In The Huffington Post's "Pseudophysics: The New High Priesthood," Amir Aczel writes about the prevalance of physicists who are taking speculation about the world, like the existence of a multiverse, and preaching them as gospel truth to the public:
But let's now look at the very vocal minority of theoreticians who, without a shred of experimental evidence to support their claims, are now telling us what, in their view, nature is truly made of. They do it through articles in popular magazines and through too many YouTube videos, but mostly through recent books aimed at the average reader....
But the most irritating book of them all, and the best example of the new pseudophysics, has nothing to do with the multiverse. It is about where our single, known universe might have come from. In his 2012 book A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, the physicist Lawrence M. Krauss informs us that the universe came out of nothing. Sheer nothing. Nada. Zip. How does he know? Every leading theoretical physicist I have posed this question to, including the American Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg and the Dutch Nobel Laureate Gerard 't Hooft, have told me definitively that we have no idea where our universe came from: We can't tell what happened before, or even at, the Big Bang. If Krauss' screed is not pseudoscience, I don't know what is. If I am going to believe him, I could just as well subscribe to the medieval "sciences" of alchemy or astrology. Krauss gives no evidence for his carelessly cobbled-together conjecture, but he makes up for it by his aggressive tone. Studying the book carefully, I found that Krauss implies that the source of his hypothesis is a research paper by the cosmologist Alex Vilenkin. At my request, Vilenkin sent me a copy of his article, and -- not surprisingly -- I found that what he says differs markedly from Krauss' conclusion. Vilenkin's universe does not at all start from "nothingness." It begins from a bubble of a preexisting piece of a very condensed kind of spacetime called a "quantum foam..."
There is absolutely nothing wrong with speculation in physics -- and the correct theories are eventually confirmed by experiment and observation. But it is definitely wrong -- misleading and dishonest -- to preach to an unsuspecting public, mostly uninitiated in science, mere hypotheses as if they were confirmed facts. This isn't science, and it isn't honest scientific reporting. Physicists should be the purveyors of facts, not dreams.
Amir Aczel certainly has a point about how physicists like Lawrence M. Krauss have preyed on the public fascination with scientific discovery by teaching them theories with little foundation as if they were gospel, but Aczel doesn't touch on one of the most disappointing elements of the new high priesthood: Their inability to talk philosophically about their subjects. In A Universe From Nothing, Krauss has no dialogue with the philosophical treatment of nothingness and even goes as far to say that philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas couldn't have reasoned about nothing because they lack modern physics. That would be fine if he showed how they went wrong; yet, it is Krauss making the mistakes: he even assumes that a universe of nothing comes with the laws of quantum mechanics. That certainly isn't nothing. Krauss' arrogant attitudes towards philosophy are repeated across the high priesthood. Neil deGrasse Tyson, a preacher within this high priesthood, has gone as far as to say that philosophy is essentially futile.
Ignorance of philosophy is more than an ignorance of the contributions that Plato, Kant and others have made to our understanding of the world. Ignorance of philosophy is an ignorance of the very underpinnings of what we call 'science' today. Science just didn't come out of nothing fully formed, like Athena coming out from Zeus' brow already clad in armor. Instead, it emerged as a gradual process of philosophers coming to a certain understanding of the world, which was informed by a array of different beliefs like the manifestation of divine revelation in the natural world, empiricism, and even the institutions of the university system. To really understand science, we have to understand how it came to be, and all of those factors are assumed away by the scientism's high priesthood. They would like to reject questions about metaphysics as nonsense, but they are themselves participants is an activity itself contingent upon a certain metaphysical understanding of the world.
Scientism's high priesthood also results in the public having a warped view about what science actually is. In shows like MythBusters and on Facebook pages like "I Fucking Love Science," we see science simply showcased as a simple process of accumulating data and then getting truth at the end. That perspective blinds the public to the importance of paradigms and the importance of speculation to our understanding of the world. Rather than actually getting people to pay attention to how the sausage is made, it simply creates enthusiasm about those small slices of science which are prima facie fascinating. "Cyanide and Happiness" well lampooned this ascpect of scientism in a single cartoon:
Overall, the high priests of scientism have not only warped the public understanding of science, but they have warped how science should fit in with the other disciplines we use to study the world. As Amir Aczel pointed out, they sell a faulty notion of science to the public in which speculative notions like the multiverse are sold as science. That is not all they do, though, and by refusing to think philosophically about their subjects, scientists like Krauss ignore that science itself is part of a larger tradition of understanding the world, and thereby warp our image of what science should be.
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