Science or imagination?

A large part of the "scientific" research currently being developed, rather than being science, is just an exercise of the imagination of "scientists." It seems that we must consider as scientists all those who do mathematical speculations that have little or nothing to do with reality. And naturally, everything a scientist does is “science”. At least, scientific journals and high-profile media consider it as such.

Let’s look at some very recent examples:

• January 2022: Is the arrow of time moving forward? Or could it also move backwards? Was the Big Bang a critical point from which time began to move simultaneously in both directions, in two symmetrical universes? That is what says the book The Janus Point, by the physicist Julian Barbour, to which the magazine Physics World dedicates a review. Luckily, at least, it does not classify it as science, but as Philosophy, Sociology and Religion.
• March 2022: A Swiss team has built a model to simulate how could be the planets revolving around Alpha Centauri A and B, two of the components of the triple star closest to the sun. They are trying to predict the chemical and mineralogical composition of planets that are not known to exist. In fact, one exoplanet has been detected (and there are two other candidates) around Alpha Centauri C (Proxima Centauri), but these are not what these scientists are trying to model. In 2012 a planet was believed to have been found around Alpha Centauri B, which was later ruled out. A planet candidate in Alpha Centauri A has been proposed in 2021, but has not yet been confirmed.
• April 2022: Three authors from the physics department at Princeton University and New York University propose an alternative theory to the standard cosmological model, virtually indistinguishable from it throughout the past history of the universe, but differing greatly in the near immediate future, as it predicts that the expansion of the universe will stop very soon and a gravitational collapse will take place. Thus, the cyclical theories so popular during the 1980s once again raise their heads, although they had been excluded since the 1990s. Note, by the way, that this theory would be incompatible with the theory mentioned in the first point of this list.
• May 2022: Several German and American physicists have developed a new theory to avoid the wormhole growth paradox, a discrepancy between two physical theories: AdS (the Anti-de-Sitter gravitational theory) and CFT (conformal field theory). This paradox would take place inside certain black holes that could act as wormholes. But let’s look at the situation: first of all, we don’t know whether wormholes exist. We are talking, therefore, of theories to explain the behavior of possibly imaginary objects. Also, the two theories considered (AdS and CFT) are not validated by any confirmed predictions, and therefore should be considered as merely tentative. Between these two theories there are discrepancies. And now they are trying to formulate a new theory that would resolve these discrepancies about the paradox. This construction of a tower of chained hypotheses must be very useful and very “scientific”, since specialized magazines publish articles about it.

If we add to these "scientific" news those that only announce future possibilities (what I call futuristic news), which currently amount to 50% of the news; and if we add to these a growing number of “scientific” news stories (actually they are sociology) concerned about possible discrimination in scientific settings against women, people of diverse races, or LGBTQA people, both past and present, the number of genuine science news is decreasing continuously, despite the unrestrained rush of researchers to increase the number of their publications.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca