Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

louche lapin

Back in August, Maciej Ceglowski at Idle Words pointed his readership at an article by Max Tegmark that had been published in the May issue of Scientific American. A quick trip to Mad Max's website got me a slightly expanded version which I printed it out and took to read on the local light rail. Hmm, it was a good read. I discussed it with a friend who pointed out that cosmologists and theoretical physicists were, in general, quite mad. But, I liked what I'd read about the four theoretical levels of multiple universes:

1. regions beyond our cosmic horizon—same laws of physics, different initial conditions
2. other post-inflation bubbles—some fundamental equations of physics, but perhaps different constants, particles, and dimensionality
3. the many worlds of quantum physics—same as level 2
4. other mathematical structures—different fundamental equations of physics

I found Tegmark's prose a pleasure to read and found myself following his argument. Here's how he sums up his paper:

We have seen that a common feature of all four multiverse levels is that the simplest and arguably most elegant theory involves parallel universes by default, and that one needs to complicate the theory by adding experimentally unsupported processes and ad hoc postulates (finite space, wavefunction collapse, ontological asymmetry, etc.) to explain away the parallel universes. Our aesthetic judgement therefore comes down to what we find more wasteful and inelegant: many worlds or many words. Perhaps we will gradually get more used to the weird ways of our cosmos, and even find its strangeness to be part of its charm.

I meant to write an entry about it, but then I got busy with other topics, and finally it fell off my to-do stack entirely. Today, hard put to write about something, I turned to Google to find out about multiple universes and, as a result of a link near the top of the heap, I went and read this withering retort by Karl Stephen.

Stephen's starts with:

Tegmark's main argument is that, far from being a shadowy, speculative corner of cosmology, the parallel-universe idea has been increasingly confirmed by recent experiments, and we should get used to it because it appears that it will be around for a while.

I'm not sure I'd agree with him. I thought Tegmark did a thorough job of saying that his popular essay was concerned with a description of current cosmological speculation. But Stephen sees evidence of a greater evil in the article and the popular magazine in which it was published.

Whether or not Tegmark's work constitutes a direct assault on the principle of specified complexity is a discussion for another time. The thing we have established beyond reasonable doubt is that in an article purporting to be about empirical science, Tegmark smuggled in more than a little scientism, a variety of philosophy currently favored by the editors of Scientific American. And to parade philosophy as science is never a good idea.

I cannot really say anything about the content of either paper, other than one amused me in an enjoyable manner, while the other made me wrinkle my brow frowning. Tegmark came across as the fun sort of guy you might meet at a party who has fun describing what he does. Stephens came across as a humorless stick in the mud that you end up avoiding at the chips and drinks table. Then it dawned on me that when I get going on some linguistic rant, I probably come across more acridly than I'd like to imagine, causing people to mentally roll their eyes and wonder what those smiling people are doing over by the big sofa.

Posted by jim at November 6, 2003 07:41 PM | TrackBack