See what pretzels people make of themselves, to deny fine-tuning of the universe for life?

_{Denyse O'Leary

February 23, 2015

Fine tuning, Multiverse, News, Physics}

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To try to test how fine-tuned Hoyle’s resonance is, Meissner’s team ran a series of simulations with different average quark masses and with different fine structure constant values. As described in a paper published in December in the journal Science Bulletin, they found that if they gave either constant a value around two to three percent larger or smaller than its measured value, dying stars could still produce enough carbon to account for the amount we see on Earth. Previously, other groups found similar results for the fine structure constant, but Meissner’s group was the first to study what happens if the quarks’ mass varies.

Meissner acknowledges that the research does not answer why the values are what they are. To explain this, some physicists invoke a concept called the “multiverse,” in which “parallel” universes with many different possible values of the constants exist, and we, unsurprisingly, find ourselves in one in which complex life can evolve. Meissner says his team’s work “gives some credit” to this concept, but does not explain how the many universes would be generated.

“This paper strengthens the case for the fine-tuning of the universe,” agrees Luke Barnes, an astrophysicist at the University of Sydney. Meissner’s team’s model of the carbon atom is more advanced than previous efforts, he said, especially because they can change the mass of the quarks.

Then we hear, “Others are less impressed.”

Why? Because there could be universes with different parameters from ours that could support types of life we can’t even imagine:

“Maybe if you change the quark masses not by three percent but by 50 percent you could end up with a situation where life as we know it couldn’t exist, but life as we don’t know it could exist,” he said.

In short, if we can just leave evidence out of it, we can dispense with fine-tuning.

See also: Copernicus, you are not going to believe who is using your name. Or how.

