Comments on: Cosmic Inevitability

By: Tom Scudder

Tom Scudder — Tue, 26 Aug 2003 14:21:48 +0000

I’m fond of Terry Pratchett’s formulation of the Very Strong Anthropic Principle: The entire universe and its whole history happened in order that I, personally, could come into being. (Which practically no one holds to officially, but everyone secretly believes).

By: Chris Young

Chris Young — Tue, 26 Aug 2003 11:13:07 +0000

This said it all 17 years ago.

By: Adam Conover

Adam Conover — Tue, 26 Aug 2003 06:30:40 +0000

I had no intention of being offensive—I was just trying to point out what I assumed what an honest mistake, one which a lot of people make.

By: Thomas Dent

Thomas Dent — Mon, 25 Aug 2003 11:52:50 +0000

I use Netscape in which the comment boxes don’t automatically break lines. So either I can write everything on a single line and not see more than a few words at once, or make my own linebreaks to see what I’ve written. I hereby apologise for offending the sensitivities of the majority-browsered with my ugly linebreaks.

By: adam conover

adam conover — Mon, 25 Aug 2003 04:59:14 +0000

I’d like to point out that putting a carriage return at the end of every line you type produces ugly results after the comment itself has been posted. I’m enjoying the debate, but for readability’s sake, please only use hard breaks to distinguish between paragraphs.

By: Con Tendem

Con Tendem — Sun, 24 Aug 2003 22:46:06 +0000

Robert:
All of the large monotheistic religions hold that G-d created the Universe and all in it. There is no particular reason why some Christian groups would not embrace a a race of polytheist ants from Orion as a great evangelical opporunity while others simply ignore them as not part of the “mankind”. Seeing how all these religions are essentially unprovable and have a required element of faith, a simple arrival of an intellegent life-form from outer space should not change too much in their theology.
Now, if E.T. and his 600billion co-religionists were actually on some sort of quasi-crusade or meta-jihad with a somewhat different version of the Bible/Koran/Torah that was similar enough to be clearly of the same derivation but different enough to be incompatible (or treating Earthlings like Amalek) with our texts… That could be a major disruption.

By: Robert Schwartz

Robert Schwartz — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 18:23:15 +0000

I am less inclined to believe in ET’s than I am in God, but I have no theological issue if they exist. OTOH, I am a Jew and I do not claim any real knowledge of Christian theology. From what I do know of Christian theology, it holds that a historical event is of cosmic significance. This would seem to render it somewhat vulnerable to disruption if ET shows up. Wouldn’t it be a hoot if ET did show up and he turned out to be a goat-slaughtering polytheist?

By: Thomas Dent

Thomas Dent — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 17:51:14 +0000

I’m not sure the weak principle requires ‘many worlds’ in the sense of the interpretation of quantum mechanics. If your view of probability is frequentist then you may have to imagine many different regions of the Universe (they need not be completely disconnected) with different values of constants. However if you are a Bayesian then you might be happy talking about the statistics of a single Universe with the same laws all the way through. In either case you have to believe that a Universe with different laws would be at least logically consistent. But I’ve never understood what the strong principle actually stated, or at least it has always seemed to be nonsensical. The only principle that I understand is that when answering the question “how likely is X” one should discard all the cases which result in there being no observers around capable of asking such a question, and make one’s estimate of likelihood based on the remaining cases. You get to another tricky point when you try to define what “such a question” covers. If there were intelligent beings formed of black charged dust clouds (a la Fred Hoyle), how could one tell if they were asking such a question?

By: Patrick

Patrick — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 14:27:00 +0000

Very good point from Thomas. The anthropic principle isn’t as cray as it seems (although there are trivial, weak, and strong versions). The strong version is usually the one invoked by the crazies. Since Thomas already mentioned the weak form, I’ll lay off of it. The trivial form is that we can use certain observations stemming from the existence of human life to constrain certain parameters in cosmological equations- i.e., the existence of the earth means that the universe must be X years old at the very least, because the earth is X years old. Not really in use now, as there are better supported methods of constraining these, but in the early days of extragalactic cosmology, this was important. The strong version is a bit odd. It’s essentially the weak version, but most formulations of the weak version invoke the many worlds hypothesis (infinite number of universes, thus infinite variations in physical constants, laws, even number of dimensions). The downside is that it explains the whole “why everything is right for life” with other universes that we can’t observe. Strong does away with the many universes theory, and assumes that our universe was set up the way it is initially, by whatever you like. You don’t need the unobservable universes, but you do need some all powerful creator setting up the constants at the beginning of time.

