collapsing the waveform on quantum physics

Recently, the editors at Discover thought it was a good idea to spice up an interview with Roger Penrose by using a loud, splashy title which states that the famous physicist thinks that the modern achievements in his discipline might as well be junked. However, as is often the case with articles that have loud, splashy titles, that’s not the conclusion that could be drawn from the content itself. Instead, Penrose is unhappy that many of the predictions about the quantum world and cosmology involving string theory and extra dimensions are not possible to test and seem to have no practical applications to today’s big problems. While you could disagree with his opinion, it’s pretty obvious that he’s not throwing his fellow physicists under the rhetorical bus here.

As odd as it may seem, I can understand why the editors decided to pursue the manufactroversy route when they got wind of the fact that one of the biggest names in physics has doubts about cutting edge paradigms. When we consider a recent uptick in papers which try to challenge the ideas of dark energy or play around with the rules of general relativity to make more sense of some of the complex phenomena obscured by an amazingly dense flood of creative math, we could say that some academics are getting frustrated. The same goes for readers of popular science blogs who seem to have a visceral distaste for the “dark” terms. It’s not a problem that the universe is a complex beast. The big issue here is that some of the complexity raised by our theoretical work with quantum mechanics and cosmological ideas seems to be artificial. For example, we can try to count the number of identifiable universes in the cosmos but we have no way of proving they exist or how this has any bearing on real world cosmology.

Maybe this is the flip side of years of magazine articles on bleeding edge science based on giving a lot of very creative leeway with quotes from scientists still working on complex problems. By now, we’ve heard of almost everything from holographic universes, to theories about quantum mechanics that put our very existence into question and everything in between. Where’s the comprehensive framework for the universe? How does what happens in the quantum realm have any bearing on the macro world? And where have theoreticians taken a set of formulas too far and ended up with a set of predictions which make no sense and can’t be confirmed in any way, shape or form? How do we parse the applicable science from dead-end navel gazing? This is what Roger Penrose was asking in the interview and what a lot of us should be asking next time we see a bizarre paper suggesting a bizarre universal framework which seems to have no empirical application behind it.