I would have to question what do you call creation science? Is it the first organizations that were created to falsify evolution or are you talking about the intelligent design movement that is present today?
Either.
It makes a difference. Considering that this is a new area,( ID )and that it really just began in the 80's, it is no wonder that it is nowhere near the point of theories and validation seen by mainstream science. While I don't care one way or the other about the ID movement or whether or not it is successful I don't think it is a valid example of whether it will be useful in anyway in the future
.
While I know you don't care, it is incorrect to categorize ID as a scientific movement at all because it is fundamentally negative. It provides no scientific hypothesis to replace evolution.
I totally agree. That was my point. I hadn't said otherwise.
Okay, cool, apologies for misunderstanding.
What is unfalsifiable about it?
Simple: even if you accept that the constants could be different (which I don't, necessarily), and that there might be a system of physical laws with "nice" constants, why couldn't the inhabitants simply imagine all the other potential universes--including universes like ours, where tiny changes in constants could possibly wipe out their type of life? And why on earth should the universe care what constants we have assigned to it?
WE know that certain measurements show a remarkable precision which does not allow for any minimal change without making life impossible.
But that isn't really meaningful in this kind of discussion. What constitutes "remarkable precision" in a discussion about
possible worlds? And anyway, you are assuming that it is in fact the constant that is the "pure truth" of the universe, but it's just a number in our model. If we split up the number in our model, does the constant change?
It doesn't require knowing other universes, or other parameters because it uses our own.
Constants are necessarily constant, so we have no evidence that these parameters could be any different. If we are going to speculate that they could, why must we constrain our speculation to changing constants?
It was once thought that the Higg's boson would be the particle that would explain all the fine tuning in the universe and that everything would come together to make the fine tuning problem disappear. However, that was not the case and in fact, the discovery lead to even more evidence for fine tuning. It seems the Higg's Boson itself is very fine tuned.
That may or may not be true. My impression was that nobody working on the Higgs boson thought it would solve fine tuning--I think the fact that the Higgs boson falsified a lot of string theoretic assumptions actually has more to do with the fact that much of string theory is precisely an attempt to "undo" what we see as fine-tuning and is therefore very sensitive to changes to the actual model. But of course if the real universe in fact has a perfect mathematical model, there is no reason why that model has to be "robust" to change like a good scientific theory would, since it is universally true and can never be falsified.
According to astronomical measurements, the matter described by the Standard Model that makes up the stars, planets and ultimately us, only accounts for a tiny fraction of the universe. We appear to be a thin layer of froth, floating on top of an invisible ocean of
dark matter and
dark energy, about which we know almost nothing.
Worse still, according to the Standard Model, we shouldn’t exist at all. The theory predicts that, after the Big Bang, equal quantities of matter and antimatter should have obliterated each other, leaving an empty universe.
Worse still, according to the Standard Model, we shouldn’t exist at all. The theory predicts that, after the Big Bang, equal quantities of matter and antimatter should have obliterated each other, leaving an empty universe.
Both of these are good scientific reasons to doubt that the Standard Model is the end of the story when it comes to the laws of physics. But there is another, aesthetic principle that has led many physicists to doubt its completeness – the principle of “naturalness”.
The Standard Model is regarded as a highly “unnatural” theory. Aside from having a large number of different particles and forces, many of which seem surplus to requirement, it is also very precariously balanced. If you change any of the 20+ numbers that have to be put into the theory even a little, you rapidly find yourself living in a universe without atoms. This spooky fine-tuning worries many physicists, leaving the universe looking as though it has been set up in just the right way for life to exist.
The Higgs’s boson provides us with one of the worst cases of unnatural fine-tuning. A surprising discovery of the 20th century was the realization that empty space is far from empty. The vacuum is, in fact, a broiling soup of invisible “virtual” particles, constantly popping in and out of existence.
The conventional wisdom states that as the Higgs boson passes through the vacuum it interacts with this soup of virtual particles and this interaction drives its mass to an absolutely enormous value – potentially up to a hundred million billion times larger than the one measured at the LHC.
Theorists have attempted to tame the unruly Higgs mass by proposing extensions of the Standard Model. The most popular of which is “supersymmetry”, which introduces a heavier super-particle or “sparticle” for every particle in the Standard Model. These sparticles cancel out the effect of the virtual particles in the vacuum, reducing the Higgs mass to a reasonable value and eliminating the need for any unpleasant fine-tuning.
