Science of Absurdity

As science moves further away from objectivity, it moves deeper into absurdity. String Theory now claims that its mathematical-only basis has been tested - mathematically. The new proposition, that the universe we know is merely a projection from a separate flat, 2D universe, is riddled with ever more problems than it solves. (See update, below)

To start, in two dimensions there is no mass, and thus the only energy which could exist would be fields, which would have nothing to act upon. Further, assuming that "projection" is a proper interpretation of the theory, projection as we know it always produces fewer dimensions, not more. Even 3D holograms are visual deceptions, so calling this theory holographic is to call it deceptive. And our experience is local to our three dimensional universe, not to a flat plane. If anything, our experience is of three dimensions plus our qualia, which are not physical lumps.

But to back away at least one level from this, mathematic models which are not realizable in order to be checked and double checked independently and at will, are outside the realm of scientific knowledge. String Theory certainly falls into that arena and a great many physicists so admit. Mathematics can model physical reality where physical reality is consistent; there is no reason to think that it can predict existence merely because equations balance.

Prediction and verification are very much a part of the requirement that scientific propositions be independent and objective knowledge. This has always meant that the physical relationship being observed would be proposed to have replicable characteristics, based on inductive observation. Those characteristics could be used to deduce an experiment which would produce results which are sub-categories of the characteristics which were observed. Further, proposing a falsification technique would enable a wrong theory to be eliminated.

The observation part of science started to crumble under quantum observations which were not replicable, but which were probabilistic, displacing Newtonian physics as the sole predictor of physical behavior. This extended to particle physics, which can find only new particles, never a falsification. And it extends to evolutionary theory, which predicts anything and everything and nothing, simultaneously, and is based on paleo events which are not testable (including paleo-projections using DNA).

Yet each of these is positioned as if it were a path to some sort of unification theory. Evolution, for example, is already called the unifying theory of biology, despite its complete inability to deduce any biological outcomes, and its uselessness in modern experiment-based biology. (Not to mention its inability even to prove itself, and its abdication of the abiogenesis issue, agency, qualia, etc.)

Science has stepped into the land of science-fantasy. It is no longer self-correcting since the fantasies cannot be disproved because they cannot be independently tested in the physical domain. And that, in turn, means that science will be funded to produce ever bigger fantasies. The ultimate value of each of these “non-knowledges” is claimed to be in terms of technology, at least in the case of the CERN accelerator, where the science admittedly has no known societal value, but the technology of the accelerator itself might. But string theory has no correlate benefits. And evolution is of value, not to biology, but to ideology (which is why evolution alone is a legally protected dogma).

When scientism rears up, you are looking at an unobjective worshipper, not an aficionado of objective, replicable knowledge.

UPDATE:
The media representation of the holographic finding is not accurate (surprise). There is a better summary at Nature, which includes this:

“They have numerically confirmed, perhaps for the first time, something we were fairly sure had to be true, but was still a conjecture — namely that the thermodynamics of certain black holes can be reproduced from a lower-dimensional universe,” says Leonard Susskind, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University in California who was among the first theoreticians to explore the idea of holographic universes.

Neither of the model universes explored by the Japanese team resembles our own, Maldacena notes. The cosmos with a black hole has ten dimensions, with eight of them forming an eight-dimensional sphere. The lower-dimensional, gravity-free one has but a single dimension, and its menagerie of quantum particles resembles a group of idealized springs, or harmonic oscillators, attached to one another.

Nevertheless, says Maldacena, the numerical proof that these two seemingly disparate worlds are actually identical gives hope that the gravitational properties of our Universe can one day be explained by a simpler cosmos purely in terms of quantum theory.

Got that? A ten dimensional universe with eight forming an eight-dimensional sphere? And a single dimension universe (a line with no width?) full of springs hooked together.

Could the reason that these things are found to be mathematically identical be that they are rationally trivial? After all, mathematically trivial things actually are all equal... to zero. So any trivial solution is equal to any other trivial solution, trivially.