Posted on 01/05/2005 7:18:54 AM PST by PatrickHenry
But an "infinite number of universes" is precisely what is not given; it is a speculation; an interesting one, but a speculation nonetheless. It's not a matter of us liking the laws we have. The point is we wouldn't be here to express our liking/appreciation if the ones we've got weren't precisely what they are.
Drake's equation is a joke.
The puddle will follow the second law of thermodynamics. Or it will be sent to bed without dinner.
> an "infinite number of universes" is precisely what is not given; it is a speculation
Yes, a specualtion... but one based not on wishful thinking, but as the result of theories that have been shown to be valid.
> The point is we wouldn't be here to express our liking/appreciation if the ones we've got weren't precisely what they are.
"We" probbaly wouldn't. But so what? If America wasn't here, "we" wouldn't be here either.
Basically... what makes you think that you are so special? What makes you think that the universe was set up just for *your* comfort? As opposed to thinking that you are just a natural function of this universe?
Sorry to be pedantic, but given an infinite set, something happening is guaranteed...
There are fundamental questions in all of these threads that few address.
Is the universe knowable?
If it is knowable from some perspective, is that absolute? Can not another observer from a different perspective come to a different conclusion?
Metaphysically, and I was spending alot of time yesterday morning thinking about this, these questions are almost paraphrase of another question:
Can new, heretofore unknown and nonexistent natural laws spontaneously come into existence?
I don't have many fans on these threads so I'll leave it at that.
Hi PatrickHenry. Surprised you posted this; the anthropic principle is basic to Intelligtent Design. This fine scientist makes no opinion about the requisite biological soup that we supposedly evolved from and leaves that to the biologists. It's a fair article, and basically he is shrugging his shoulders, saying "who knows?". Happy New Year. RIW
> given an infinite set, something happening is guaranteed...
Well, no. Consider the set of positive integers: 1,2,3,4,... all the way up. It is an infinite set. But what it *doesn't* have are things like 1.2345 and -4.
Another thing it has is a beginning (1), but no end. And no middle. Perhaps a good analogy for the universe: it had a definite beginning, but no end is in sight.
From the article:
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We don't really know the likelihood of life because the uncertainties in the Drake equation, which still are still very large, are the probabilities that life gets started given the right kind of initial soup.
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We have a pretty good grasp on the probabilities of abiogenesis for life like ours, and it ain't a small number. Something on the order of 10^100 against.
And, no, natural selection can't work on abiogenesis; it's pure chemistry, folks.
And I know that evolution supposedly doesn't cover the beginning of life, but the scientist in the article brought it up, not me.
Good story. I suspect that Rees' anomalous configuration could exemplify some aspect of the fine tuning issue, but I can't quite force it to the surface of my brain. And it would be inappropriate even if I could figure it out.
Thanks, I'll take a look. My son is a grad student in nuclear physics so its good to have things to talk about. I do understand the scientific method, the thing that bugs me a bit is the way hypotheses with a lot of unanswered questions get thrown around as fact. I'm not talking about this specific article. But the statement that a hypothesis answers many questions sounds like a fact, when it should have been stated the hypothesis "could" or "may" (or may not) answer a lot of questions.
Google up "WMAP" and "flatness". There was also a very good discussion of it in Max Tegmark's Scientific American article on parallel universes, available somewhere in here. Max calls it a "Level-1 Multiverse"; you can read much more on the page I linked.
In a nutshell, the argument goes like this: we measure that the spatial geometry of the universe is very flat, all the way out to the most distant quasars and galaxies. So the space extends beyond what we can see. Matter does, too: if there were no matter beyond, the gravitational forces on the distant quasars would not be balanced, and so they would not be receding, but would be drawn back towards the rest of the Hubble volume by the gravitational pull of all the stuff inside it--the stuff we see.
We know that the matter just beyond--heck, a good distance beyond--the quasars has (or rather, will) become (by 14 billion years after the Big Bang) stars and galaxies, because the physics there is not appreciably different from what it is here, and that's what matter does under these conditions. (Go far enough beyond, though, and who can say?)
Not by any stretch. An infinity of additional campaign stops wouldn't have helped John Kerry.
.....universe has laws we need . I would much rather like a universe with twice as much oxygen, think how happy everyone would be.
What makes you think that I think I'm "special?" Or that I think the universe was "set up" (i.e., designed????) for *my* comfort? Methinks you assume too much, orionblamblam. Here's an article I just love, from Max Tegmark: (I hope you like it, too.)
http://wintersteel.homestead.com/files/ShanaArticles/multiverse.pdf
FWIW, I'm a great fan of the Class IV multiverse....
> universe has laws we need
Yes, but we'd get by with slightly different laws and constants. How much different would life be if the speed of light was slower by 50 miles per hour? If Pi was different in the 45th decimal place?
This may seem like wild speculation to some, but it fits within the realm of science. Science is a process and part of that process is this type of speculation. There are questions about our universe that scientists are asking and, within the limits of our cuurent knowledge, the article above asks some very interesting questions and proposes answers based upon what we know. This is the first step in the scientific method - the formation of various hypotheses. The next step would be developing methods to test these hypotheses. That's why cosmolology is so theoretical. We have the math and logic to speculate how the universe may be structured, but experimental physics has to play catch up.
The same things were happening over a century ago in chemistry. There were many speculative models of matter that were proposed, such as the raisin bun model of matter. It fit with what was known at the time but further gains in knowledge made it obsolete. Then there was Bohr's model of atomic structure, then came quantum mechanics.
Over the course of time, science is like a lens that is changing to give better and better focus of our surroundings. The above speculation is an interpretation of that which is still slightly out of focus.
I like that one. What I now need to find is the Espresso Machine that pours coffy in the same shape as MY cup! ;-)
Gosh, and here Buggman was just denouncing the use of such qualifiers in post 9.
The problem you mention is real, but it's a problem of reportage rather than one of science. Scientists are reflexively careful to delineate what is known from what is unknown. If anything, the bias of scientists lies in the other direction, taking nothing as established. In particle physics, essentially all of the effort goes in to proposing (and searching for) exceptions to rules that are more firmly established than any rules in any other field of inquiry.
This is not an exaggeration: some decay experiments search for decay patterns that have not occurred once in a trillion trials...so far. The next round of experiments will search for even rarer decay patterns, that could only be expected once in a quadrillion trials. There's no point at which we will ever say, "well, that's enough. If it hasn't happened by now, it never will."
Damn. Where is that expresso machine? I obviously need it.
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