations. Perhaps not definite proof, but certainly a test of an assumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes This is not to disagree with the thrust of your argument, however :)
- raspasov 7y ago
  I was aware of this one :).
tsimionescu 7y ago
> Sure, we might not have a plausible way of testing it today but that doesn't mean there won't be in the future. 2000 years ago people were on the right track that the Earth is round but couldn't "test it" but going around it. I'm sure the prospect of going round the earth back then seemed as distant as testing a multiverse today. But there lies the problem: people 2000 years ago had a very clear idea of how they could test their round earth idea, it just wasn't technically feasible. Even worse for your point, they did quickly come up with experiments and proved pretty definitively the shape and general size of the earth, based on ships going past the horizon and others. There have been many physical ideas with no hope of testability throughout the ages, and many of these have turned out wrong. Aristotle believed, and physicists agreed, that all objects have a natural place which they tend to move to, so apples falls down, but steam rises up. As far as I know, there are not even thought experiments about how we could tell whether there is a multiverse, or for many (but not all) aspects of string theory. This is not an engineering problem (its way out of our league to implement), it's a theoretical physics problem (we don't know whether there is a way to tell, there may very well not be one). It's like the difference between people in ancient Greece imagining a high-speed car, versus building faster-than-light travel.
- raspasov 7y ago
  I am not a physicist, but one can definitely come up with thought experiments about testing the multiverse. One could imagine creating a universe in a lab "from nothing" since there's a hypothesis that the energy of a universe could be zero (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)). Now, we might not be 2000 years but perhaps 20,000 or 20 million years away from coming up with the technology and breakthroughs required to do this. In the grand scheme of things, even 2 billion years is not that much. One big difference with Aristotle's apples, steam ideas, etc is that there's very solid mathematical foundation under string theory/multiverse that to a great extend agrees with existing well tested theories like quantum mechanics and general relativity. That does not make string theory/multiverse true but it at least leaves the possibility open. Aristotle's ideas that turned out definitely wrong were born out of pure philosophizing and were little better than pure fiction.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> 2000 years ago people were on the right track that the Earth is round but couldn't "test it" but going around it. 2,200+ years ago, and while they couldn’t test it by going around it, still, they could test it with a prediction of measurement differences which would be found if it was round and would not be found if it was not, and, as a bonus, whose magnitude would also tell the size of the earth if it was round. Could—and did. The prediction was not untestable, even with the technology of 194 B.C.

h0l0cube 7y ago

> 2000 years ago people were on the right track that the Earth is round but couldn't "test it" but going around it. Fun fact: Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth and the tilt of its axis around ~200 BC, by comparing the angles of shadows at two locations. Perhaps not definite proof, but certainly a test of an assumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes This is not to disagree with the thrust of your argument, however :)

raspasov 7y ago
I was aware of this one :).

tsimionescu 7y ago

> Sure, we might not have a plausible way of testing it today but that doesn't mean there won't be in the future. 2000 years ago people were on the right track that the Earth is round but couldn't "test it" but going around it. I'm sure the prospect of going round the earth back then seemed as distant as testing a multiverse today. But there lies the problem: people 2000 years ago had a very clear idea of how they could test their round earth idea, it just wasn't technically feasible. Even worse for your point, they did quickly come up with experiments and proved pretty definitively the shape and general size of the earth, based on ships going past the horizon and others. There have been many physical ideas with no hope of testability throughout the ages, and many of these have turned out wrong. Aristotle believed, and physicists agreed, that all objects have a natural place which they tend to move to, so apples falls down, but steam rises up. As far as I know, there are not even thought experiments about how we could tell whether there is a multiverse, or for many (but not all) aspects of string theory. This is not an engineering problem (its way out of our league to implement), it's a theoretical physics problem (we don't know whether there is a way to tell, there may very well not be one). It's like the difference between people in ancient Greece imagining a high-speed car, versus building faster-than-light travel.

raspasov 7y ago
I am not a physicist, but one can definitely come up with thought experiments about testing the multiverse. One could imagine creating a universe in a lab "from nothing" since there's a hypothesis that the energy of a universe could be zero (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)). Now, we might not be 2000 years but perhaps 20,000 or 20 million years away from coming up with the technology and breakthroughs required to do this. In the grand scheme of things, even 2 billion years is not that much. One big difference with Aristotle's apples, steam ideas, etc is that there's very solid mathematical foundation under string theory/multiverse that to a great extend agrees with existing well tested theories like quantum mechanics and general relativity. That does not make string theory/multiverse true but it at least leaves the possibility open. Aristotle's ideas that turned out definitely wrong were born out of pure philosophizing and were little better than pure fiction.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> 2000 years ago people were on the right track that the Earth is round but couldn't "test it" but going around it. 2,200+ years ago, and while they couldn’t test it by going around it, still, they could test it with a prediction of measurement differences which would be found if it was round and would not be found if it was not, and, as a bonus, whose magnitude would also tell the size of the earth if it was round. Could—and did. The prediction was not untestable, even with the technology of 194 B.C.