Article

Against Falsifiability

9 April 2015


Nearly two years after the publication of Farewell to Reality, the debate about ‘fairy-tale’ physics rages on. Highly speculative and arguably non-scientific papers continue to be published on aspects of superstring theory and the multiverse. Peter Woit recently drew attention on his blog to a Templeton Foundation grant of almost $900,000 to Stanford University theorists Leonard Susskind, Andre Linde and Stephen Shenker, on the subject of ‘Inflation, the Multiverse and Holography’ (see here). I think we can agree that’s a lot of money.

Now, I didn’t expect Farewell to change anything – its purpose was simply to raise awareness of some of the problems with contemporary theoretical physics and engage the debate. However, I confess to being a little disappointed to see that arguments against ‘fairy-tale’ physics still tend to be based on Austrian philosopher Karl Popper’s criterion of falsifiability, which states that a theory is not considered to be scientific unless it makes predictions that can in principle be falsified.

READ FULL ARTICLE