Paul Davies The Goldilocks Enigma/Anthropic Principle

[sandy_mcd]

Anybody read Paul Davies' "The Goldilocks Enigma"? I'm not sure this review fits my image of him (garnered from 2nd sources such as the main website here, not having read any of his books).

Why is the universe, like the porridge in the tale of Goldilocks and the three bears, “just right” for life? Even cosmologists have said it looks like a fix or a put-up job. Is it a fluke or providence that it appears set up expressly for the purpose of spawning sentient beings? ...

Anyone expecting Davies to recant his non-religious views and join the intelligent design lobby will be disappointed. “We can't dump all this in the lap of an arbitrary god and say we can't inquire any further,” he says. “The universe looks ingenious, it looks like a fix, and words like meaning and purpose come to mind. But it doesn't mean that we're going to have a miracle-working cosmic magician meddling with events.”

What concerns him in his new book The Goldilocks Enigma is science and the universe's stringent conditions for existence, so finely tuned that even the slightest twiddle of the dials would wreck any hope of life emerging in the universe. “No scientific explanation of the universe can be deemed complete unless it accounts for this appearance of judicious design,” he says. ...

Davies wants to rise above such bickering. “I want to get away from this notion that something has to be accepted on faith,” he says. “That just becomes a sterile argument. These people can argue all night, but you're never going to prove or disprove the other person's position.”

He is fascinated by an alternative answer to the Goldilocks question. “Somehow,” he writes, “the universe has engineered, not just its own awareness, but its own comprehension. Mindless, blundering atoms have conspired to make, not just life, not just mind, but understanding. The evolving cosmos has spawned beings who are able not merely to watch the show, but to unravel the plot.”

Anyhow, this addresses what I consider to be the other main branch of ID, the fine-tuning of the Universe so that we can exist. From one perspective, this is a silly question: if the universe wasn't able to support life, we wouldn't be here to ask why it does. On the other hand, if the laws governing the initial Big Bang don't require our type of universe to develop and almost all the other types wouldn't support any form of intelligent life, then it is highly unlikely that we should be here.
I just don't understand enough of the physics involved to have any meaningful opinion. Actually, the whole idea of a developing universe is just incomprehensible to me.

[David Blacklock]

Sandy mcd asks: Anybody read Paul Davies' "The Goldilocks Enigma"?

DB: I haven't, Sandy - I tried to find it on Amazon, but it has an "unavailable" tag on it.

I do have an uninformed opinion, however - that being that this concept is more philosophical than anything else. I believe that also for the multiverse theory, string theory, and a few others. Perhaps I am wrong, but they all seem short on evidence (none) and long on speculation. At least they provide fodder for the science fiction writers.

If the Big Bang were to have actually happened, all the many particles of the Standard model would have begun to act according to their specific properties - attraction here, repulsion there, indeterminancy everywhere with a few virtual realities thrown in for flavor - all propelled by what was left over from the explosion. As these forces interacted with the acceleration and the heat, they aggregated, orbited, and organized. Our planet (and others?) eventually had conditions appropriate for a more complex organization and life started.

In the Weak Anthropic principle, the argument (that life is too improbable because of the necessary fine tunings of the 6 constants) that design was necessary is circumvented by the idea that life only arose here only because those conditions already existed right here on earth.

Weak Anthropic Principle: The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines WAP as "conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist."

Strong Anthropic Principle: There exists one possible Universe
"designed" with the goal of generating and sustaining "observers." This can be seen as the classic design argument dressed in the garb of contemporary cosmology. It implies that the purpose of the universe is to give rise to intelligent life, with the laws of nature and their fundamental constants set to ensure that life as we know it will emerge and evolve.

The most thorough extant study of the anthropic principle is the controversial 1986 book "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle" by Barrow, a cosmologist, and Tipler, a mathematical physicist. They believe that the anthropic principle has important antecedents in the notions of intelligent design.

In his review of Barrow and Tipler in the New York Review of Books', Martin Gardner ridiculed the Anthropic Principle by quoting the last two sentences of their book:

Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle ("CRAP"): "At the instant the Omega Point is reached, life will have gained control of all matter and forces not only in a single universe, but in all universes whose existence is logically possible; life will have spread into all spatial regions in all universes which could logically exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically possible to know. And this is the end."

Parts of this came from Wikkipedia.