Video| Fine Tuning from the Top Scientists
- Thread starter jem
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Jem, my point is if you're going to take a position, make sure your sources aren't scheit. That initial video is completely dishonest in its presentation of the evidence it uses.
I'm not denying the science here at all, it seems as thought it has broad acceptance amongst the scientific community. As for Susskind, any honest intellectual or scientist would be "obligated" to include all possibilities, and a creator would be one of them. Unfortunately there's no way to investigate that explanation, so they must go about it utilizing mathematics and the scientific process to test other hypotheses.
For the most part I guess I agree with you in the sense that I agree with Susskind, but damnit man, your sources piss me off!
I don't have the time to read this book right now but I always enjoy reading customer reviews from those who have to weigh the merits of the read. This is a very enlightening one.Quote from stu:
"The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design"
You agree with Susskind? No "Tuner"? Really?
By Royce E. Buehler
Unlike the physicists who wrote the first two reviews, I don't know much 'bout string theory. Which is why I turn to books like this, or Greene's _The Elegant Universe_. Let me try to explain what this book is trying to do, and how, for one proverbial intelligent layman, it stacks up.
Susskind is a man with a mission. What he's describing here is not settled science, but his own view of the direction fundamental physics should be trying to go. In order to describe that properly, of course, he has to explain a good deal of settled physics along the way. He does this engagingly and fairly clearly, though he doesn't have the truly remarkable expository gifts of Brian Greene, and I strongly recommend that anyone who wants to tackle this book should read _Elegant Universe_ first.
The book has two tightly intertwined main theses. The first has to do with the Anthropic Principle: the observation that a large number of physical constants are required to fall within a surprisingly narrow range of values, in order for the apparatus of biology ever to appear. Slight tweaks to any of them would make galaxies, stars, atoms, chemical elements heavier than helium, to say nothing of carbon based life forms, impossible. Susskind's thesis here is that the AP is neither, as many theists would like to claim, evidence for a Designer who tailored the universe to make us possible; nor, as secular physicists would like to claim, an uninteresting tautology requiring no explanation. Rather, its explanation is to be found in the last decades' developments in string theory.
His second thesis is that these developments - especially the way in which string theory, which was originally hoped could prove mathematically that the various physical constants could have only one uniquely determined set of values, turned out to be a family of five, then many, then mind bogglingly many, distinct theories - are not the intellectual catastrophe some have felt them to be. Rather they are an argument in favor of the truth of string theory, because the innumerable variations in the laws of physics permitted by the various string theories provides a naturalistic explanation for the Anthropic Principle. To wit: cosmic inflation creates innumerable new universes all the time, each with its own set of physical constants, and it is not surprising that some of them should have laws (and in particular a value for Einstein's cosmological constant, which is more extremely constrained than any of the others) which permit life to arise. The collection of all these possible universes, by analogy with the "fitness landscapes" of evolutionary theory in biology, is what Susskind designates as "the cosmic landscape" of the title.
There are a lot of problems with this point of view. Susskind considers them, and argues enthusiastically, subtly and fairly that none of them is a show stopper. In the end, I felt he failed to close the sale. Until someone solves what he calls the "measure problem", the whole scheme is dead in the water. Further, we are never given a positive reason to believe in the truth of string theory, other than the fact that no other consistent theory unifying gravity and quantum mechanics has surfaced yet.
In his final chapter, Susskind tries to summarize the disparate attitudes of a dozen major living theorists toward this emerging Landscape picture. The two most telling criticisms come from physicist David Gross. The book gives them a pretty fair hearing , and doesn't claim to dispose of them. First, if we adopt the idea that the physical constants have randomly created values, the enterprise of trying to explain why they have the particular values they do comes to a dead halt - perhaps prematurely. "Quantum fluctuations did it" puts the kibosh on further inquiry as surely as "God did it" would. Second, we don't really know how wide a range of physical constants could produce life and intelligence in *some* form.
