Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Category

Fine tuning

Recent finding: The “water world” exoplanets are not habitable ocean planets

So, it turns out, even if there IS lots of water in a solar system, that doesn't add up to habitability either. Talk about Rare Earth and Privileged Planet. Read More ›

Logic & First Principles, 19: Are we part of a Boltzmann brain grand delusion world (or the like)?

In looking at time (no. 18) we saw how a suggested form of multiverse is one in which sub-cosmi are speculated — there is no observational base, this is philosophy dressed up in a lab coat — to pop up as fluctuations, exhibiting their own “big bang” events and timelines: However, it was not as simple as that. Wikipedia, speaking against known inclinations, summarised: a Boltzmann brain is a self-aware entity that arises due to extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic equilibrium [–> the predominant, statistically overwhelming group of accessible micro-states for a relevant entity in statistical thermodynamics]. For example, in a homogeneous Newtonian soup, theoretically by sheer chance all the atoms could bounce off and Read More ›

At Forbes: Fine-tuning really is a problem for cosmology, about which nothing can be done

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. Read More ›

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. Read More ›

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.” Read More ›

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. Read More ›

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. Read More ›

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. Read More ›

“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? Read More ›

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” continue to pile up… In yet another article in the same issue as Canup’s review, earth scientist Tim Elliott observes that the degree and kinds of complexity and fine-tuning required by lunar origin models appear to be increasing at an exponential rate. Among lunar origin researchers, he notes, “the sequence of conditions that currently seems necessary in these revised versions of lunar formation have led Read More ›

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. Read More ›