Brian Greene on Infinite Universes

New interview:

Brian Greene on Theory of Everything, Big Bang, UFO, Conciseness, Multiverse [INTERVIEW]

In just under an hour, Brian Greene questions whether the Big Bang actually began time, explores a multiverse filled with copies of us, argues that billion-year-old aliens wouldn’t bother with Earth, confronts the hard problem of consciousness — hinting particles may carry “proto-awareness” — and defends string theory as our best yet unproven bridge between gravity and quantum physics, complete with tantalising talk of hidden dimensions.

He is good at explaining many things, but he is mainly famous for overhyping string theory and the multiverse.

I say this is wrong:

[Q] Quantum mechanics is for you 18:41 local or non-local?

[A]Quantum mechanics as far as we can tell is non-local. And this is one of the deep insights that came 18:49 from the work of John Bell working in the 1960s A name that most people have 18:54 never heard of Everybody knows Einstein They should because it was John Bell 18:59 almost as a hobby He was working at CERN particle accelerator was working on 19:04 other things but in his spare time like to think about the foundations of quantum mechanics and in his work he was 19:11 able to reveal a test to determine whether or not certain ideas that 19:17 Einstein had that the universe was local what you do here only affects things here and that it was real that particles 19:24 always have definite features he came up with a test of Einstein's view nobody 19:29 thought you could test Einstein's view It was just metaphysics ideas Go away Einstein You're just thinking philosophy 19:36 We're physicists Which is basically what people said toward the latter decades of Einstein's life But John Bell said "No 19:43 no no This is not just philosophy This is physics We can actually test whether 19:49 these things Einstein was saying are true." And when the tests were done they to most people's satisfaction revealed 19:57 that Einstein's view that the universe was local That that was not true That the universe is non-local In a sense 20:04 what you do here can in a very specific quantum way be connected to something 20:10 that happens over there

No, that was not a deep insight. Bell only disproved a classical model, and said nothing about quantum nonlocality.

Those nonlocal connections are just correlations. Nothing has a nonlocal causal effect. QM is only nonlocal in the sense that if you model it by a classical theory of hidden variables, than that theory must be nonlocal. But QM itself is local.

Here is more foolishness.

[Q] Infinitive universes Do you believe that it could exist

[A]i think the 6:48 possibility of infinite universes is an idea worth having in your toolkit 6:55 because a it naturally emerges from a variety of ideas from the inflationary 7:00 theory to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics So it may be true and if it is true it completely changes 7:09 the landscape of reality And so for me to sit here and imagine there might be a 7:14 copy of me out there in the cosmos infinite copy of us If the universe is 7:19 infinitely big then you can pretty much prove mathematically that there'd be infinite copies of us out there one 7:26 after another after another. Sometimes having exactly the same conversations sometimes having slightly different 7:32 conversations. That's a crazy idea.

No, he cannot prove multiple copies of himself. That is nonsense. There could be infinitely many universes, with all others not having life. Nobody would know what is going on in those other universes.

At least he admits that string theory has no evidence, even though he is the most famous promoter of the theory.