From Geraint Lewis at New Scientist:
A fundamental concept is coming back to the fore – that the universe may be fine-tuned for life. The idea is that physical laws and constants are inexplicably just right to support it; any different and we wouldn’t be around to ponder this.
The notion that this might be so has been around for decades, but has sat on the sidelines, considered idle speculation or even outside the bounds of science.
This article is carefully written, so as to undermine the facts and promote multiverse blather. Otherwise, it would not be in New Scientist at all.
Underlying all of these potential explanations are serious philosophical questions. Is adopting the multiverse as a solution to fine-tuning even science as we traditionally understand it, given that we can never experience other universes and hence never really test this explanation experimentally? And would this new definition of science, with the unseen and the untestable, bring it too close to religion for the comfort of most?
Does anyone use a standard like that to determine what to believe about anything else whatever? If you get coshed on the head and have your wallet stolen, and end up in the ER, will you tell the police it was an accident?
The apparent fine-tuning of the physical laws for complexity and life remains one of the peculiarities of our universe. We might be simply part of a much larger, much weirder multiverse, but to adopt this view of the cosmos might mean we have to change our notion of what science is – and that would be hard. Expect a lot more debate.More.
There is no evidence whatever for universes other than our own. New Scientist is the Pravda of science. Increasingly, popular science news is becoming Pravda vs. samizdat,
See also: What becomes of science when the evidence does not matter?