I, crackpot? Not compared to this.

I'm sure all three of my readers are terribly bored by my political rantings of late, so I'm going try ranting in a different direction here. And I mean ranting.

It's due to this mind-blowing article in the New York Times. (I was tipped by this clear-thinking blog. Seconded by a sensible neuro-scientist.) I'll wait while you read it. Try not to let incredulity overwhelm you. And don't let your eyes glaze over. That will only cheat you out of the full wonky experience.

Okay. How was it for you? Did you follow it? Understand it? Believe it? Probably not and good for you.

Unfortunately, this is a fine example of the state of theoretical physics. (If I didn't know that they were dead serious, I'd cry “Sokal hoax!”) And people call me a crackpot for thinking that this and this are better answers. Really, based on that article, I think that the gatekeepers of high-level physics are now fully prepared to don their Voodoo headdresses and drop a LSD tab for old-time sake. I say that merely to be funny. I have nothing against these folks personally. I'm sure they are accomplished thinkers and are merely attempting to build 11-dimensional houses of cards on top of the worst possible logical and epistemological foundations. This stuff is ridiculous. Needless indeterminism abounds. When is enough enough for these people? When are they going stop and say, “Hmm... that's a bit far-fetched - maybe we should rethink this”? After reading about possibly being a random protuberance and/or a disembodied brain, I'm thinking it's past time for re-examination of cosmology in its current cosmogonic guise.

Not only do we all need to yell 'shenanigans' on this, we need to get them to follow the trail back through string theory, 11 dimensions, spacetime foam, all the way to Einstein's Special (more than one three-dimensional space? No!) and General (space bends? Not!) Relativity. That's where this whole thing got off got off on the wrong foot. That's when theoretical physics became the piquant wackadoo nutjobbery that we all get to enjoy today.

More on this later. I'll let you all recover first.