it's an interesting idea
Absolutely. Unfortunately, this is just not enough in order to become a viable model.
that just puts it as "fringe" rather than "crank".
I don't think that anyone asserted that timeless physics is a crank idea, since there is no contradiction to the established science. Fringe is indeed a good description, due to the reasons I mentioned.
And you could say about the same about string theory.
I wish I could. String theory, while being an out-of-proportion popular piece of math which took over high-energy physics, has a few things going for it, despite getting its every testable prediction wrong.
It offers tantalizing hints of new perspectives on high-energy physics research, such as the duality between strong- and week-coupling models, the holographic principle, new unexpected yet elegant symmetries, and even useful calculational techniques for quark-gluon plasma analysis. Of course, it would probably not have gotten nearly as popular if Ed Witten didn't take up the cause.
It has testable predictions it got wrong? As I understood it, its predictions were untestable without radically more powerful accelerators.
Today's post, Timeless Identity was originally published on 03 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Principles of Disagreement, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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