Good and bad arguments for fine-tuning?

_{Denyse O'Leary

August 12, 2015

Fine tuning, News}

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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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Comments

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?
I thought I understood fine-tuning, but this Robert Green/Englebert Humperdinck example is confusing me. Exactly what is (possibly) fine-tuned in the above? Does Sheldon have in mind something like the following? Say my name is Robert Green and I show up for my first day of college, and find that my roommate's name is also Robert Green. I might suspect that someone had "fine-tuned" the room assignments so as to put us together. If my (and my roommate's) names were Englebert Humperdinck, then my suspicion would be stronger. Of course, if it turns out that roommates were assigned alphabetically, then that's all out the window.daveS_{August 12, 2015
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The fine-tuning argument is a terrible argument for ID. Look at a simple transistor in a circuit. It's biased by some resistors to conduct a certain amount of current which leaves parts of the circuit with voltages very close to what a "designer" intended. Now look at another board with the same circuitry. The voltages are very close, but don't exactly match. About neither board could you say: "If I changed the value of the resistor by a very small amount, it would no longer work". We have evidence that shows that conclusion about the boards to be wrong, but we don't have another universe to compare ours with that had values that were slightly different.Carpathian_{August 12, 2015
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The slightest change in the mass or charge of the electron would be disastrous, IMO.Mapou_{August 12, 2015
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Here is the paper that Dr. Strauss used to refute the conjecture of a 'bouncing' universe:
Evidence For Flat Universe - Boomerang Project http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/boomerang-flat.html http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/images1/omegamomegal3.gif updated boomerang - picture https://uncommondescent.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/t1_cos_combined1.gif
At the 3:44 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Gordon states this in regards to the 'bouncing' universe model:
"If there were a pre big bang state, and you had some bounces then that (1 in 10^10^120 initial entropy) fine tuning gets even finer as you go backwards. If you can imagine such a thing." Dr. Bruce Gordon - The Absurdity of Inflation, String Theory and The Multiverse - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff_sNyGNSko
as to this quote from the article in the OP:
Sean, at one point your referred to some naive estimate of the very low probability of the flatness of the universe, but then you said that we now know the probability of flatness is very near unity. This is indeed true, as Stephen Hawking and I showed long ago (“How Probable Is Inflation?” Nuclear Physics B298, 789-809, 1988) when we used the canonical measure for classical universes, but one could get other probabilities by using other measures from other models. In summary, I think the evidence from fine tuning is ambiguous, since the probabilities depend on the models. Whether or not the universe had a beginning also is ambiguous,
The only thing that is truly ambiguous is when he tries to invoke the now discredited inflation model to try to 'explain away' why the universe is as 'flat and round' as it is. Inflation, besides being empirically embarrassed in the cosmic dust incident, also suffers the embarrassing difficulty of winding up in epistemological failure.
Why converge? - Jun 22, 2015 Excerpt: “The biggest thing that helped was the BICEP measurement,” he says. “Inflationists came out of the woodwork and said, yay, we were right…then they realised they’d forgotten about dust.” This led people to the realisation, he says, that even though hundreds or thousands of people are working on an idea, it may still be wrong. This episode “made people aware we need to be more objective about what we’re doing,” http://blog.physicsworld.com/2015/06/22/why-converge/ Cosmic inflation is dead, long live cosmic inflation - 25 September 2014 Excerpt: (Inflation) theory, the most widely held of cosmological ideas about the growth of our universe after the big bang, explains a number of mysteries, including why the universe is surprisingly flat and so smoothly distributed, or homogeneous.,,, Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, who helped develop inflationary theory but is now scathing of it, says this is potentially a blow for the theory, but that it pales in significance with inflation's other problems. Meet the multiverse Steinhardt says the idea that inflationary theory produces any observable predictions at all – even those potentially tested by BICEP2 – is based on a simplification of the theory that simply does not hold true. "The deeper problem is that once inflation starts, it doesn't end the way these simplistic calculations suggest," he says. "Instead, due to quantum physics it leads to a multiverse where the universe breaks up into an infinite number of patches. The patches explore all conceivable properties as you go from patch to patch. So that means it doesn't make any sense to say what inflation predicts, except to say it predicts everything. If it's physically possible, then it happens in the multiverse someplace Steinhardt says the point of inflation was to explain a remarkably simple universe. "So the last thing in the world you should be doing is introducing a multiverse of possibilities to explain such a simple thing," he says. "I think it's telling us in the clearest possible terms that we should be able to understand this and when we understand it it's going to come in a model that is extremely simple and compelling. And we thought inflation was it – but it isn't." http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26272-cosmic-inflation-is-dead-long-live-cosmic-inflation.html?page=1#.VCajrGl0y00
