Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics – Scientific American Blog Network

Ever since the early days of science, finding an unlikely coincidence prompted an urge to explain, a motivation to search for the hidden reason behind it. One modern example: the laws of physics appear to be finely tuned to permit the existence of intelligent beings who can discover those laws a coincidence that demands explanation.

With the advent of the multiverse, this has changed. As unlikely as a coincidence may appear, in the zillions of universes that compose the multiverse, it will exist somewhere. And if the coincidence seems to favor the emergence of complex structures, life or consciousness, we shouldn t even be surprised to find ourselves in a universe that allows us to exist in the first place. But this anthropic reasoning in turn implies that we can’t predict anything anymore. There is no obvious guiding principle for the CERN physicists searching for new particles. And there is no fundamental law to be discovered behind the accidental properties of the universe.

Quite different but not less dangerous is the other challenge the uglyverse.  According to theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, modern physics has been led astray by its bias for beauty, giving rise to mathematically elegant, speculative fantasies without any contact to experiment. Physics has been lost in math, she argues. But then, what physicists call beauty are structures and symmetries. If we can t rely on such concepts anymore, the difference between comprehension and a mere fit to experimental data will be blurred. 

via blogs.scientificamerican.com

I vote for uglyverse, but it’s not entirely ugly.