Homocentric Universe

PHYSICS IS JUST A PROOF OF HUME:

On the Equality of All Things by Carlo Rovelli review – a physicist’s guide to life, the universe and everything: Near-mystical musings from a scientist who believes we are on the brink of a revolution in understanding ourselves (Farrah Jarral, 30 Sep 2026, The Guardian)

It’s enough to give you vertigo, and Rovelli admits it. “The resulting image of reality is haunting. Every fact is only a fact relative to something else, and even the fact that a fact is relative to something else is itself relative. There is no ground floor.” Yet, in contrast to the bleakness that can shroud such unflinching scientific accounts of the universe, Rovelli’s telling validates our messy, subjective human experiences. “None of this prevents us from describing the world from one perspective. Ours.”

HOMOCENTRISM IS INESCAPABLE:

But is it science?: Theoretical physicists who say the multiverse exists set a dangerous precedent: science based on zero empirical evidence (Jim Baggott, 10/07/19, Aeon)

There is no agreed criterion to distinguish science from pseudoscience, or just plain ordinary bullshit, opening the door to all manner of metaphysics masquerading as science. This is ‘post-empirical’ science, where truth no longer matters, and it is potentially very dangerous.

It’s not difficult to find recent examples. On 8 June 2019, the front cover of New Scientist magazine boldly declared that we’re ‘Inside the Mirrorverse’. Its editors bid us ‘Welcome to the parallel reality that’s hiding in plain sight’.

How you react to such headlines likely depends on your familiarity not only with aspects of modern physics, but also with the sensationalist tendencies of much of the popular-science media. Needless to say, the feature in question is rather less sensational than its headline suggests. It’s about the puzzling difference in the average time that subatomic particles called neutrons will freely undergo radioactive decay, depending on the experimental technique used to measure this – a story unlikely to pique the interests of more than a handful of New Scientist’s readers.

But, as so often happens these days, a few physicists have suggested that this is a problem with ‘a very natural explanation’. They claim that the neutrons are actually flitting between parallel universes. They admit that the chances of proving this are ‘low’, or even ‘zero’, but it doesn’t really matter. When it comes to grabbing attention, inviting that all-important click, or purchase, speculative metaphysics wins hands down.

It would be easy to lay the blame for this at the feet of science journalists or popular-science writers. But it seems that the scientists themselves (and their PR departments) are equally culpable. The New Scientist feature is concerned with the work of Leah Broussard at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. As far as I can tell, Broussard is engaged in some perfectly respectable experimental research on the properties of neutrons. But she betrays the nature of the game that’s being played when she says: ‘Theorists are very good at evading the traps that experimentalists leave for them. You’ll always find someone who’s happy to keep the idea alive.’

The ‘mirrorverse’ is just one more in a long line of so-called multiverse theories. These theories are based on the notion that our Universe is not unique, that there exists a large number of other universes that somehow sit alongside or parallel to our own. For example, in the so-called Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are universes containing our parallel selves, identical to us but for their different experiences of quantum physics. These theories are attractive to some few theoretical physicists and philosophers, but there is absolutely no empirical evidence for them. And, as it seems we can’t ever experience these other universes, there will never be any evidence for them. As Broussard explained, these theories are sufficiently slippery to duck any kind of challenge that experimentalists might try to throw at them, and there’s always someone happy to keep the idea alive.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

New Carlo Rovelli book challenges science’s understanding of reality and the universe (Adam Frank, 9/14/26, NPR)

Rovelli dedicates considerable space to a view of quantum mechanics called the relational interpretation. When quantum physics appeared in the early 20th century, it came as a shock to the physicists who were creating it. In the 250 years since Newton introduced his famous laws of motion, physicists had come to believe their equations described a reality that was entirely independent of human action or interpretation. The “stuff” described by Newton’s laws, and the laws themselves existed “out there” in the “Ultimate Reality” that the book on my shelf points to. But in quantum mechanics it became difficult to speak of objects having properties before those properties were measured. This is the source of the famous Schrodinger’s Cat paradox where a cat in a box can be both dead and alive before the box is opened and a measurement is made.

For some physicists, it was so important to get that Ultimate Reality back that they invented interpretations of quantum physics that claimed the universe splits into separate parallel versions of itself when the box is opened. Rovelli thinks these attempts are nonsense. For him, the lesson of quantum mechanics is relationality. Everything exists only in relation to everything else. That means the properties of a system – any object – are always relational properties. There is no way to see them from an ultimate or absolute perspective because there are no ultimate or absolute perspectives. And in the absence of an ultimate perspective the power of physics to ultimately “explain everything” also falls apart.

THE BEATING OF OUR HEARTS IS THE ONLY SOUND:

The great silence: why haven’t we found any aliens yet? (Adam Kirsch, 11 Aug 2026, The Guardian)

During a visit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1950, Enrico Fermi, one of the architects of the Manhattan Project, was having lunch with other physicists when the conversation turned to flying saucers. At one point during the discussion, Fermi blurted out: “Where is everybody?” – or, as another participant remembered it, “Don’t you ever wonder where everybody is?” If aliens exist, in other words, why have we never encountered them?

The episode has become famous, marking the moment when extraterrestrial life went from a theme for philosophical speculation to a serious scientific problem. For centuries, people had wondered whether life exists on the moon or Mars, but they accepted that we would never know for certain, since making contact with another planet was impossible. By the 1950s, those limits no longer seemed so fixed. In addition to space flight, researchers were developing tools to detect the radio signals that reach us from stars many light years away. These developments were still in their infancy, but it was already clear that humanity was no longer bound to Earth the way it always had been.

This expansion of human horizons raised an awkward question. Since the 16th century, when Copernicus showed that Earth is not the centre of the cosmos, modern science had learned to embrace the idea that there is nothing unique about our planet. And if Earth is statistically average, there is no reason why it should be the only home of intelligent life. Given the age of the universe – about 13.8bn years, according to current estimates – it should be full of species with technology far more advanced than what we have come up with in a few thousand years of civilisation. Yet we can’t find any trace of them.

That was the case in 1950, and it is still the case today, despite well-publicised claims to the contrary. Since 2017, when the New York Times reported that the US military possessed video recordings of pilots’ encounters with UFOs, aliens have gone mainstream. The House of Representatives even held hearings on what are now called unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) as a potential national security threat. But the blurry and inconclusive “Pentagon UFO videos” have not been followed by any clear images of nonhuman craft, just as earlier waves of UFO sightings never produced any unambiguous evidence.

For most scientists, the real mystery about aliens isn’t their presence but their stubborn absence.

IT’S A HOMOCENTRIC UNIVERSE:

Objective reality only exists because other people do: We experience only one small slice of the ruliad. What’s the ruliad? Stephen Wolfram explains. (Stephen Wolfram, The Big Think)