Our Universe Is not fine-tuned for life, but it’s still kind of OK
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It's like marketing, you need to come up with a new thing every few years.
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There's at least two versions of the Anthropic Principle and they reach different conclusions. One is known as the Strong Anthropic Principle, in which the Universal constants have the values they do in order for life to exist. That's what's being referred to in the article. The one you're more familiar with (and the one actually advanced by Dicke) is the Weak Anthropic Principle, which is the "if the values weren't right we wouldn't be here to talk about it" sort.
I would say the article is mixing up Strong and Weak and lumping them together even though they reach rather contradictory conclusions.
I'm also not really aware of what Hoyle had to say on the topic (Google results are polluted with regurgitations of an inapporpriate anecdote; attributing to him an "anthropic" prediction when the prediction he made preceded the Anthropic principle by years and wasn't based on the AP, in any version, as a starting point).
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...and the scientist wants evidence while religion demands faith. According to many religious folk God wants you to believe in him, even worship him (or her) in the complete absence of evidence. Failure to do so is a one way ticket to hell.
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Well, if nothing else, if the Universe is truly infinite, then one can find another point in it that is arbitrarily similar to our observable Universe. And also an identical one. That would mean life on a planet arbitrarily similar to Earth's, or even an identical one.
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The world, on the whole, is a glorious place.
Humans suck quite often, which fits most theologies quite nicely.
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The article’s explanation of the origin of the cosmological constant is, respectfully, wrong.
Einstein introduced the original version because he recognized that his theory resulted in the contraction of the universe, not its expansion. This contraction would have been incompatible with a static universe.
Einstein regretted his inclusion of an expansionary pressure constant as kludgy and inelegant, and he was right about that. But it was only wrong until discovery of expansion’s acceleration, at which point lambda’s reality was recognized as a property of (for now) dark energy, which has zero connection with Einstein’s original constant, the rationale for which was more aesthetic than scientific.
Einstein introduced the original version because he recognized that his theory resulted in the contraction of the universe, not its expansion. This contraction would have been incompatible with a static universe.
Einstein regretted his inclusion of an expansionary pressure constant as kludgy and inelegant, and he was right about that. But it was only wrong until discovery of expansion’s acceleration, at which point lambda’s reality was recognized as a property of (for now) dark energy, which has zero connection with Einstein’s original constant, the rationale for which was more aesthetic than scientific.
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possible... if the life is sheltered ... say, in an ocean, under a very thick ice sheet... feeding chemically on simple compounds erupting from an active core, heated by tides from a large neighbor planet ... or maybe from radionuclide decay deep in the core ... for a few billion years ...
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HuntingManatees
Ars Centurion
"O, merciful God! Hear our prayers, for our crops are withered and the cattle have grown feeble and barren of milk!"
"UGH! I DIDN'T ASK TO BE PART OF YOUR BELIEF SYSTEM! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU!" slams door
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No, it's a refutation of the claim that "We need a god to exist".
Creationism is predicated on the idea that there are things in the universe that cannot be explained by any natural means and must therefore be supernatural. The flaw in this logic (and calling it "logic" is a kindness) is that as we learn more about how nature works, the less need there is to resort to the supernatural to explain things.
Thunder and lightning used to be the rage of Thor, now we know it's an electrostatic discharge caused when the clouds in a thunderstorm become so charged that they overcome the massive resistance of Earth's atmosphere and discharge to ground. We once thought a dragon ate the sun and spat it out from time to time, now we know it's just the moon moving in front of it and blocking its light. Therefore it's more logical to think that things we currently can't explain do have a natural cause, just one of which we are currently not yet aware.
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The "fine tuning" in this case relates to changes in fundamental constants so that you have to ask whether atoms can form, whether nucler fusion can produce heavy elements, whether gravity is so strong the Universe never expands beyond a beach ball size etc.
So yes for most of the Universe you'd have a bad time if you forgot your spacesuit, alot of the other possible Universes a space suit wouldn't protect you from your atoms disintegrating because the strong nuclear force has a different strength.
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Could we replace "the" with "some" as the 5th word in the first sentence there?
Or insert "a vocal minority subset of".
