Mathematician Peter Woit, on Not Even Wrong, points out that John Gribbin is “author of the 2009 multiverse-promotional effort In Search of the Multiverse. I don’t know how Gleiser treats this, but Gribbin emphasizes the multiverse as new progress in science… Gribbin and his multiverse mania for untestable theories provides strong ammunition for Horgan, since it’s the sort of thing he was warning about.”
In an email to me about a decade ago, author John Gribbin asked me if a theory had any confirmed falsifiable predictions. When these were supplied, he didn’t reply and showed no further interest. Catering to prejudice, or entering popular (media aware) controversy, is more profitable and rewarding for the “free media” than getting into backwaters. The rise of popular quack physics like the multiverse is an infiltration tactic in the physics lobby, a tactic first employed successfully by communist infiltrators of socialist parties. The reason for infiltration tactics is that an an honest call to turn physics into a religion or quackery is unpopular, just as an honest call for Communism leads to defeat in the elections. So proponents are “forced” into duplicity and sailing under false flags:
“In 1950 all the Communist Party’s 100 candidates were defeated, including the two Communist MPs who had sat in the 1945 Parliament. This heightened the determination of the Communists to control the Labour Party by indirect means since they could not establish themselves in Parliament under their own name.”
– Woodrow Wyatt, What’s left of the Labour Party?, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1977, p43.
Wyatt, himself one of the authors of the 1947 Keep Left book, goes on to document how religious style bigotry by the hard-left control of the Labour Party (and eventually of the British Government) was indirectly established when in 1956 the Kremlin’s Khrushchev-fan, Mr Frank Cousins, became the general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, which held the vote swing in the Labour Party Conference; in 1969 Cousins was succeeded by the even more militant, eye-to-eye with Brezhnev, Jack Jones, leading to Britain’s strife, strikes, IMF bailout (due to national bankrupcy), winter of discontent, etc. in the 1970s. Our point is, indirect infiltration and subversion tactics are used by fanatics to overcome direct barriers.
It’s like the Maginot Line, the French fortifications supposedly guaranteeing peace for all time by physically preventing German tanks from entering France. The problem was, the tanks went around it. Similarly, Nagasaki actually had bomb shelters for 70,000 which survived the nuclear explosion intact with 100% survival rate for the 400 people in them, but because it was a surprise attack, nobody took notice of the single B-29 in the sky and most people were not in the shelters. The point we’re driving at is that if you pass a law or build a barrier, you must expect that opponents will try to seek a way around it. In other words, you must deliberately focus on seeking out the weakest link in your defense, and strengthening it, or else the enemy will exploit it. It’s not good enough to try to close down this argument by using propaganda which promotes the strongest links in your defense to try to stifle criticisms, or to label critics of mainstream defense propaganda as paranoid. What usually gets dismissed as paranoid is actually often valid criticism. To assume that the enemy will not exploit weaknesses in your defense is not anti-paranoia, but rather is insanity.
If in science you have a law saying “Law 1: Falsifiable predictions only”, and if opponents of the law can’t directly overturn it to make science a religion by “honest” (i.e. open, fairly stated) democracy means, they simply agitate to add an exception that effectively reverses the law: “Law 1, exception 1: theories that are incomplete need not make falsifiable predictions”.
Similarly, the Soviet Union dismissed critics who claimed that it was an unequal, unjust, non-communist dictatorship of hatred by claiming that once it had disposed of all its enemies like capitalists, it would then be able to become the promised utopia. Because it was never able to achieve its aims, it had the perfect excuse to remain a fascist-type dictatorship of censorship and enforced poverty.
Quantum field theory 