and How crazy it all gets when we ignore evidence in favour of speculation

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Comments

Multiverse Hypothesis doesn't solve Fine Tuning, this article explains why http://sententias.org/2013/01/19/do-multiverse-scenarios-solve-the-problem-of-fine-tuning/JimFit_{February 24, 2015
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"If there were 400 trillion mines and one had diamonds in it, you wouldn’t say those 400 trillion mines were collectively fine tuned for diamond mining" Heck yea that one mine is fine tuned for diamond mining. Incredibly fine tuned. But only 1 out of 400,000,000,000,000? yawn. Our live universe is 1 out of 400,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 plus plus dead ones. That is REALLY fine tuned. Only way to escape is on the crazy train to the Multiverse. Fine tuned crazy train btw.ppolish_{February 24, 2015
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CHartsil okay there is no design, can you please prove me that something random DID occurred in this chain of events that leads to life to support that you are a random cosmic mistake without purpose? I mean, if the Universe wasn't created and there wasn't intention for life to unfold it was popped out of Nothingness, assembled itself through Randomness and we are here due to Luck, i don't think Science works with Nothingness Randomness and Luck but with Determinism (cause and effect), if you are truly a scientist you should know that there is always a cause but you can't have infinite past causes since the Universe began. A transcendent cause is needed and that transcendent cause is a Consciousness which we call God. I believe that our Consciousness is transcendent and that precedes Materialism (the Physical Universe) and i have reasons to believe that since now we have evidence from quantum physics that this happens. Even the Science you are doing demands a conscious observer that's why i laugh when Atheists use the Minds of the Scientists to disprove a Mind that created the Universe, it is a paradox since every argument about the Universe needs a Mind to exist. Now remember, if you say that the Universe doesn't need the God of the Gaps argument you are implying the Infinity of the Gaps argument, if you want the Universe to be Eternal then there is no way to understand it ever so it is hypocritical to say God is not a useful scenario but infinite causes are useful. At least with God the Universe has a purpose AND we can hope to understand it completely since God is not attached to the Physical world.JimFit_{February 24, 2015
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CHartsil, it seems that we agree that “I’m here ain’t I” is no valid rebuttal to the fine-tuning of either spaceships nor universes.Box_{February 24, 2015
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It's not irrelevant because you're comparing a structure of known design to the universe which is speculated to be designed.CHartsil_{February 24, 2015
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CHartsil, the fact that a spaceship is designed is irrelevant to my point that the "I'm here ain't I" answer doesn't make sense.Box_{February 24, 2015
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The problem with your analogy being that spaceships ARE designed to support life and we know this through actually designing them. In fact, except for a few tragedies, most of the spaceships ever built have successfully supported life. So that's a high percentage of vessels known to be designed to support life vs one planet speculated to be part of a universe designed to support life.CHartsil_{February 24, 2015
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CHartsil, suppose someone with amnesia wakes up in a spaceship. However he has no idea what a spaceship is or that there are situations other than being in a spaceship. One day he contemplates the question "why is the spaceship fine-tuned for my existence"? How much sense would it make if he comes up with the answer: "asking why is question begging, if it didn’t allow for life I simply wouldn’t know it in the first place" ; see #7.Box_{February 24, 2015
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"You obviously just don’t like where the sensitivity analysis — a standard investigative procedure — points" >If things were different, they would be different. That's all that's been posted in defense of fine tuning thus far. How would one even go about falsifying the claim that the universe is fine tuned for life when it can be declared so because of one single planet that can support some life some of the time?CHartsil_{February 24, 2015
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CH, the body of physics anchored in observation is there. You obviously just don't like where the sensitivity analysis -- a standard investigative procedure -- points. KFkairosfocus_{February 24, 2015
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"Now go do an experiment and give us some hard concrete evidence to back it up." I'm the skeptic here. All I've seen in favor of fine tuning is "If the universe were different, it would be different" and ppolish admitting that the universe will be considered to be fine tuned no matter what. "If you are happy believing in chance, then that’s your choice, but others of us have a more difficult ramping up our faith and chalking it all up to the god of Chance based on our experience." You’re looking back over a series of events that, together, are highly unlikely and saying that it was impossible. Shuffle 1,024 decks of cards together then deal them out. Now calculate the odds of the order you just dealt. It’s more than mind blowing and you just did it. "I’m always amazed at the double standard atheists use when dealing with miracles." Miracle? Life appeared once in an ocean of planets https://www.facebook.com/groups/CreationEvolutionDebate/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/IntelligentDesignOfficialPage/CHartsil_{February 24, 2015
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Chartsil @ 10
I’m arguing that there’s no fine tuning in the first place.
Great hypothesis. Now go do an experiment and give us some hard concrete evidence to back it up. Yes, you can say that we would not be here if it is not fine tuned for life, but like Jim pointed out, that doesn't automatically mean that our universe it happened by chance. There are other explanations that could just as easily explain the data - Intelligent Design being one of them. The only reason you reject that is because you are an atheist scientist and that explanation is outside the bounds of your worldview. You have arbitrarily limited yourself to totally natural explanations - by choice. And your commitment to your worldview forces you to believe in wildly amazing and miraculous things - like "It just happened by chance." So, even though the universe is fit for life, you allow only one explanation for that - CHANCE. If you are happy believing in chance, then that's your choice, but others of us have a more difficult ramping up our faith and chalking it all up to the god of Chance based on our experience. When it comes down to it, you simply do not want to see any evidence for intelligent design, so no matter what, you are happy, as an atheist scientist, to place your faith in Chance, because of course, no one can prove that it couldn't happen. I'm always amazed at the double standard atheists use when dealing with miracles. They have no problem with miracles as long as God is not involved.tjguy_{February 24, 2015
