I wouldn’t count parallel universes and time travel out quite yet.
Time travel .. In which direction?
I would count out time travel, with absolute certainty.
".....the scientific search for a "theory of everything" is totally misguided, at least to the extent that anyone imagines it will account for the higher levels of creation. Even an apprentice ... knows full well that that will never happen. At best, it will account for the lowest rung, and even then, only for people who don't know about the rest of the ladder, which necessarily has a lowest rung. In other words, it will be a satisfying theory for simpleminded flatlanders and lizards who crawl on their bellies. It will have no relevance to Upright Man, except to demonstrate the "relative unity" of that particular plane of reality. But we already know that each rung in the ladder necessarily has relative unity as a result of God's involution, so we won't really have learned anything. ...." ~ Robert Godwin
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Life, the multiverse and [theory of] everything
Written by: Mark Vernon | Appears in: Issue 44 Posted by: TPM May 18, 2009
[.........Huge Snip...........]
"...Evidence is what eventually settles science. But in the meantime, one should also be wary of sleights of hand. The multiverse is a hypothesis for which there is no evidence, and perhaps can never be any evidence. It is only since 1998 that it has leapt off the blackboards of a few physicists doing esoteric mathematics and lodged itself in the popular imagination. As is the way with popular science, it is easy to move from speculating that there might have been more than one big bang to proceeding on the basis that there has been more than one big bang.
So, I’d like to give the last word to another physicist, Paul Davies. He is the author of many widely read and highly readable books on cosmology and its ramifications, his latest being on the fine-tuning: The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life? He is a multiverse sceptic, preferring another explanation of the fine-tuning. Very roughly, he suspects that the universe, its laws, and the presence of life somehow all emerged together. He calls it a “self-explaining universe”, that is without any external deity; though containing within it what he terms “the life principle”. Again, it is a speculative proposition: “there are many details to be worked out,” he admits.
But what is interesting about Davies is that he believes the evidence of fine-tuning is taking science in a direction that collapses the traditional distinction between physics and metaphysics: “I do take life, mind and purpose seriously, and I concede that the universe at least appears to be designed with a high level of ingenuity.”
He is quite aware that some scientists will already feel his approach is “crypto-religious”, even though he explicitly makes no appeal to non-natural processes. He retorts that all physicists are committed to some form of ideology. In another New York Times opinion piece, published in 2007, Davies argued that believing the universe is governed by laws is a form of faith too, faith in the existence and efficacy of laws. It is a faith that is well justified by evidence. But, as yet, science itself cannot account for these laws – where they come from, why they work. Davies concluded: “Until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.”
Davies’ piece itself produced a slew of letters. In the present climate, it is a provocative opinion to express. And yet, the implication is that a testable theory of the laws of the universe, let alone the multiverse, isn’t going to appear any time soon. Until then at least, in some scientists’ mind, physics will inevitably rub shoulders with metaphysics."