This week's Hype

The latest New Scientist has a much larger dose of M-theory/multiverse hype than I in one place have seen in a while. There is a four-part series on M-theory (here, here, here and here) by Mike Duff. It tells the story of the progress of modern physics in the last century, according to the dominant ideology: general relativity Kaluza-Klein extra dimensions, super-symmetry, Superstrings, branes, ends in the apotheosis of M-theory more than fifteen years ago. For the current state of affairs, Duff describes his "M-theory" predictions about the real world (that 4 qubits 31 different ways can be entangled, something discussed here). He ends with the M-theory multiverse and the following comments on whether this can ever be tested:

So is M-theory the final theory of everything? With rival attempts falsifiable predictions are hard to come by. Some generic functions such as supersymmetry or extra dimensions can be displayed on the collider experiments or in astrophysical observations, but the diversity of the possibilities offered by the multiverse allows precise predictions difficult.

Are all the laws of nature that we set theory of fundamental theory perceive? Or are some mere accidents? The jury is still out.

In my opinion, many of the important issues remain unresolved for quite some time. Finding a theory of everything is perhaps the most ambitious scientific undertaking in history. No one said that it would be easy.

Here he makes clear that, at least while he is still around and enjoy academic notoriety because of M-theory, there is no danger that it will be faced with a kind of test can not. He answered the critics of M-theory by claiming that the failures not important. It is the dominant paradigm, and as such will reign until someone comes up with a different theory of everything that is not a failure.

Elsewhere in the magazine there is a fawning article on the recent Bousso-Susskind paper (see here):

TWO of the strangest ideas in modern physics – that the Cosmos continually in parallel universes in which every conceivable outcome of each event happens splits, and understanding that our universe is part of a larger multiverse is-have are grouped in a single theory. This has lost a bizarre but fundamental problem in Cosmology and physics circles buzzing with excitement, as well as some bewilderment.

No critics of the idea were by the writer, with the discussion about blogs described as:

The paper has caused a flurry of excitement on Physics blogs and in the wider physics community. "It's a very interesting document that a lot of new ideas," says Don page, a theoretical physicist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and author of the blog Cosmic Variance, thinks that the idea has some merit. "I have a confused skeptic a believer for the time being," he wrote on his blog. "I realized that these ideas fit very well with other ideas that I've been thinking about myself!"

One way or the other of Lubos "them on crack" to take on the subject was missed.

Finally, the meaning of it all summarized in an editorial that States that Bousso-Susskind finally pulls the plug on religion and replaces it with the Science:

Cosmologists can now begin to take God seriously, precisely because they him (or her) can explain away.