Quote:Hi,
Not quite. It is now speculation. But it may be, one day, testable. If that day comes, it will be because of speculation. Thus, we cannot, a priori, consider the speculation fruitless.
Too lazy to look up the source, but a prominent scientist of the past listed things that would always be beyond our knowledge. Among these was the composition of the sun. Not only did he turn out to be wrong, but the element helium was first observed in the spectrum of the sun (and thus its name). That physicist failed to predict the technology of spectrometry. It wold be a fun speculation to predict the technology that would make other present unknowables future observables. Making those fun speculations is a large part of theoretical physics.
Making speculations about the nature of the universe is fine, and you're absolutely right, much of the fun in physics seems to be (watching vicariously from the sidelines through Hawking, Green, Feynman and the like) the imaginative element, when hypothetical universes come together with surprising consequences.
What I suppose I mean is that the god of the gaps always has a place to hide; no matter how long our reach gets, even if our reach grows beyond what we currently think of as the "universe", it is always possible to put god one further step past that. Therefore, the "god from beyond" hypothesis lacks falsifiability.
But, who knows. Maybe he's out there somewhere. If only we had scientists with the chutzpah to really dig deep into the square root of the second time dimension.
-Jester