By: Thomas Dent

Thomas Dent — Thu, 21 Aug 2003 20:33:02 +0000

If you go to “Primer” on the site http://www.anthropic-principle.com, you’ll find a good explanation explaining where some of the cobblers come(s) from. I quote: “Brandon Carter, a … cosmologist … coined the term ?anthropic principle? in 1974, clearly intending it to convey some useful guidance about how to reason under observation selection effects. (…) While Carter himself evidently knew how to apply his principle to get interesting results, he unfortunately did not manage to explain it well enough to enable all his followers to do the same.” “When John Barrow and Frank Tipler introduced anthropic reasoning to a wider audience in 1986 with the publication of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, they compounded the terminological disorder by minting several new ?anthropic principles?, some of which have little if any connection to observation selection effects.” A relevant quote from Francis Bacon: “It was a good answer that was made by one who when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods, – ‘Aye,’ asked he again, ‘but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?’”

By: Todd

Todd — Thu, 21 Aug 2003 18:49:59 +0000

I wonder what would become of the religions if E.T. affirmed the existence of God? CS Lewis’ space trilogy comes to mind…

By: Thomas Dent

Thomas Dent — Thu, 21 Aug 2003 15:27:06 +0000

It seems you don’t understand the Anthropic Principle. However, rather few of the people who write about it do either. It’s certainly not a version of the argument from design, in fact it’s a debunking of it. We start from the observation that if some constants were very slightly different then carbon would not have formed, and thus complex so-called organic chemicals could not form, thus (which is the slightly weak point) no life. (There are other apparent coincidences as well, not just carbon.) The naive conclusion is that there must be an intelligent designer to set the constants just right, since the chances against are overwhelming. The core of the anthropic argument is to notice that there is a massive selection bias in the question “What is the chance of obtaining values of constants in this tiny range which can give rise to intelligent life?”. To correct for the bias, the condition that such a question can be asked at all should be applied as a prior. It shouldn’t be surprising that the constants lie in a very narrow range given that any value outside that range fails to lead to intelligent life capable of asking such a question. Hence, the argument from design is debunked. Exactly the same principle can be used to explain the very puzzling answer to this question: “What is the chance that you and I are both English-speaking, university-educated computer users”? This is of course a very small probability when taken over the whole population of the world. But apply the prior that we are both reading the question on a computer screen in the middle of an intellectual debate and the probability becomes rather high – and there is no coincidence at all. This is the “weak anthropic principle”. People have also made other inferences which get other names, but I don’t understand them and they seem to tend towards mysticism. The weak point of the weak principle is that we don’t really know whether there are other forms of life that could form given different values of constants. It could be life (Jim) but nothing like we know it. More technically, we can’t reliably find the shape of the function P({c}) which gives the probability of intelligent life given a set {c} of constants. However we do know that P({c}) = 0 for some sets {c}. For example if the Universe was only large enough to hold a few hundred atoms, or only contained massless particles. It’s a pretty solid scientific inference that carbon-based life does require highly fine-tuned values of constants, so you can’t dismiss this as “cobblers”. The idea that this implies “the Universe was waiting for, e.g., Orange County to emerge” is indeed cobblers, but is not equivalent to any formulation of the anthropic principle. If this is your summary of what the principle amounts to, it’s either a bad misunderstanding (which may be the fault of the popular science writing you read) or a cheap hit.

By: Nabakov

Nabakov — Thu, 21 Aug 2003 15:25:37 +0000

The whole debate sounds so carbon-centric. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere between ‘Childhood’s End’ and “Human beings are just transport systems for fluids”. Or as Clifford Simak pointed out, there is a distinct lifecycle from paperclips to wire coathangers to bicycles. You ever seen all three at once in the same room?

By: Jacob T. Levy

Jacob T. Levy — Thu, 21 Aug 2003 10:07:16 +0000

That allegedly respectable journalist got tired of of the Raelians telling him every day, “We’ll get you that evidence real soon now. Tomorrow. Next week, at the latest.” After a couple of weeks he announced that the whole thing was almost certainly a hoax, to widespread derision from those who hadn’t ever thought otherwise.

By: mitch

mitch — Thu, 21 Aug 2003 07:40:34 +0000

“I bet they also have homologues to non-fat vanilla lattes, frat parties and New Labour.” A stimulant modified for reasons of health… a social gathering of a biologically distinct student subcaste… and a political association with a changing ideology.