Fake Physics

(About the usual multiverse bunk going around) The usual hype machine is at work this week, with the usual mechanism:

University press offices and grant agencies put out irresponsible hype about the work of one their faculty or grantees. In this case, it’s Taming the multiverse: Stephen Hawking’s final theory about the big bang from Cambridge, and Stephen Hawking’s last paper, co-authored with ERC grantee Thomas Hertog, proposes a new cosmological theory, in which universe is less complex and finite from the European Research Council.

This gets distributed via services that either just reprint such press releases (phys.orgor EurekAlert! in this case), or rewrite with added hype (Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory About Our Universe Has Just Been Published, And It Will Melt Your Brain).

Journalists then write stories based on these press releases, which appear all over the place (see here, here, here, here, here and here for example). At this point, whatever was in the original press releases that tried to add caveats or stick to reality gets abandoned, and a completely misleading headline gets slapped on at a final level of the hype machine.

Normally I try and defend the journalists involved, feeling that the most irresponsible behavior is coming from the scientists themselves. In this case, Hertog has a lot to answer for, but it’s not Hawking’s fault since he’s dead. Any semi-competent journalist should have realized that this is not news: the same stories had already been written and published a month ago, and then conclusively debunked in many places (see here, here and here for instance).

This is rather depressing, making one feel that there’s no way to fight this kind of bad science, in the face of determined efforts to promote fake physics to the public. It’s one thing for journalists to be misled by a new variant on an old debunked story, but that they’re getting misled again by exactly the same story is a new development.

The thing is - mainstream media always used to follow fads like this when they thought the origin of the story was genuine. If they deem a source “trusted” they simply transmit the news coming from it. According to Isaacson’s book Einstein, starting from 1931 and for two decades, Einstein kept announcing, theory after another, that he finally solved the unified theory puzzle in physics, when in fact he hadn’t (theories fell apart after a few years of scrutiny), see pg

MM happily reported all of them, because the source was Einstein. That is nothing new.

The reason MM is under the gun lately is that there is a diverse non-mainstream alternative media now that hold them to account.

However, MM got worse on some aspects, worse than its historic average even, because of its overly corporatized structure IMO. The way they trumpet war nowadays is truly stomach churning. I dont think Vietnam War had this much support in mainstream media, but the way CNN pushes for war these days, you know, the network who made made it big during first Iraq War, truly has no parallels in history. They really want to sell this thing, just so they can have a correspondent over there with that Middle East background where bombs are going off, the sky is lightning up, creating an awesome visual spectacle. Would Walter Cronkite ever go for that shit? I doubt it. But these buckers somehow do. It all became a big show.

So same old same old in some aspects, worse in others.