Could the Higgs Nobel Be the End of Particle Physics?: Scientific American
I'm not disputing any of this and I've heard all these arguments before. What I think is going on above, and what I think is the
only way that anyone can be convinced by a fine-tuning argument, is that scientists are falling in love with their models to the point that they forget that they are not "true" (necessarily, anyway). And in forgetting that, we have seen the rise of unified theories of everything that interact with "our" universe as little as possible and mostly deal with some unseen and as-yet-unverified realm (one that it is entirely possible we will
never be able to verify).
What studies have you looked at? You may feel it is silly, but phyicists take it pretty seriously. Those who agree that it is factual and those that are trying to provide alternate reasons that explain it.
We're talking about universes entirely outside the realm of our experience, unbound (apparently) by the universal laws we have observed elsewhere. As such, it seems to me we can imagine whatever we want. So because this is a metaphysical question, the only studies I could conceivably have to look at are model-theoretic studies. And I'd accept an argument that even those don't tell me anything useful because we don't know if
math works "outside our universe." We don't know if that even means anything and most likely we never will.
It does reflect only our universe. I believe that if there was a way to eliminate the fine tuning problem mathematically, it would have been done.
That is a large part of what string theory, loop quantum gravity, and other such theories are about--making the math pretty. So not only has it been done, it's been done over and over again. There's a large group of people devoted to laying out a theory that says the exact same thing as the "ugly" theory in all cases for which we have evidence, and there's really no reason to believe one is more true than the other (except when an actual
observation like the Higgs boson comes around, and--shockingly--validates the standard, evidence based model while invalidating a lot of theories that there was never any reason to prefer in the first place). I have made no secret of the fact that I do not think these people are really engaging in science so I am not surprised to find nonscientific attitudes from them, but it doesn't change the fundamental fact that fine-tuning arguments make no sense.
Like I said, I would certainly accept a model theoretic proof that "almost all" eventually consistent universes don't have life--though I can't imagine how one would even begin proving such a thing, in the absence of some easy to constrain things like cosmological constants--but only as a starting point. We'd still have to contend with various "impossible worlds" where Turing computability was optional, since we have no reason to believe the Church-Turing thesis holds outside our universe and we can certainly conduct thought experiments in which it is violated.
And even then--even after we've covered variation in the universes--we still haven't a shred of evidence that more than one actually exists. That means that we get to play around with theories about how such universes could form (or could fail to form) and a wide variety of possible interactive effects, probability distribution functions, and so on. Our only constraint would be that our universe has to be
possible.
Does this sound like fun to you? Or does it seem like a massive waste of time? Thought-provoking and revelatory, or frustratingly stupid and beside the point? Welcome to metaphysics--when you abandon reality, you can say all kinds of wacky things and no one can prove you wrong! This is why I don't understand why religion and science are so often depicted as being at odds--they're both ways of helping us make sense of reality by reducing the possibility space. All things considered, I think religion bears the much heavier load--science just has to deal with our universe, but religion has to deal with nonsense like this!
The fact that they can be described by mathematical laws and that those laws have coincided with reality creates the necessity.
Only in our universe. Which, for people like you and me, does not immediately imply that there are other universes. But for those who do, it seems to me that it is rather important that they explain (1)
why universal laws would be different, anywhere, and (2) why they would only differ in ways that worked to help explain "fine tuning" that is entirely a construct of the model.
In any case--once you start talking about locations that can necessarily not be observed, you can make any predictions you want. Saying it's "unlikely" is meaningless because it's completely outside the realm of our experience. Again, things like this are warning signs that you have left the confines of scientific inquiry. But notice that I didn't even propose that mathematical laws had to be abandoned, just that they could be immeasurably more complex than our own. In fact, as we learn more about the universe, our own fundamental laws seem to have grown in complexity, rather than becoming simpler. Since any "true model" of the universe would necessarily already explain all present phenomena, either (1) there is a simpler (easier to calculate) model, but for some reason we haven't found it yet, (2) it's already out there (maybe as a form of string theory), (3) the universe isn't governed by any one mathematical model, or (4) There is a "true" model, and it is
at least as complex as quantum mechanics + special relativity. Given that physicists have had no problem assuming unseen entities to make their theories simpler for at probably a good century, I think (1) is probably the least likely, but I can't rule
any of them out.
How about the field of drug discovery? In physics we probably wouldn't figure out the most optimal design for a trebuchet by lining up millions of models, testing them one by one, and then retesting again with different groups, but that type of thing is extremely common in biology because even though we know the underlying processes, they can't help us usefully predict organic behavior. This concept is known as
the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. To be clear, I'm not anti-math--quite the opposite--but even if you believe, as I do, that it all ultimately does come down to math, that's (1) not provable, and (2) doesn't actually help us in a wide variety of practical problems.
(continued in next post due to length)
Why are you so evasive?