In further regards to his claim that the 'evidence from fine tuning is ambiguous, since the probabilities depend on the models' and his use of the discredited inflation model to try to say that example of fine tuning in particular is 'ambiguous', I would also like to add that the evidence for the fine tuning of the 'flatness' and 'roundness' of the universe is far less ambiguous than he apparently would like to hold. The reason that I hold that the evidence for the 'flatness' fine tuning example that he used is far less ambiguous than he holds is that the very nature of geometric 'flatness', (and also of 'roundness'), severely constrains the competeing models that can be used to successfully address those particular examples of fine tuning. To put it plainly, there are a virtual infinity of shapes that can exist compared to the flat and round shapes that we actually do observe for the universe. Moreover, there is certainly nothing inherent within naturalism itself that would compel, or favor, any particular shape over any other particular shape. Therefore, when flatness and roundness are appropriately modeled in that proper context (i.e. modeled as to, given naturalism, what the shapes could have been compared to what they actually are), then there is nothing ambiguous whatsoever to the fine-tuning example of 'flatness', (and roundness), that he himself used. Of supplemental note: In my mind, I know for a fact what 'flat' is like. Yet, besides not being able to account for the flatness of the universe, materialists have no way to account for why I can intuitively grasp what flat is like with my mind, (much less can they account for my conscious mind in the first place). To borrow from C.S. Lewis's quote from his argument for objective morality:
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?” - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
And as with the straight line of objective morality, so the same puzzle exists for why the universe is flat instead of 'crooked': supplemental notes:
"The Universe today is actually very close to the most unlikely state of all, absolute flatness. And that means it must have been born in an even flatter state, as Dicke and Peebles, two of the Princeton astronomers involved in the discovery of the 3 K background radiation, pointed out in 1979. Finding the Universe in a state of even approximate flatness today is even less likely than finding a perfectly sharpened pencil balancing on its point for millions of years, for, as Dicke and Peebles pointed out, any deviation of the Universe from flatness in the Big Bang would have grown, and grown markedly, as the Universe expanded and aged. Like the pencil balanced on its point and given the tiniest nudges, the Universe soon shifts away from perfect flatness." ~ John Gribbin, In Search of the Big Bang Job 38:4-5 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? Illustration of the 'roundness' of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) http://new-universe.org/zenphoto/albums/Chapter4/Illustrations/Abrams47.jpg The Cosmic Background Radiation Excerpt: These fluctuations are extremely small, representing deviations from the average of only about 1/100,000 of the average temperature of the observed background radiation. The highly isotropic nature of the cosmic background radiation indicates that the early stages of the Universe were almost completely uniform. This raises two problems for (a naturalistic understanding of) the big bang theory. First, when we look at the microwave background coming from widely separated parts of the sky it can be shown that these regions are too separated to have been able to communicate with each other even with signals traveling at light velocity. Thus, how did they know to have almost exactly the same temperature? This general problem is called the horizon problem. Second, the present Universe is homogenous and isotropic, but only on very large scales. For scales the size of superclusters and smaller the luminous matter in the universe is quite lumpy, as illustrated in the following figure. ,,, Thus, the discovery of small deviations from smoothness (anisotopies) in the cosmic microwave background is welcome, for it provides at least the possibility for the seeds around which structure formed in the later Universe. However, as we shall see, we are still far from a quantitative understanding of how this came to be. http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/cosmology/cbr.html Proverbs 8:26-27 While as yet He had not made the earth or the fields, or the primeval dust of the world. When He prepared the heavens, I was there, when He drew a circle on the face of the deep, Job 26:10 He has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness.
bornagain77_{August 12, 2015
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as to this quote from the article in the OP:
"On the issue of whether our universe had a beginning, besides not believing that this is at all relevant to the issue of whether or not God exists, I agreed almost entirely with Sean’s points rather than yours, Bill, on this issue. We simply do not know whether or not our universe had a beginning, but there are certainly models, such as Sean’s with Jennifer Chen (hep-th/0410270 and gr-qc/0505037), that do not have a beginning."
