Canadian cosmologist Don Page has written, “In summary, I think the evidence from fine tuning is ambiguous, since the probabilities depend on the models.”
Some have questioned this, and I asked physicist Rob Sheldon who writes to say,
Don Page is exactly correct. Many, though not all, of these fine-tuning arguments have no way to measure the domain, and without that, specifying the range doesn’t turn it into fine tuning.
Let us suppose that your name is Robert Green, and you Google your name and find out that there are exactly 256 Robert Greens in the phone book. Is this evidence of fine tuning or not?
You know the range–256–but you don’t know the domain–the number of potential Robert Greens in the universe. Now suppose your name were Englebert Humperdinck, and you discovered there’s another one in the phone book. Would that be fine tuning? Let us further suppose that this EH was listed as living in a house that you moved out of 15 years ago, would that remove the fine tuning? So you see, it really does matter how big the domain is, how big is the pool of potential-EH minus defined-EH.
In the same way, when someone tells you that the proton mass to electron mass ratio must be accurate to 3 parts per thousand or else life is impossible, is that fine tuning or not? IF it is 3 parts per million for every other physical constant, then this one might not be so finely tuned after all. But wait, parts-per-million of what? It has to be compared to something, and by their nature, physical constants are in different units which makes it hard to intercompare them.
Now when the expansion energy of the universe (kinetic energy) equals the gravitational potential energy of the universe to one part in 10^60, that is measured in the same energy units. That’s clearly fine tuning or a law, but not an accident. So there are valid examples of fine tuning, which may turn
into some deep physical insight in the future, but for the moment can only be described as not-coincidence. But there are more invalid fine tuning examples being advertised than there are valid ones, which was Don Page’s point.
Thoughts?
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