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Post by abacus9900 on Oct 12, 2011 12:26:50 GMT 1
Apparently the cosmological constant is so incredibly fine tuned to allow life to arise that the chances of it occuring by chance are vanishingly small. The only reasonable hypothesis to account for this is that our universe has to be one of many in which the odds of something like the CC has a statistical chance of occurring. It's a bit like going into a tailor's shop who only have one size of suit and expecting it to fit the first person who goes in - highly unlikely. Whereas, stocking many different sizes would tend to allow better 'fits.' For 'fits' read life.
Can this idea of a multiverse be really true to account for the incredible fine tuning of the cosmological constant, or are there viable alternatives to this view?
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Post by marchesarosa on Oct 12, 2011 13:13:20 GMT 1
Welcome back, abacus!
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Post by abacus9900 on Oct 12, 2011 17:18:22 GMT 1
Thank you. I just hope some of the others will return.
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Post by eamonnshute on Oct 12, 2011 20:34:12 GMT 1
This argument suffers from the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacyYou claim that the purpose of the universe is to produce life, but if the constant had a different value then it would produce gokine instead, and you would then claim that gokine was the purpose of the tuning. (Gokine is a phenomenon which is just as interesting as Life, but it does not exist in this universe). For your prediction to have any value must make it before you do the experiment, not after you know the result! How do you know that the constant is actually a variable? Perhaps it is impossible for it to have any other value, and I see no reason to suppose that any other value is possible. |
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Post by StuartG on Oct 12, 2011 21:53:27 GMT 1
Eamonn says "You claim that the purpose of the universe is to produce life" if that is so Abacus, I bet the Universe doesn't know that. However if You believe that the Universe is older than ~13.5 Byrs, is there some research to show that this might be a possibility?
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Post by abacus9900 on Oct 13, 2011 10:29:20 GMT 1
Well, the chance that any initially random set of constants would correspond to the set of values that we find in our universe is very small, in fact, it has been found that the fine tuning (when measured) extends to 120 decimal places! I don't claim to be an expert, however, it seems to me and indeed some cosmologists that this degree of fine tuning seems highly unlikely, to say the least, in a universe where the initial conditions would have to be so incredibly exact to produce life. People who use this argument to support the existence of a Creator are misguided I think because they are not allowing for other possibilities such as the many universes one so it is not necessarily a questions imbuing the universe with any particular purpose; it is suggesting that the mathematical possibilities of producing a universe like ours, with such great fine tuning, is are more realistic when considered in the context of an 'ensemble' of universes. Certainly, this seems to be a more logical approach than simply accepting that pure chance was able to overcome the billions upon billions of odds against life being able to arise.
It's interesting that this idea of a multiverse also crops up in some interpretations of quantum mechanics so that the concept seems to to persist when we seek to find a solution to some of the deepest mysteries of reality. This is philosophy, true, but science originally sprang from philosophical questions posed by thinking people of the past.
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