There are plenty, plenty of Christians who really just try to get on with their lives without bleating on about everything.
And the concept "created in God's image" clearly does not refer to physical characteristics at any point.
It's far more the case that we create or at least represent God in our image, because our knowledge and abilities are so very constrained by what we think is our experience.
Humans discussing the nature of God (from any religion) is like a hand drawing of a Lego minifig discussing the nature of Leonardo da Vinci.
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Decent article, but confusing in that it seems to imply that this argument counters the weak anthropic principle even though it doesn't. All the weak principle requires is that the universe be such that we can exist, not that it be precisely tuned for life. In fact, it says that fine tuning is irrelevant so any measurement of how close to perfect the universe is doesn't matter.
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I don't know why you would say that is "clear."
Gen 1:26: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
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[QUOTE="yoodoo2, post: 43329587, member: 567323"
And the concept "created in God's image" clearly does not refer to physical characteristics at any point.
[/QUOTE]
That doesn't seem clear at all, and it is widely discredited by the bulk of art and literature depicting god as a somewhat elderly white man.
I guarantee, in fact, that if you displayed a depiction of god as some black guy, it - and quite possibly you - would be torn to shreds almost instantly. By christians.
And the concept "created in God's image" clearly does not refer to physical characteristics at any point.
[/QUOTE]
That doesn't seem clear at all, and it is widely discredited by the bulk of art and literature depicting god as a somewhat elderly white man.
I guarantee, in fact, that if you displayed a depiction of god as some black guy, it - and quite possibly you - would be torn to shreds almost instantly. By christians.
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Nope. That part falls under the title of “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” There is no reason we should believe in a deity and to the extent we start basing our decisions on the existence of one, we run the risk of inviting disaster from the very real and very ordinary physical processes around us that we ignore in service to the proposed deity.
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There is no reason to believe in the world of Star Trek either. I have it on good authority that the videos were faked. You can even still interview some of the actors involved! Apparently warp drive isn’t a thing either, and their communicators are hopelessly silly compared to our phones. No advanced civilization would put up with that.
In other words, Q? Although it's not thought that he created the universe, what the federation knows about the Q could be incorrect since the encounters with Picard and Janeway could've been completely deceptive - or even illusory.
The Q continuum is silly and those episodes deeply frustrating for all involved, only exceeded by “Wesley episodes”.
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As someone who finds the existence of a supernatural omnipotent being to be improbable, I agree that its existence cannot be proven or disproven in either the world of logic or science. What I find more interesting is how one decides between the various candidates, and that 90+% of all believers in a supreme deity had the good luck to pop out of one of the correct wombs to be "chosen". This also strikes me as improbable. And for many religions why man was created in the Supreme Being's image, while it is so much more probable that the Supreme Being was created in man's image. Which explains both said being's relative unpleasantness, and moral ambiguity whenever it becomes convenient to slaughter our neighbors. I have some deeply religious relatives who are going to cluck feebly for a token period once our borders are turned into killing fields. And others who will be less compassionate.
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![:\](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/civis/data/assets/smilies/slash-1x.png "Slash :\")
As far as I understand it, that's pretty much what gnosticism taught (first century judeo-christian splinter group who have waxed and waned in prominence over the centuries, and haven't quite died out as a theology).
There seem to have been many many variants, but with the core idea that the real creator creates the overall universe, and lets various sub-gods sweat the details, such as the material part of the universe (ie, our bit). These sub-gods may be malevolent or not, ‘sons’ of the main creator or not (teenagedness isn't specified), or artisans (‘demiurges’) who seem ready to run you up a material-universe thing as a contract gig. ‘You want how many dimensions? Hmm: tell you what – I can do you four, and leave in the Evil, and do you a pretty good price 'cos it's a Friday’
Explains a lot, really...
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Voix des Airs
Ars Praefectus
I wasn't going to comment on this because I don't think it's all that important but it is showing up more and more lately (I presume as a result of a certain increasingly cranky now full-time Youtuber former physicist)...
What you are describing is not how this works and is based on the assumption that people with Ph.D.'s in physics/math/philosophy are idiots.
