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The fine tuning of the universe.
- Thread starter Oncedeceived
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I have a list in this thread of all the scientists that believe fine tuning is a real phenomena.
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You are switching from one universe being the probability of one and then off you go and there are different universes with even different laws of physics. Do you realize that?
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Are you aware of the previous conversation in the thread or do you just go off half cocked and say what comes to mind whether it is relevant or not? Who implied that life was "build" from only hydrogen atoms...it wasn't me.
Right. Fine tuning is just like ice.The link was about how rare life is, was the article not clear in its content?
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Yes I realize this. The fine tuning argument relies in part on saying that the way our universe is special is that it allows for life. It implies that in a different universe with different parameters no life would be possible, a point you have made several times. While it may be the case that life as we know it would be impossible, we are not justified in saying no life at all would be possible, we just don't know and this is the life as we know it objection. So yes to adress the part of your argument that speculates about other possible universes, I too speculate about other possible universes.
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freezerman2000
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HitchSlap
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See post #949, where you linked this:
"The one I gave you I think is the most up to date and Luke Barnes is at the top of the heap as far as fine tuning is concerned. I will give you one here that is considered very good and Carr is the one that everyone recognizes in fine tuning.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1979Natur.278..605C"
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I can see why you would be confused. I was trying to show that the constants have precise values as well and did so woefully incoherently. My fault.
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No problem.
Here’s a quote that I wanted to put out there from the paper about how widely accepted fine-tuning is among scientists:
There are a great many scientists, of varying religious persuasions, who accept that the universe is fine-tuned for life, e.g. Barrow, Carr, Carter, Davies, Dawkins, Deutsch, Ellis, Greene, Guth, Harrison, Hawking, Linde, Page, Penrose, Polkinghorne, Rees, Sandage, Smolin, Susskind, Tegmark, Tipler, Vilenkin, Weinberg, Wheeler, Wilczek. They differ, of course, on what conclusion we should draw from this fact. Stenger, on the other hand, claims that the universe is not fine-tuned.
That is a very diverse list. I know that Sandage, Ellis, Page, Tipler and Polkinghorne are theists. But I also know that Weinberg, Rees, Hawking, Greene, and Dawkins are atheists. So scientists all across the spectrum of worldview admit that the fine-tuning is real.
https://winteryknight.com/2015/11/1...or-stengers-critique-of-cosmic-fine-tuning-4/
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This is called explanations for evidence. There is this phenomena that shows the universe is fine tuned for intelligent life. The majority of scientists agree that the universe is fine tuned to be life permitting for intelligent life. That is the evidence that needs explaining.
I am giving an explanation, I am not adding to anything. Please try to understand the difference.
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Sean Carroll who has been critiqued by Luke Barnes said:
“We just don’t know whether life could exist if the conditions of our universe were very different because we only see the universe that we see.”
Barnes answered:
“I don’t know how a theoretical cosmologist can make a statement like that. …. If Carroll’s problem here is an in principle problem, then his objection amounts to a denial that we can do theoretical physics. The job of the theoretical physicist is to take a given law of nature (and its constants), and predict its consequences. This usually involves solving the equation. Asking whether a given set of laws and constants would produce life is the same type of question as whether they would produce atoms, rainbows, galaxies or a CMB.
“Granted, life is a more difficult task. But …. we can be conservative. Rather than identify every island that life may or may not inhabit in parameter space, we can just note the huge lifeless oceans.
“The best-understood cases of fine-tuning are too dramatic to think that nit-picking over the definition of life would make any difference. Carroll’s point is essentially appealing to an as-yet-unknown fact about life that will hopefully reveal why, against all appearances, it could form and survive in a wide range of universes. In the absence of any specific idea about what this unknown fact might be, it is just as likely that what we don’t know about life will make it rarer in possibility space, i.e. more fine-tuned than we think.”
