So here’s where it stands: They’re compelled to stumble and make up nonsense and the rest of us are compelled to support them, cheer them on, and accept the dismal outcome, forever if need be.
Fine tuning
Gaia needs a reboot and New Scientist is here to explain
A machine built from scavenged parts from Britain’s Royal Air Force started randomly but ended in equilibrium. Can it boost the Gaia cult?
Are the best measurements to date deepening the “cosmological crisis”?
Two things many cosmologists would like to get rid of are the Big Bang and apparent fine-tuning of the universe. Telling a different story is difficult mainly due to lack of evidence for a different story but they can make do with discrepancies. But then maybe the years have made some of us cynical.
Templeton winner Marcelo Gleiser endorses the Rare Earth principle
Gleiser: So when people talk about Copernicus and Copernicanism—the ‘principle of mediocrity’ that states we should expect to be average and typical, I say, “You know what? It’s time to get beyond that.”
Our superiors explain why “people” believe in pseudoscience
Elite reasoning is interesting. People who see no evidence for design in nature are quite prepared to believe that interstellar object Oumuamua is an alien spacecraft and that an evidence-free multiverse must really exist. And no evidence for fine-tuning of our universe for life is really evidence.
An astrophysicist makes clear why a multiverse MUST exist
You should be suspicious of any science claim that could have been thought up as a sheer work of the imagination. The multiverse is just such a concept: Somewhere, everything and its opposite happens or doesn’t, in an infinity of infinities. No math needed.
Hossenfelder: Now they are marketing non-discoveries as discoveries
If Hossenfelder means that it won’t work scientifically, she is correct. But “won’t work” can be construed in other ways. In the age of the multiverse and “ET’s gotta be out there,” it is quite possible for something that is entirely without evidence to retain a place as science. Thus, it should easily be possible for non-discoveries to be marketed as discoveries.
“Very few” exoplanets have strong magnetic fields like Earth’s
This means that the search for extraterrestrial life should focus on planets with strong magnetic fields. Meanwhile, why is it that a thousand coincidences pointing in the same direction never seem to add up to a pattern, just something to explain away?
Hugh Ross: The fine-tuning that enabled our life-friendly moon creates discomfort
Astronomer Robin Canup has spent fifteen years developing models that seem to demonstrate that, whether it is a desired finding or not: Such fine-tuning was not lost on Canup, who remarked in a recent Nature review article, “Current theories on the formation of the Moon owe too much to cosmic coincidences.”4 Indeed, the required “coincidences” […]
Sabine Hossenfelder: Cosmic inflation is overblown
he author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, makes clear that cosmic inflation was intended to deal with evidence for fine-tuning, which she considers a “waste of time.” But, as she shows, the cosmology has gone nowhere.
Uses and misuses of the Anthropic Principle
Theories multiply because the facts favor fine-tuning of the universe.
Physicist: How the multiverse can save the soul of physics
A physicst calls it quantum monism but he more or less means the multiverse. The problem, as he sees it, is that “the laws of physics appear to be finely tuned to permit the existence of intelligent beings who can discover those laws—a coincidence that demands explanation”. However, if we accept that there are zillions […]
Logic and First Principles, 13: The challenge of creeping scientism (and of linked nominalism)
There is a creeping scientism in our intellectual climate. We have been led to think that Science is the gold standard of reliable, substantial knowledge and that institutional science and its leaders are the curators of knowledge. This is of course deeply connected to the wider domination of evolutionary materialistic scientism, which compounds the above […]
Researchers: Habitable zone is probably narrower than hoped
From Universe Today: In addition, research into how life evolved on Earth has shown that water alone does not guarantee life – nor, for that matter, does the presence of oxygen gas.
What would a multiverse really be like?
The multiverse is not a logical deduction from the state of our universe. It is an attempt to short circuit discussion of apparent fine-tuning by appealing to the idea that no conclusions can be drawn because there is an infinite series we do not know about.