Universe: Fine Tuned For Life

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1) Please do not feed the troll.

2.1) If you REALLY, REALLY have to reply, please ruthlessly
trim back the newsgroups you plague.

2.2) Better yet, take it to e-mail. I doubt you'll get a
reply, though: this looks like a throwaway e-mail account.

3) If you want to make the world a better place:

X-Complaints-To:

--
Rob Ellwood

A couple of years ago I sent two theorists centrally in-
volved in the Anthropic Principle debate (whose names
you would recognize) the following questions:....

"In many cosmology texts it is often stated, as a version of the
Anthropic Principle, that the particular values of the fundamental
constants (their fine tuning, as it were) is exactly optimal in our
universe for the development of planets and life...in particular,
presumably sentient beings such as ourselves. Such constants
of course include Co, h-bar, G, e, particle masses, universe mass,
and so forth.

I want to know how confident we can be of this.

Ie:
1) Does a general theory of variation of fundamental 'constants'
exist today which is so accurate that we can safely say that no
changes whatsoever (careful fine-tuning) of any combination in
the entire suite of such relevant constants would ever result in a
universe somehow richer in structures and richer in evolving life
forms?


not to my knowledge




2) A corollary and more general question is...Disregarding the
[detailed] fine-tuning of the actual values of all our constants,
can we be logically certain, without a rigorous general theory of
variation of fundamental constants, that no other suite of values
for the 'constants' (given the infinite number of values that each
constant might take on, in principle) could result in a universe
at least as rich, or even richer, in structures, including life?


no


3) Finally, noting that the detailed structure of the periodic table
itself is a byproduct of the Exclusion Principle and fundamental
constants, what re-tuning (if any) might allow a hypothetical uni-
verse to possess not just around 81 stable elements (up to bis-
muth), with a smaller number of completely unstable elements,
but, say, one thousand elements having at least one stable iso-
tope each, with a commensurate retinue of completely unstable
elements higher up? Or one million stable elements? And so
on? Ie: What would be required for a universe to have a sub-
stantially larger, richer periodic table?

I ask these questions because it is my hunch that we may actu-
ally find ourselves and our universe to be simply on a continuum
of relative complexity, as universes go, governed by particular
suites of values of the relevant and possibly even evolving 'con-
stants'...an extension of the Copernican view that we are not
particularly special.

If that were to turn out to be true, it is interesting to try to
contem-
plate something of the nature of life, especially intelligent life in
universes where nature had a much broader, richer palette of
elements to play with in the evolution of emerging properties of
complex matter."

Both theorists answered that there was as yet nothing like
a rigorous theory of changes of constants; and both
agreed that no meaningful statement could be made
about our universe being exactly (or even close to being) optimal for
the existence of life in the absence of such a
theory. Ie: the reality is that there is a lot of wiggle room.

I believe that we are all currently in the uncomfortable position
of witnessing certain seemingly intractable problems...Ie: the
mystery of fine-tuning (~The Anthropic debate); string/M theo-
retical difficulties; the QFT vacuum energy vs. the observed
flat space-time vacuum energy; etc. Some good physicists are
feeling a kind of despair at ever knowing any satisfying resolution
to these things. Some are wondering if such deep answers may
indeed be unknowable. It may well be so, but a good guess is
that the universe has a lot more surprises in store for us, to knock
us out of any apathy, despair or smug certitudes about a tidy
little world precisely arranged for a few exalted primate bipeds
by a divine being who, oddly enough, in many peoples' minds,
strongly resembles a very large primate biped. IMHO,
the appeal to divine creation (or some form of the Anthropic
Principle) are two different branches of the same sterile
tree, lines of thought which ultimately answer nothing.

Cheers,
Gene