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I'm an atheist scientist, I don't accept it. You can say "If things were different, then things would have been different" all day long. They still weren't, and there's no reason they should have been. If there were millions of planets with intelligent life on them bombarding us with radio signals, would you consider the universe more or less fine tuned for life?CHartsil_{February 24, 2015
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I’m arguing that there’s no fine tuning in the first place.
Of course there is and even Atheists Scientists accept it. Wilczek: life appears to depend upon delicate coincidences that we have not been able to explain. The broad outlines of that situation have been apparent for many decades. When less was known, it seemed reasonable to hope that better understanding of symmetry and dynamics would clear things up. Now that hope seems much less reasonable. The happy coincidences between life?s requirements and nature?s choices of parameter values might be just a series of flukes, but one could be forgiven for beginning to suspect that something deeper is at work. Hawking: ?Most of the fundamental constants in our theories appear fine-tuned in the sense that if they were altered by only modest amounts, the universe would be qualitatively different, and in many cases unsuitable for the development of life. ? The emergence of the complex structures capable of supporting intelligent observers seems to be very fragile. The laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned, and very little in physical law can be altered without destroying the possibility of the development of life as we know it.? Rees: Any universe hospitable to life ? what we might call a biophilic universe ? has to be ?adjusted? in a particular way. The prerequisites for any life of the kind we know about ? long-lived stable stars, stable atoms such as carbon, oxygen and silicon, able to combine into complex molecules, etc ? are sensitive to the physical laws and to the size, expansion rate and contents of the universe. Indeed, even for the most open-minded science ?ction writer, ?life? or ?intelligence? requires the emergence of some generic complex structures: it can?t exist in a homogeneous universe, not in a universe containing only a few dozen particles. Many recipes would lead to stillborn universes with no atoms, no chemistry, and no planets; or to universes too short-lived or too empty to allow anything to evolve beyond sterile uniformity.Linde: the existence of an amazingly strong correlation between our own properties and the values of many parameters of our world, such as the masses and charges of electron and proton, the value of the gravitational constant, the amplitude of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the electroweak theory, the value of the vacuum energy, and the dimensionality of our world, is an experimental fact requiring an explanation. Susskind: The Laws of Physics ? are almost always deadly. In a sense the laws of nature are like East Coast weather: tremendously variable, almost always awful, but on rare occasions, perfectly lovely. ? [O]ur own universe is an extraordinary place that appears to be fantastically well designed for our own existence. This specialness is not something that we can attribute to lucky accidents, which is far too unlikely. The apparent coincidences cry out for an explanation. Guth: in the multiverse, life will evolve only in very rare regions where the local laws of physics just happen to have the properties needed for life, giving a simple explanation for why the observed universe appears to have just the right properties for the evolution of life. The incredibly small value of the cosmological constant is a telling example of a feature that seems to be needed for life, but for which an explanation from fundamental physics is painfully lacking. Smolin: Our universe is much more complex than most universes with the same laws but different values of the parameters of those laws. In particular, it has a complex astrophysics, including galaxies and long lived stars, and a complex chemistry, including carbon chemistry. These necessary conditions for life are present in our universe as a consequence of the complexity which is made possible by the special values of the parameters. Victor Stenger: The most commonly cited examples of apparent fine-tuning can be readily explained by the application of a little well-established physics and cosmology. . . . [S]ome form of life would have occurred in most universes that could be described by the same physical models as ours, with parameters whose ranges varied over ranges consistent with those models. ? . My case against fine-tuning will not rely on speculations beyond well-established physics nor on the existence of multiple universes.
If there were 400 trillion mines and one had diamonds in it, you wouldn’t say those 400 trillion mines were collectively fine tuned for diamond mining.
Please watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDMpWcf4ee0JimFit_{February 24, 2015
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I'm arguing that there's no fine tuning in the first place. If there were 400 trillion mines and one had diamonds in it, you wouldn't say those 400 trillion mines were collectively fine tuned for diamond mining.CHartsil_{February 24, 2015
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Asking why is question begging, if it didn’t allow for life we simply wouldn’t know it in the first place.