That claim is simply disingenuous to the empirical evidence we now have in hand. The evidences we now have from cosmology, physics, and mathematics all strongly favor a definite beginning for this universe in the finite past:
Evidences For The Big Bang - Michael Strauss – video (4:50 minute mark) https://vimeo.com/9195703 Evidence Supporting the Big Bang http://www.astronomynotes.com/cosmolgy/s7.htm International team strengthens Big Bang Theory Jun 06, 2013 Excerpt: The fundamental observations that corroborate the Big Bang are the cosmic microwave radiation and the chemical abundances of the light elements described in the Big Bang nucleosynthesis theory. "The predictions of Big Bang nucleosynthesis have been one of the main successes of the standard Big Bang model," said lead author Lind. "Our findings remove much of the stark tension between 6Li and 7Li abundances in stars and standard BBN, even opening up the door for a full reconciliation. This further consolidates a model resting heavily on the pillars of the cosmic microwave background and the expanding Universe." http://phys.org/news/2013-06-international-team-big-theory.html#nwlt "Every solution to the equations of general relativity guarantees the existence of a singular boundary for space and time in the past." (Hawking, Penrose, Ellis) - 1970 Big Bang Theory - An Overview of the main evidence Excerpt: Steven Hawking, George Ellis, and Roger Penrose turned their attention to the Theory of Relativity and its implications regarding our notions of time. In 1968 and 1970, they published papers in which they extended Einstein's Theory of General Relativity to include measurements of time and space.1, 2 According to their calculations, time and space had a finite beginning that corresponded to the origin of matter and energy."3 Steven W. Hawking, George F.R. Ellis, "The Cosmic Black-Body Radiation and the Existence of Singularities in our Universe," Astrophysical Journal, 152, (1968) pp. 25-36. Steven W. Hawking, Roger Penrose, "The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, series A, 314 (1970) pp. 529-548. "When this paper was published (referring to the circa 1970 Hawking, Penrose paper) we could only prove General Relativity's reliability to 1% precision, today we can prove it to 15 places of decimal." Hugh Ross PhD. Astrophysics - quote taken from 8:40 mark of the following link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF1xSErF_f4 Mathematics of Eternity Prove The Universe Must Have Had A Beginning - April 2012 Excerpt: Cosmologists use the mathematical properties of eternity to show that although universe may last forever, it must have had a beginning.,,, They go on to show that cyclical universes and universes of eternal inflation both expand in this way. So they cannot be eternal in the past and must therefore have had a beginning. "Although inflation may be eternal in the future, it cannot be extended indefinitely to the past," they say. They treat the emergent model of the universe differently, showing that although it may seem stable from a classical point of view, it is unstable from a quantum mechanical point of view. "A simple emergent universe model...cannot escape quantum collapse," they say. The conclusion is inescapable. "None of these scenarios can actually be past-eternal," say Mithani and Vilenkin. Since the observational evidence is that our universe is expanding, then it must also have been born in the past. A profound conclusion (albeit the same one that lead to the idea of the big bang in the first place). http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27793/ “All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.” - Alexander Vilenkin - Cosmologist - Tufts University - paper delivered at atheist Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday party (paper was characterized as 'Worst Birthday Present Ever') https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/vilenkins-verdict-all-the-evidence-we-have-says-that-the-universe-had-a-beginning/ "The prediction of the standard model that the universe began to exist remains today as secure as ever—indeed, more secure, in light of the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem and that prediction’s corroboration by the repeated and often imaginative attempts to falsify it. The person who believes that the universe began to exist remains solidly and comfortably within mainstream science." - William Lane Craig http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6115 "It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can long longer hide behind the possibility of a past eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning." Alexander Vilenkin - Many Worlds In One - Pg. 176
Of note to Carroll's model in particular:
The Universe Is Not Eternal - Johanan Raatz - March 1, 2014 Excerpt: One thing known for certain about quantum gravity is something called the holographic principle. Precisely put, the holographic principle tells us that the entropy of a region of space (measured in terms of information) is directly proportional to a quarter of its surface area. The volume of this region is then actually a hologram of this information on its surface. Except this tells us something interesting about the universe as well. Entropy, or the amount of disorder present, always increases with time. In fact not only is this law inviolate, it is also how the flow of time is defined. Without entropy, there is no way to discern forwards and backwards in time. But if the holographic principle links the universe’s entropy and its horizon area then going back in time, all of space-time eventually vanishes to nothing at zero entropy. Thus Carroll’s argument is unsound. We already have enough knowledge about what happens beyond the BVG theorem that Craig cites. The universe is not eternal but created. It is interesting to note that this also undermines claims made by atheists like Hawking and Krauss that the universe could have fluctuated into existence from nothing. Their argument rests on the assumption that there was a pre-existent zero-point field or ZPF. The only trouble is that the physics of a ZPF requires a space-time to exist in. No space-time means no zero-point field, and without a zero-point field, the universe can not spontaneously fluctuate into existence. http://blog.proofdirectory.org/2014/03/universe-not-eternal/
as to this quote from the article in the OP:
"I myself have also favored a bounce model in which there is something like a quantum superposition of semiclassical spacetimes (though I don’t really think quantum theory gives probabilities for histories, just for sentient experiences), in most of which the universe contracts from past infinite time and then has a bounce to expand forever. In as much as these spacetimes are approximately classical throughout, there is a time in each that goes from minus infinity to plus infinity."
