Did the Mathematicians Kill Theoretical Astrophysics?

Did Mathematics Destroy Astrophysics?

Ever since I read Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" (four times) in sixth grade I had wanted to be an astronomer.  I yearned to understand life, nature, how we got here, by exploring the infinite cosmos. But life had other plans for me.  The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King during the spring of my sophomore year knocked that goal off course.  As a black student at Harvard and a product of the Civil Rights Movement, astronomy seemed too effete, too irrelevant to the needs of my community in distress.  I became a historian instead, seeking answers to life's existential questions in the narrative of human behavior.

To be honest, there were times when I regretted that decision.  But those feelings of nostalgia dissolved over the years as I watched astronomers and theoretical astrophysicists enter a realm of fantasy no less detached from the real world than religious belief.    String, superstring theory, the multiverse hypotheses were mathematical formulations that answered fundamental questions about the nature of the universe. But they were theologies, disguised as science.  Advanced mathematics was their "ecclesiastical Latin,"  used to keep their congregants in awe of, but unable to penetrate their foundational theories.  

It was in picking up a copy of Professor Lee Smolin's book, The Problem with Physics, (a book I read five times), that expression was given to my unease regarding the direction astrophysics had taken in recent decades.  Prof. Smolin, who founded the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada has since expanded on these ideas with two new books, Time Reborn and The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, written in collaboration with philosopher of Science, Roberto Mangabeira Unger , who teachs at Harvard Law School.  

These books are readable, but also depressing, in suggesting that for the past several decades, so little progress has been made in the search for a "theory of everything", which would unify quantum mechanics and the macro-world in which we live, because some of the best scientific minds have been hijacked by theories that, like religion, are unprovable by scientific experimentation. These theories, though glamorous, gained a powerful hold over university physics' departments, leading the most promising students to either sign on to them or risk having no future at all in the field.

If you want to know what's wrong with theories of multiverses, infinite universes, and the multiplicity of superstring theories that declare the world is made up of any number of hidden dimensions, please read Prof. Smolin for the details.  The basic issues are not, however, hard to grasp. Scientists had been stuck for decades in their search for a principle that unified the laws governing the world we see, with those of subatomic particles.  The behavior of atoms was determined by quantum mechanics, laws that seemed nonsensical in the observable world. How could light be both a wave and a particle?  How was it possible for an atomic particle to be at two places at one time, a process known as quantum entanglement.  These weirdnesses could not be dismissed, however preposterous they might seem, because the actual functioning of modern technology from radios to cellphones were based on them.

The mathematicians entered the confusion and began propounding numerical theories.  But the problem as Smolin points out in his work is the fact that the human brain can devise an infinite number of mathematical abstractions. Just because mathematical formulas can be constructed to explain natural phenomena, does not mean that these solutions are applicable to what happens in the real world.   As a consequence, mathematics gave us an infinite number of so-called real worlds. It is a beautiful notion that caught the public's imagination.  Who wouldn't want to believe so soothing a theology as that every bad decision we made in life was reversed in a different universe?

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