Starting with your apple example: Even classical physics does this. There are tons and tons of cases where you wind up with positive and negative time solutions (for example, this happens any time you take a square root - e.g., sqrt(4) = +/-2) and the nonphysical solution (the thing that has been ruled out by experiment) is discarded as such. But when the Dirac equation (a relativistic version of the Schrodinger equation) was proposed, it made predictions that seemed nonsensical. Like positively charged electrons. But they turned out to exist (like all the other antimatter particles the math predicted). So just because the math is right doesn't mean this thing actually exists, but it doesn't mean it doesn't either (the math of General Relativity predicted things that even Einstein didn't think could exist, like black holes and gravitational waves, the later taking about 100 years to actually detect). Nature is the arbiter of that.
Second, in any theory the math has to work and has to be consistent with everything we currently know. If these things aren't true then the theory is wrong. But if the math works and is consistent with what we know then it can't be ruled out. It may be unlikely to be true (whatever that means) but until it's ruled out as inconsistent with observation it can't be discarded as wrong either. Which leads me to my third point:
What would you have theorists working in foundations do? How else should they proceed? And the Youtuber I alluded to above (who should know better) is bad about this too; condemning everything everyone else is working on but proposing nothing themselves. People working in foundations (and there really aren't many) are pretty much trying everything that they can think of but, at least currently, there just isn't enough experimental and/or observational data to guide them. There are anomalous observations (things like dark mater/energy) but not nearly enough data. So all anyone can do is hypothesize things and then try to rule out or at least constrain those theories by comparing them to the limited observational data we have. Perhaps an even better example are quantum gravity theories that, amongst other things, attempt to deal with what is happening at and inside event horizons. We can't go there and as far was we know never will be able to. So all we can do is to develop theories that are mathematically consistent with what we do know to be true and then hope that they make some sort of prediction about something that we can observe.
None of this means that these proposals are correct and I really wish that popularizers and university press departments and the media would stop presenting them as such... but it doesn't mean the proposals, and the people developing them, are stupid either. And it's why I rarely, if ever talk about any of them when I post here and stick to the well supported stuff.
Anyway, if any of you who feel the way the quoted poster does have a constructive solution regarding what foundations theorists or experimentalists should be doing let us know. But also keep in mind that to do that you will need to be up to date on what is already known otherwise you are almost certainly reinventing the broken wheel.
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" doesn't seem clear at all, and it is widely discredited by the bulk of art and literature depicting god as a somewhat elderly white man."
By the bulk of middle-late, white, European/western art produced/commissioned by rich people.
I think that proves rather than contradicts my point that people create God in their image rather than the other way round
"I guarantee, in fact, that if you displayed a depiction of god as some black guy, it - and quite possibly you - would be torn to shreds almost instantly."
Have a look at Coptic and Ethiopian Christian art from 2nd Century CE onwards. Not a white chap among them.
" By christians."
Again, by some Christians. By a tiny vocal minority of Christians. Most wldnt be bothered either way.
By the bulk of middle-late, white, European/western art produced/commissioned by rich people.
I think that proves rather than contradicts my point that people create God in their image rather than the other way round
"I guarantee, in fact, that if you displayed a depiction of god as some black guy, it - and quite possibly you - would be torn to shreds almost instantly."
Have a look at Coptic and Ethiopian Christian art from 2nd Century CE onwards. Not a white chap among them.
" By christians."
Again, by some Christians. By a tiny vocal minority of Christians. Most wldnt be bothered either way.
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All christians in today's world at least are satanists judging by their actions. You can practically smell the sulfur wafting out of their churches.
If there's a tiny minority involved anywhere, it's the vanishingly small to the point of being completely invisible mythical christians you keep insisting exist.
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It is an anthropic multiverse update, but like earlier works they are still 2-3 orders of magnitude away and note that their model isn't fully conclusive, they need better models. They concern themselves with strict but arguable hypothesis testing, but the theory is good enough compared to the alternatives (such as unlikely finetuning). The arguable limit here could be 5 sigma for tension, as we see used in Hubble rate estimates.
