And finally, if you are really asking whether our universe has been programmed by a superior intelligence, that’s just a badly concealed form of religion. Since this hypothesis is untestable inside the supposed simulation, it’s not scientific. This is not to say it is in conflict with science. You can believe it, if you want to. But believing in an omnipotent Programmer is not science—it’s tech-bro monotheism. And without that Programmer, the simulation hypothesis is just a modern-day version of the 18th century clockwork universe, a sign of our limited imagination more than anything else.She is right, but with this attitude, she is not going to get tenure anywhere good.
It’s a similar story with all those copies of yourself in parallel worlds. You can believe that they exist, all right. This belief is not in conflict with science and it is surely an entertaining speculation. But there is no way you can ever test whether your copies exist, therefore their existence is not a scientific hypothesis.
Most worryingly, this confusion of religion and science does not come from science journalists; it comes directly from the practitioners in my field. Many of my colleagues have become careless in separating belief from fact. They speak of existence without stopping to ask what it means for something to exist in the first place. They confuse postulates with conclusions and mathematics with reality. They don’t know what it means to explain something in scientific terms, and they no longer shy away from hypotheses that are untestable even in principle.
Deepak Chopra wrote a letter to NY Times in response to Sean M. Carroll's op-ed. He mixes quantum mechanics and consciousness in a way that drives physicists nuts. They regard him as a mystic crackpot whose ideas should be classified as religion. But he is not really as bad as Carroll. It would be easier to test Chopra's ideas than Carroll's many-worlds nonsense.
Carroll is an example of a physicist confusing religion and science.
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