That's the Anthropic Principle but it doesn't answer the main question. Is the Fine Tuning due to chance, physical necessity, or design? Remember you can't use an infinite causal regress because it is fallacious, you can't escape the Ultimate cause. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument#Existence_of_infinite_causal_chains Is the Fine Tuning of the Universe due to chance, physical necessity or design? Physical Necessity Consider the first alternative, physical necessity. This alternative seems extraordinarily implausible because the constants and quantities are independent of the laws of nature. The laws of nature are consistent with a wide range of values for these constants and quantities. For example, the most promising candidate for a Theory of Everything (T.O.E.) to date, super-string theory or M-Theory, allows a “cosmic landscape” of around 10500 different universes governed by the present laws of nature, so that it does nothing to render the observed values of the constants and quantities physically necessary. Chance So what about the second alternative, that the fine-tuning is due to chance? The problem with this alternative is that the odds against the universe’s being life-permitting are so incomprehensibly great that they cannot be reasonably faced. In order to rescue the alternative of chance, its proponents have therefore been forced to adopt the hypothesis that there exists a sort of World Ensemble or multiverse of randomly ordered universes of which our universe is but a part. Now comes the key move: since observers can exist only in finely tuned worlds, of course we observe our universe to be fine-tuned! So this explanation of fine-tuning relies on (i) the existence of a specific type of World Ensemble and (ii) an observer self-selection effect. Now this explanation, wholly apart from objections to (i), faces a very formidable objection to (ii), namely, the Boltzmann Brain problem. In order to be observable the entire universe need not be fine-tuned for our existence. Indeed, it is vastly more probable that a random fluctuation of mass-energy would yield a universe dominated by Boltzmann Brain observers than one dominated by ordinary observers like ourselves. In other words, the observer self-selection effect is explanatorily vacuous. As Robin Collins has noted, what needs to be explained is not just intelligent life, but embodied, interactive, intelligent agents like ourselves.[21] Appeal to an observer self-selection effect accomplishes nothing because there’s no reason whatever to think that most observable worlds or the most probable observable worlds are worlds in which that kind of observer exists. Indeed, the opposite appears to be true: most observable worlds will be Boltzmann Brain worlds. Since we presumably are not Boltzmann Brains, that fact strongly disconfirms a naturalistic World Ensemble or multiverse hypothesis. Design It seems, then, that the fine-tuning is not plausibly due to physical necessity or chance. Therefore, we ought to prefer the hypothesis of design unless the design hypothesis can be shown to be just as implausible as its rivals. I’ll leave it up to you to dispute it.
We’re the only known life out of at least a few hundred trillion planets. That seems pretty prohibitive to me.
Why is the universe so big? http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/why-is-the-universe-so-big Fine-Tuning For Life On Earth By Dr. Hugh Ross http://www.reasons.org/articles/fine-tuning-for-life-on-earth-june-2004 “The universe is too big, too old and too cruel”: three silly objections to cosmological fine-tuning (Part Two) https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/the-universe-is-too-big-too-old-and-too-cruel-three-silly-objections-to-cosmological-fine-tuning-part-two/JimFit_{February 24, 2015
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Asking why is question begging, if it didn't allow for life we simply wouldn't know it in the first place. We're the only known life out of at least a few hundred trillion planets. That seems pretty prohibitive to me. Again you're looking backwards from the end of the series of collectively unlikely events. You can keep adding decks of cards until the odds of any one order is a googolplex to 1 and it still happened.CHartsil_{February 24, 2015
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CHartsil It is true that, given the fact that we’re here and we’re alive, we should expect to observe a life-permitting universe. This is called the Anthropic Principle. But that expectation, and our observations which confirm it, do nothing to explain why the universe is life-permitting when it didn’t have to be. A life-prohibiting universe is vastly more probable than a life-permitting one, so why does a life-permitting universe exist? What is the best explanation? Is it chance, necessity, or design? Fine-tuning cries out for an explanation, but the anthropic principle is not the answer. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is helpful once more: “While trivially true, [the anthropic] principle has no explanatory power, and does not constitute a substantive alternative explanation.”JimFit_{February 24, 2015
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Jim, if that was aimed at me, that doesn't really apply. I'm not saying anything would occur at any different frequency.CHartsil_{February 24, 2015
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You’re looking back over a series of events that, together, are highly unlikely and saying that it was impossible. Shuffle 1,024 decks of cards together then deal them out. Now calculate the odds of the order you just dealt. It’s more than mind blowing and you just did it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacyJimFit_{February 24, 2015
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>Defy fine tuning >Defy the idea that, because there's one planet out of trillions with life on it, the entire universe was fine tuned for life. You're looking back over a series of events that, together, are highly unlikely and saying that it was impossible. Shuffle 1,024 decks of cards together then deal them out. Now calculate the odds of the order you just dealt. It's more than mind blowing and you just did it.CHartsil_{February 24, 2015
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We can't see God therefor God does not exist...... We can't see the multiverse, therefor the multiverse exist! Hahahahahahahahaha!Andre_{February 24, 2015
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News, VJT cited one form of John Leslie's fly on the wall analogy the other day:
If a tiny group of flies is surrounded by a largish fly-free wall area then whether a bullet hits a fly in the group will be very sensitive to the direction in which the firer’s rifle points, even if other very different areas of the wall are thick with flies. So it is sufficient to consider a local area of possible universes, e.g., those produced by slight changes in gravity’s strength, or in the early cosmic expansion speed which reflects that strength. It certainly needn’t be claimed that Life and Intelligence could exist only if certain force strengths, particle masses, etc. fell within certain narrow ranges. For all we know, it might well be that universes could be life-permitting even if none of the forces and particles known to us were present in them. All that need be claimed is that a lifeless universe would have resulted from fairly minor changes in the forces etc. with which we are familiar. (Universes, Routledge, 1989; paperback, 1996, pp. 138-9)
I should note, extending, that a tack driving rifle is a case of a very fine tuned object, and that marksmanship does not come easily either. KFkairosfocus_{February 24, 2015
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