A Key Skeleton

Is a Cosmic Counter-Revolution in the Making?

As cosmology reaches the edge of the universe and gets closer to the beginning of the Big Bang, scientists are drifting into metaphysical and philosophical musings about the cosmos. Their theories about multiverses and parallel universes cannot be empirically tested, so they are left only with speculations. These are intriguing products of human imagination working upon empirical facts and mathematical descriptions of reality. Some scientists don't want to call these speculations philosophy, but at the very least they are literally metaphysics—beyond physics.

A parallel drift into metaphysics is occurring in the study of the subatomic...