He may personally favor bounce models but the empirical evidence itself says otherwise.
Refutation of Bouncing (Oscillating) Universe - Michael Strauss – video (12:00 minute mark) https://vimeo.com/9195703
bornagain77_{August 12, 2015
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News I suggest first focus on what has to be in place to found a cosmos that supports C-Chemisry, aqueous medium cell based life, especially what goes into water and its astonishing properties. From the roots of physics on up. BTW don't overlook the information content involved, there is a whole physics of information linked to the generally understood forces and stochastic phenomena of molecules . . . lucky noise and/or reaction kinetics in warm ponds, volcano vents under the sea or comet cores etc is not a plausible source for FSCO/I. Next, I suggest the 101 here, as a backgrounder: https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/id-foundations-6-introducing-the-cosmological-design-inference/ (Maybe here on too, which starts with basic astronomy in a nutshell.) Third, glance at Collins, especially (yes, 80 pp): http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Collins-The-Teleological-Argument.pdf Luke Barnes too (yes, 76 pp): http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1112/1112.4647v1.pdf That I think will give some context. Let me add that if there are superlaws that force the physics to the sort of exactitude detected that itself speaks to higher order fine tuning. (It is not so easy to get rid of this issue, especially in a world where we do not experience a Boltzmann Brain type cosmos.) Also, John Leslie:
One striking thing about the fine tuning is that a force strength or a particle mass often appears to require accurate tuning for several reasons at once. Look at electromagnetism. Electromagnetism seems to require tuning for there to be any clear-cut distinction between matter and radiation; for stars to burn neither too fast nor too slowly for life’s requirements; for protons to be stable; for complex chemistry to be possible; for chemical changes not to be extremely sluggish; and for carbon synthesis inside stars (carbon being quite probably crucial to life). Universes all obeying the same fundamental laws could still differ in the strengths of their physical forces, as was explained earlier, and random variations in electromagnetism from universe to universe might then ensure that it took on any particular strength sooner or later. Yet how could they possibly account for the fact that the same one strength satisfied many potentially conflicting requirements, each of them a requirement for impressively accurate tuning? [Our Place in the Cosmos, 1998]
And again:
. . . the need for such explanations does not depend on any estimate of how many universes would be observer-permitting, out of the entire field of possible universes. Claiming that our universe is ‘fine tuned for observers’, we base our claim on how life’s evolution would apparently have been rendered utterly impossible by comparatively minor alterations in physical force strengths, elementary particle masses and so forth. There is no need for us to ask whether very great alterations in these affairs would have rendered it fully possible once more, let alone whether physical worlds conforming to very different laws could have been observer-permitting without being in any way fine tuned. Here it can be useful to think of a fly on a wall, surrounded by an empty region. A bullet hits the fly Two explanations suggest themselves. Perhaps many bullets are hitting the wall or perhaps a marksman fired the bullet. There is no need to ask whether distant areas of the wall, or other quite different walls, are covered with flies so that more or less any bullet striking there would have hit one. The important point is that the local area contains just the one fly.
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