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Anthropixia is an intellectual illness to the extent that let's physicists off the hook---gives them an excuse, that is, to shirk their job as explainers.
Discouraged theorists are particularly subject to this disorder. Those at the end of their productive years, who have failed to find the ToE they looked for, are apt to take it as a way out. In effect, they throw up their hands and say there's NO explanation, we looked! there just isn't any---so you young people can stop trying: get over it![/color]
But theorists in middle life, if they find their line of research is making little headway, or they are short on new ideas, can be subject to anthropixia as well.
This disease is especially dangerous today because we are in a period when String research is bogged down and dwindling. String suffered a blow in 2003 when Susskind (a leader) accepted that there are something like 10500 essentially different formulations and began to pretend that all these different versions EXIST as different worlds. In effect, he captulated:
Our physics is our physics because that is just the way it is.
What I mean by anthropixia is this GIVING UP on the job of explaining predictively---either "that is how God made it, my son" or "this is just how it is, there are millions of other universes but we probably couldn't live in most of them."
At this point significant progress is being made in the fields of Quantum Gravity and Cosmology in determining details and explaining the history of THIS universe: quantum gravity is renormalizable after all (Reuter has succeeded where Weinberg failed in 1979), the expansion probably began with a bounce (Bojowald), a NON-EXOTIC inflation mechanism has been found which takes care of the "horizon problem". Acceleration is beginning to be understood without an exotic "dark energy". Non-string geometric realizations of the standard model (and perhaps gravity as well) seem to be emerging from various people's garages (Connes, Barrett, Lisi) iffy as that sounds.
this means that there is a potential revolution: one can expect the conventional exotic inflation scenarios of 1980-2000 to take a hit. Old Guard like Guth, Vilenkin, Linde are probably not going to like it. There may be resistance. One can expect the associated multiversal scenarios with their "inflaton" fields and "bubbles" to take a hit. It will help this revolution succeed if we can reduce the amount of noise and distraction connected with the outbreak of Anthropixia.
the trouble is, the fantasy of multiple universes works as IMAGINATION CANDY. People get high on it and they get hooked on imagining all sorts of garbage---colliding universes afloat in extra dimensions, inflaton fields blowing immense bubbles. At one point these visions may have been justified because nobody had an alternative solution to the horizon puzzle, or the flatness and structure puzzles, or any other way for quantizing gravity and resolving the cosmological singularity. But now we have alternative ways to do these things. The baroque visions have been cut off from their root rationales, but they still have a hold on the popular imagination.
And they still provide the waning generation with a novocaine for failure.
The multiple realities of Anthropixia provide a welcome excuse: "Why we didn't find a ToE?"----"there isn't any, so get over it!"---"this is just how things are!"
Discouraged theorists are particularly subject to this disorder. Those at the end of their productive years, who have failed to find the ToE they looked for, are apt to take it as a way out. In effect, they throw up their hands and say there's NO explanation, we looked! there just isn't any---so you young people can stop trying: get over it![/color]
But theorists in middle life, if they find their line of research is making little headway, or they are short on new ideas, can be subject to anthropixia as well.
This disease is especially dangerous today because we are in a period when String research is bogged down and dwindling. String suffered a blow in 2003 when Susskind (a leader) accepted that there are something like 10500 essentially different formulations and began to pretend that all these different versions EXIST as different worlds. In effect, he captulated:
Our physics is our physics because that is just the way it is.
What I mean by anthropixia is this GIVING UP on the job of explaining predictively---either "that is how God made it, my son" or "this is just how it is, there are millions of other universes but we probably couldn't live in most of them."
At this point significant progress is being made in the fields of Quantum Gravity and Cosmology in determining details and explaining the history of THIS universe: quantum gravity is renormalizable after all (Reuter has succeeded where Weinberg failed in 1979), the expansion probably began with a bounce (Bojowald), a NON-EXOTIC inflation mechanism has been found which takes care of the "horizon problem". Acceleration is beginning to be understood without an exotic "dark energy". Non-string geometric realizations of the standard model (and perhaps gravity as well) seem to be emerging from various people's garages (Connes, Barrett, Lisi) iffy as that sounds.
this means that there is a potential revolution: one can expect the conventional exotic inflation scenarios of 1980-2000 to take a hit. Old Guard like Guth, Vilenkin, Linde are probably not going to like it. There may be resistance. One can expect the associated multiversal scenarios with their "inflaton" fields and "bubbles" to take a hit. It will help this revolution succeed if we can reduce the amount of noise and distraction connected with the outbreak of Anthropixia.
the trouble is, the fantasy of multiple universes works as IMAGINATION CANDY. People get high on it and they get hooked on imagining all sorts of garbage---colliding universes afloat in extra dimensions, inflaton fields blowing immense bubbles. At one point these visions may have been justified because nobody had an alternative solution to the horizon puzzle, or the flatness and structure puzzles, or any other way for quantizing gravity and resolving the cosmological singularity. But now we have alternative ways to do these things. The baroque visions have been cut off from their root rationales, but they still have a hold on the popular imagination.
And they still provide the waning generation with a novocaine for failure.
The multiple realities of Anthropixia provide a welcome excuse: "Why we didn't find a ToE?"----"there isn't any, so get over it!"---"this is just how things are!"
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