The original paper noted that dark energy has a high prior as it should be around Planck energy, but that the habitability requirement push it down 120 orders of magnitude and not much more. This is against a theoretical background of an infinite number of lower orders of energy scale, as the article alludes to.
The original paper noted that dark energy has a high prior as it should be around Planck energy, but that the habitability requirement push it down 120 orders of magnitude and not much more. This is against a theoretical background of an infinite number of lower orders of energy scale, as the article alludes to.
This is a pop science claim, but there are instances where it can be useful. Life-and-death processes such as Poisson processes are one example that fits here, a single sample gives, admittedly risky, estimates of mean and variance.
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Yes, Satan is a Christian invention.
In the Old Testament, Satan is YHWH's gambling buddy, "devil" never occurs in the singular, and the Garden of Eden tale is (in part) a just-so story about how the serpent came to have no legs. (And by the way, YHWH lied to Adam(Gen 2:16-17), and the Serpent told the truth to Eve(Gen 3:4-5).)
In the New Testament, you will find "the Devil", and the only place in the Bible that equates Satan with the Devil with the Serpent is the drug-addled Book of Revelation.
Possibly Christians stole the idea of the Devil from Zoroastrianism, but they certainly did not inherit it from Judaism.
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This is an observation based on the theory of physics producing hot big bang multiverses - such as the observed slow roll inflation.
Vacuum "dark" energy density disagrees as it can vary on its lonesome and prevent galaxy formation.
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Just FYI, there are some pretty mainstream, yet very progressive Catholic and Protestant churches here in Europe*, who would be probably considered the Spawn of Satan by the mainstream US religious.
A church LGBTQ+ wedding? No problem at all!
That's under Civil Law here, where a church wedding is much harder I believe, Civil Law generally having a state monopoly on weddings, with only a few organised religions being afforded an exception that a church wedding equals a state wedding. Civil weddings of LGBTQ+ people were certainly possible prior.
So yes, normal christians are quite possible and do exist. Just to make it clear, I'm an atheist myself, but know plenty of them in my vicinity.
*: sadly, we also do have plenty of churches on the completely opposite side of the civic spectrum, so it's not all rainbows and unicorns :-(
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The theory explains a phenomena physicists call "finetuning" of parameters. In this specific case the finetuning of vacuum energy density that naturally would be the Planck energy density but is 120ish times lower. Weinberg relied on inflation for equiprobably producing different physics multiverses and used habitable galaxy formation before vacuum "dark" energy density has scattered the dark matter assemblies as a proxy for a complex problem. By assuming dark energy density is "pushed down" to habitability but not much lower he predicted the correct dark energy density before it was observed.
There are other finetuning to consider, e.g. the much less finetuned standard model fields have a "Higgs vacuum" that seems quasi-stable. But its likely lifetime is many orders of magnitude larger than the dark energy constraint, so is not competing with it. There is also possibly a dark matter finetuning that sets its particle mass similarly to dark energy here because if it isn't protected as much as the Higgs sector against coupling with gravity heavy dark matter can decay fast and prevent galaxy formation.
Those are philosophic notions. Instead Weinberg came up with quantitative theory and made a prediction, that is science. The theory is unambiguous, read his papers.
See above why the proxy was purposefully "crude" (simple, yet powerful).
It worked to predict observations. That is called a successful test.
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Maybe you could set things up so that the excess stars are running away from each other, and those that can't keep up get sucked into giant vacuum cleaners.
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Yeah, we're extremely lucky, but not the luckiest possible. I spend too much time thinking about these questions in the shower, and this is about how I would have guessed.
After all, if there is only 1-in-a-trillion chances of a universe capable of having intelligent life, they'll still count for 100% of universes where there is intelligent life capable of asking these questions in the first place.
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That's your nightmare?
Would it be better than "given infinite possibilities, we're the best that came out."
Or "in infinite possibilities, there are infinite species better off than us, but we'll still far too alone to ever know we're mid."
I don't know, worrying about how we compare in absolute or relative terms lacking any comparisons period seems pretty fruitless. And would knowing either way change anything? In the end, we all live at 1:1 human scale. Doesn't matter what the cosmos is like, we still need to trim our toenails.
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