“Today, physicists suppose that a particle can travel many different paths simultaneously, or travel backwards in time, or randomly pop into and out of existence from nothingness. They enjoy treating the entire universe as a ‘fluctuation of the vacuum,’ or as an insignificant member of an infinite ensemble of universes, or even as a hologram. The fabric of this strange universe is a non-entity called ‘spacetime,’ which expands, curves, attends yoga classes, and may have twenty-six dimensions.

In short, the recent literature on physics makes one nostalgic for anything as reasonable as a witch trial.

For the past decade many physicists have been wandering the streets with signs that read: ‘The End of Physics Is Near.’ They claim to be developing a final ‘theory of everything,’ which will leave future physicists with nothing to do but play computer games. We can dismiss their megalomania, yet still be tempted to agree with their message. The end that seems near, however, is not a climactic rise to omniscience but an embarrassing descent into pseudo-science.”

Although I don’t understand all that much of modern physics, I suspect that the author, David Harriman, despite his M.S. in Physics, is out of his depth in branding it pseudoscience. If his yearning for the naive simplicity of Newtonian science is not enough evidence, there is the fact that he is the editor of Journals of Ayn Rand and a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif.