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At Mind Matters News: Can there be a general theory for fine-tuning?

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If you make a bowl of alphabet soup and the letters arrange themselves and say, good morning, that is specified. What are the probabilities?:

Robert J. Marks: Ola, you came up with a general theory. We talk about in physics, for example, a theory of everything. It turns out the fine tuning is something ubiquitous in our universe. It occurs in biology, chemistry, and physics and cosmology, the specific area of physics.

The question is, is there a general theory, a general way that we can look at fine tuning across all of these disciplines? You’ve done that, by something called a specificity function, I believe. Could you explain the specificity function at as a high a level as you possibly can, so that we can understand what’s going on here about your general theory?

Ola Hössjer: We introduced this idea in my joint paper with Steinar Thorvaldsen originally. I have an ongoing project now with Daniel [Diaz], where we elaborate on this idea more. We start with a sample space of all the possible outcomes of a certain algorithm. This could be the algorithm on generating the universe.

Robert J. Marks: Okay. An algorithm for generating the universe is, how would you describe that as a theory or a model of by which the universe came into creation?

Ola Hössjer: If the universe was randomly generated, the different constants of nature could have different possible values with different probabilities. The sample space is a collection of all possible outputs of the algorithm…

News, “Can there be a general theory for fine-tuning?” at Mind Matters News

See also: Thorvaldsen, Steinar, and Ola Hössjer. “Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 501 (2020)

Takehome: Swedish mathematician Ola Hössjer, who is working on a general theory of fine tuning, sees the beauty of mathematics in the fact that seemingly unrelated features in cosmology and biology can be modeled using similar concepts.

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