Those who are looking for a primer on string theory, or on the latest truths that scientists have learned and agreed on, won't find it here. But if you are interested in the Anthropic Principle, or in the ferment of controversies at the edge of the presently knowable, you won't have to agree with Susskind to take delight, as I did, in colorfully articulated, intriguing, and frequently illuminating read.
http://www.amazon.com/Cosmic-Landscape-String-Illusion-Intelligent/dp/0316013331
hey troll, I said I agree with his 4 explanations for the fine tunings.
I agree that if there are almost infinite other universes that may explain why we are in a universe so tuned for our life.
I agree science may someday come up with a Theory of Everything.
and that might explain the universe... although that still might be too lucky... or there might be a designer using the ToE to design.
I agree with his idea about luck we see in the video.
I agree God might be an explanation.
I agree that if there are almost infinite other universes that may explain why we are in a universe so tuned for our life.
I agree science may someday come up with a Theory of Everything.
and that might explain the universe... although that still might be too lucky... or there might be a designer using the ToE to design.
I agree with his idea about luck we see in the video.
I agree God might be an explanation.
ok... why don't you go back an makes Stu's argument for him.
Lets start with proving many physicists do not say the universe appears designed.
Then
show that Susskind does not consider God to be a possible explanation for the fine tunings.
Then show us that the Landscape and the Multiverse is not the same thing.
If you go through the arguments... you will see Stu was caught lying about science many times throughout the last 5 years.
(you might want to go visit our argument on proof that life evolved from non life... stu even was caught misleading us about his previous statements until I linked to them. Stu is a troll... a smart one who writes specious stuff... but he is a troll.
Lets start with proving many physicists do not say the universe appears designed.
Then
show that Susskind does not consider God to be a possible explanation for the fine tunings.
Then show us that the Landscape and the Multiverse is not the same thing.
If you go through the arguments... you will see Stu was caught lying about science many times throughout the last 5 years.
(you might want to go visit our argument on proof that life evolved from non life... stu even was caught misleading us about his previous statements until I linked to them. Stu is a troll... a smart one who writes specious stuff... but he is a troll.
No troll it boils down to this...
you are a 1950s atheist who used to implicitly if not explicitly argue.. science says we got here by random chance... In reality science does not know how we got here but that if there is only one universe random chance does not look like an option.
I have now shown you through physics and physicists that our universe appears finely tuned... and that if there is only one universe that tuning is evidence of a Tuner...
as .... I showed you years ago...
Bernard Carr is an astronomer at Queen Mary University, London. Unlike Martin Rees, he does not enjoy wooden-panelled rooms in his day job, but inhabits an office at the top of a concrete high-rise, the windows of which hang as if on the edge of the universe. He sums up the multiverse predicament: âEveryone has their own reason why theyâre keen on the multiverse. But what it comes down to is that there are these physical constants that canât be explained. It seems clear that there is fine tuning, and you either need a tuner, who chooses the constants so that we arise, or you need a multiverse, and then we have to be in one of the universes where the constants are right for life.â
But which comes first, tuner or tuned? Who or what is leading the dance? Isnât conjuring up a multiverse to explain already outlandish fine-tuning tantamount to leaping out of the physical frying pan and into the metaphysical fire?
Unsurprisingly, the multiverse proposal has provoked ideological opposition. In 2005, the New York Times published an opinion piece by a Roman Catholic cardinal, Christoph Schönborn, in which he called it âan abdication of human intelligence.â That comment led to a slew of letters lambasting the claim that the multiverse is a hypothesis designed to avoid âthe overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science.â But even if you donât go along with the prince of the church on that, he had another point which does resonate with many physicists, regardless of their belief. The idea that the multiverse solves the fine-tuning of the universe by effectively declaring that everything is possible is in itself not a scientific explanation at all: if you allow yourself to hypothesize any number of worlds, you can account for anything but say very little about how or why.
http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=137