Worst Science Writing of 2008

To this NYT Science page for this atrocity.

The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.

The Boltzman problem is real and the debate in cosmology is, actually, fairly complicated and hard to follow if you're not following it closely. I can understand the difficulties in trying to present it to an interested lay audience, however this is a piece of crap. It doesn't explain it at all, instead making it sound like cosmologists believe in a crazy floating brain invasion. It becomes just silly.

FTR, Don Page, who is mentioned here, was my astrophysics advisor when I was an undergrad. He's one of the brightest humans I have ever met and did a lot to introduce me to some of the most interesting puzzles in cosmology. I always please when I see he's still around.