wow... you are so ignorant on this subject you should be embarassed to have just critiqued scientific american.
. as far as un natural vs natural in physics... I now realize you are so ignorant on this matter... I have been arguing with a person who has zero understand of the words I have been quoting. You are completely ignorant of this area of science... yet you keep arguing against the scientists.
really... if you were in physics class your professor would have looked at you like you were a dumb ass and sent you back to high school physics.
here is a primer...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalness_(physics)
In
physics,
naturalness is the property that the
free parameters or
physical constants appearing in a physical theory should take relative values "of order 1". That is, a natural theory would have parameters with values like 2.34 rather than 234000 or 0.000234. This is in contrast to current theory like the
standard model, where there are a number of parameters that vary by many
orders of magnitude, and require extensive "
fine-tuning" of those values in order for the theory to predict a universe like the one we live in.
The requirement that satisfactory theories should be "natural" in this sense is a current of thought initiated around the 1960s in particle physics. It is an aesthetic criterion, not a physical one, that arises from the seeming non-naturalness of the standard model and the broader topics of the
hierarchy problem, fine-tuning, and the
anthropic principle.
It is not always compatible with
Occam's razor, since many instances of "natural" theories have more parameters than "fine-tuned" theories such as the Standard Model.
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here is stu's... incredibly ignorant quote.
And what exactly is an "unnatural" theory? Or don't you even ask yourself that glaringly obvious question.
There cannot actually be anything unnatural (contrary to nature or not in accordance with or determined by nature) in physics. Science is the study of the physical and natural world, not some imaginary ethereal and unnatural one.
If there were anything unnatural then it wouldn't be scientific. End of story.
There is nothing remotely being made unnatural about the Standard Model from it having
a large number of different particles and forces, many of which seem surplus to requirement, or
because it is also very precariously balanced.
Who the hell would say cosmological theory is regarded as unnatural because it has a large number of stars and planets which seem surplus to requirement!
You don't even need to be a scientist to see how those are not reasons to call something unnatural or even "unnatural".
Badly used words do tend to end up in quote marks a lot. Pity "authors" don't take the "time" to "use" the "right" word that might better "convey" what they mean to "say".[/quote]