Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder: ‘There are quite a few areas where physics blurs into religion’

 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/26/physicist-sabine-hossenfelder-there-are-quite-a-few-areas-where-physics-blurs-into-religion-multiverse

You write that a lot of research in physics, such as hypotheses for the early universe, is “religion masquerading as science under the guise of mathematics”. Could you elaborate on that?

There are quite a few areas where the foundations of physics blur into religion, but physicists don’t notice because they’re not paying attention. It’s a lack of education in the philosophy of science in general. For example, the most commonly accepted story about the beginning of the universe is the big bang, and to some extent this is really just the simplest way you can extrapolate the equations into the past – and then you can add inflation, which is an exponential phase of expansion; or, like Roger Penrose, you can make it a cyclic universe. But maybe it was a big bounce, or it started with the collision of membranes. These ideas are all possible – they’re all compatible with the observations that we have. But I would call them ascientific – the kind of idea that evidence says nothing for nor against.

Also, it worries me that we always talk about how science supposedly self-corrects, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. They’re just trying the same thing over and over again.