The Multiverse

Yesterday's critique of the Ask Ethan blog was such fun, we should do another. It may seem tedious, but someone has to ridicule the charlatans. The ContraKrugman podcast is run by two economists who refute Paul Krugman - the left's premiere priest of economics - week after week. Their persistence in refuting a false prophet is commendable. Perhaps this blog will begin a weekly recap of all Ethan's nonsense (he seems to post almost daily). Someone needs to be doing it. The only real way to stop the lying liars is to ridicule them consistently and aggressively until they are too ashamed or marginalized to continue. For now, I'll just look at his most recent post.

One of the most solid logical arguments is the reductio ad absurdum. The premise is simple. If your argument leads inevitably to absurdity, it must be wrong. Ethan would like to turn that logic principle on it's head. The absurd must be true. Normal people might interpret this a little different. If cosmic inflation leads to the multiverse with "no way out", it must be an argument against cosmic inflation.

If this is the idea of the Multiverse, I can understand your skepticism at the notion that we could somehow know whether it does or doesn’t exist. After all, physics and astronomy are sciences that rely on measurable, experimental, or otherwise observational confirmation. If we are looking for evidence of something that exists outside of our visible Universe and leaves no trace within it, it seems that the idea of a Multiverse is fundamentally untestable.

But there are all sorts of things that we cannot observe that we know must be true. Decades before we directly detected gravitational waves, we knew that they must exist, because we observed their effects. Binary pulsars — spinning neutron stars orbiting around one another — were observed to have their revolutionary periods shorten. Something must be carrying energy away, and that thing was consistent with the predictions of gravitational waves.

The leading argument depends on the existence of neutron stars, which are an epic fiasco of scientific imagination run amok. But Nobel prizes have already been awarded, so the scientific community can't simply walk that one back. And, as we can see here, if you admit one absurdity, you leave the door open for about anything to follow. It remains to be seen how far things will have to get before the scientific community will refute research that has been awarded the Nobel Prize.