The fine tuning of the universe.

DogmaHunter said:

You asked "What order comes from hydrogen gas?".
You did not ask "Is life possible on the surface of a star?"

But I understand your need to quickly make it about something else.

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You are free to go back and look and you will fine this comment was about life.

HitchSlap said:

I clicked on one of her links, and it was from 1976(?) and only the abstract was available, and from what I could tell, had nothing to do with fine tuning.

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That simply is false.

freezerman2000 said:

Which scientists?Which field?

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I have a list in this thread of all the scientists that believe fine tuning is a real phenomena.

Athée said:

yes it is possible that a form of life could live on a sun. You seem to keep thinking about the requirements of life as we know it in the universe as we know it . The objection bis that this is only one kind of life and it is possible that there are more. Moreover in a different universe with different laws of physics and different constants we have no idea what kinds of life might be possible.

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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?

DogmaHunter said:

Newsflash: life isn't build from only hydrogen atoms. So one can only wonder what your point is.

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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.

Ice isn't just forms of imagination but requires actual requirements that have to be met and just claiming that ice could exist is not providing necessary elements that would allow an ice permitting universe.

So therefor, the North Pole is "designed for the purpose of ice forming", because freezers.

...a polar bear might say.



Can you summarize what point you are trying to make by including this link?

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Right. Fine tuning is just like ice.

The link was about how rare life is, was the article not clear in its content?

[serious] said:

Yup, you are incorrect.

Also, I have absolutely no idea how you got to that from anything I said. Again, the conversation went as follows:

can pi be anything but 3.14...? It seems that that's just what pi is and it can't be anything different. Could the rest of the natural constants likewise simply be the only value they can be?
Is pi a physical thing?
No, pi is a ratio.
how could the physical constants be like pi?

We can calculate pi to arbitrary specificity, but that's hardly unique. Most metric units are defined in terms of physical constants anyway.

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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.

freezerman2000 said:

Link me to it please.

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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/

HitchSlap said:

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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Right and it is about fine tuning.

DogmaHunter said:

You are inventing probabilities.
You are inventing deities.
You are inventing causal links between said deities and the universe.

Let's play honest here... Your entire rant / argument does NOT limit itself to saying "if things were different, things would be different." Nope, you are going waaaay beyond that.

You are adding to it: "...and there is a reason for why things aren't different, and that reason is purpose and intent by a designer".

Which is very far removed from the statements by scientists concerning this subject matter. Very far removed indeed.



Where is your evidence of purpose, intent, deities?
Where is your evidence of your continued assertions concerning the probability of the universe being the way it is?

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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.

Athée said:

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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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.”

HitchSlap said:

Which part?

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That it is not about fine tuning.

Athée said:

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.

HitchSlap said:

Some opinions are more reasoned than others. I don't find your reasons and personal interpretation of the evidence compelling. So, for now, I'll accept what the the scientists actually say about the evidence.

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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.