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Great source but Barnes completely misses the point. He is still thinking abut life as we know it, maybe with some minor variation. Carroll's point is that we just don't know how different life could be. Yes in our universe the only kind of life we see is ours in a different universe we don't know what is possible or not.
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Actually that is not what he says at all. He is looking at different life forms and uses very specific examples to do it.
From the Link I gave you of Barnes:
4.1.3 Changing the Laws of Nature
What if the laws of nature were different? Stenger says: . . . what about a universe with a different set of “laws”? There is not much we can say about such a universe, nor do we need to. Not knowing what any of their parameters are, no one can claim that they are fine-tuned. [Foft 69] In reply, fine-tuning isn’t about what the parameters and laws are in a particular universe. Given some other set of laws, we ask: if a universe were chosen at random from the set of universes with those laws, what is the probability that it would support intelligent life? If that probability is suitably (and robustly) small, then we conclude that that region of possible-physics-space contributes negligibly to the total life-permitting subset. It is easy to find examples of such claims. • A universe governed by Maxwell’s Laws “all the way down” (i.e. with no quantum regime at small scales) will not have stable atoms — electrons radiate their kinetic energy and spiral rapidly into the nucleus — and hence no chemistry (Barrow & Tipler, 1986, pg. 303). We don’t need to know what the parameters are to know that life in such a universe is plausibly impossible. • If electrons were bosons, rather than fermions, then they would not obey the Pauli exclusion principle. There would be no chemistry. • If gravity were repulsive rather than attractive, then matter wouldn’t clump into complex structures. Remember: your density, thank gravity, is 1030 times greater than the average density of the universe. • If the strong force were a long rather than short-range force, then there would be no atoms. Any structures that formed would be uniform, spherical, undifferentiated lumps, of arbitrary size and incapable of complexity. • If, in electromagnetism, like charges attracted and opposites repelled, then there would be no atoms. As above, we would just have undifferentiated lumps of matter. • The electromagnetic force allows matter to cool into galaxies, stars, and planets. Without such interactions, all matter would be like dark matter, which can only form into large, diffuse, roughly spherical haloes of matter whose only internal structure consists of smaller, diffuse, roughly spherical subhaloes. The same idea seems to be true of laws in very different contexts. John Conway’s marvellous ‘Game of Life’ uses very simple rules, but allows some very complex and fascinating patterns. In fact, one can build a universal Turing machine. Yet the simplicity of these rules didn’t come for free. Conway had to search for it (Guy, 2008, pg. 37): His discovery of the Game of Life was effected only after the rejection of many patterns, triangular and hexagonal lattices as well as square ones, and of many other laws of birth and death, including the introduction of two and even three sexes. Acres of squared paper were covered, and he and his admiring entourage of
Figure 1: The “wedge”: x and y are two physical parameters that can vary up to some xmax and ymax, where we can allow these values to approach infinity if so desired. The point (x0, y0) represents the values of x and y in our universe. The life-permitting range is the shaded wedge. Varying only one parameter at a time only explores that part of parameter space which is vertically or horizontally adjacent to (x0, y0), thus missing most of parameter space. graduate students shuffled poker chips, foreign coins, cowrie shells, Go stones, or whatever came to hand, until there was a viable balance between life and death. It seems plausible that, even in the space of cellular automata, the set of laws that permit the emergence and persistence of complexity is a very small subset of all possible laws. Note that the question is not whether Conway’s Life is unique in having interesting properties. The point is that, however many ways there are of being interesting, there are vastly many more ways of being trivially simple or utterly chaotic. We should be cautious, however. Whatever the problems of defining the possible range of a given parameter, we are in a significantly more nebulous realm when we try to consider the set of all possible physical laws. It is not clear how such a fine-tuning case could be formalised, whatever its intuitive appeal.
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That is your assessment and that is fine. Regardless, there are people that it is compelling to and they understand the fine tuning problem very well and are scientists themselves.
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