Avi Loeb

So the strange situation that we are living in right now is, on the one hand, practitioners of science are refusing to deal with some questions or to make some statements.

Not only that, they will ban talks about these statements in their conference and remove a sentence from the end of a paper that raises the possibility because the data seems a bit strange, okay?

They would remove that.

So you have these people

At the same time, you have another community of people making speculations like crazy and not making any prediction that is testable.

That is allowed because they are smart people that are doing mathematical gymnastics.

but yet their theory is not testable.

They would admit that it... I asked one of them, string theorist, I said, if tomorrow we do this experiment and test your statement, because he made a statement about the universe.

I said, so suppose we do observations and we find the universe is not behaving the way you expected.

Would that rule out string theory?

He said, no, string theory will always be right.

It's my conjecture of what the interpretation of string theory is that might be proven wrong, but it's just one interpretation.

So he can immediately shift and continue to work on string theory in a different version of it.

It's unfalsifiable.

It's a logic problem.

So my point is, if you have a model that cannot be falsified, what is the difference between that model and a religious cult?

That's a very good point.

But that's how they treat it.

They do treat it like religion.

I remember when I was younger, the religious community of Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, the Lubavitchers, believed that the Lubavitcher rabbi will come as a messiah.