Maybe (in the same sense as the anthropic principle, or maybe it’s the same thing)-- but only if the multiverse has the feature of a random (or effectively) random draw of physics for each universe. If all the universes have the same physics, then obviously the multiverse does not help the fine tuning problem.
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One of the concepts that always crops up when people discuss fine-tuning is “naturalness”, which is basically akin to saying “what you’d have expected”.
For instance, in everyday life its natural that a mother would comfort her crying baby - if she didn’t, we might find that a bit strange, a bit unnatural (surprising, not what we’d have expected) and wonder why she might refrain from comforting her babe. We’d think this cries out for an explanation.
In the context of physics, likewise, the cosmological constant has a surprisingly small, nonzero value compared to what you’d naturally expect if calculating it from first principles - and yet the observed value is inexplicably conducive to complex chemistry and by extension life. Change it to fit the more “natural” calculated value and we wouldn’t be here to even ponder this due to the fact that in the possible range of hypothetical universes one can think of where this constant, which drives the expansion of the universe, were significantly more energetic (as you’d expect working from first principles), matter would instantly disperse and no stars and galaxies would be able to form.
The incredible delicacy of the cancellation involved here is particularly disturbing. This amazing sensitivity means that the properties of our universe have to be, very precisely, just as they are — like a radio that is set exactly to the frequency of a desired radio station, finely tuned.
Supercomputers have been able to demonstrate this with the right modelling software too.
Professor Matt Strassler, a leading particle physicist working at CERN, used the analogy of kids running around a table with a vase to explain this:
After nearly an hour with the kids playing nearby, where is the vase? On the table? Smashed on the floor? Or right at the edge? We’d all believe the first two before we’d believe the third — unless the third was carefully arranged.
You get three options. Choose the most plausible.
- The vase was exactly where mother left it, comfortably placed at the center of the table.
- The vase was smashed, and the flowers crushed, down on the floor.
- The vase was hanging off the table, right at the edge, within a millimeter of disaster.
Professor Strassler notes:
Well, the answer is #3. There it was, just hanging there.
I suspect you don’t believe me. Or at least, if you do believe me, you probably are assuming there must be some complicated explanation that I’m about to give you as to how this happened. It can’t possibly be that two young kids were playing wildly in the room and somehow managed to get the vase into this extremely precarious position just by accident, can it? For the vase to end up just so — not firmly on the table, not falling off the table, but just in between — that’s … that’s not natural!
There must (mustn’t there?) be an explanation.
Maybe there was glue on the side of the table and the vase stuck to it before falling off? Maybe one of the kids was hiding behind the table and holding the vase there as a practical joke on his mom? Maybe her husband had somehow tied a string around the vase and attached it to the table, or to the ceiling, so that the vase couldn’t fall off? Maybe the table and vase are both magnetized somehow…?
Something so unnatural as that can’t just end up that way on its own… especially not in a room with two young children playing rough and throwing things around.
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This like saying that when cars crash into each other this is a random event, because all of the molecules in the autos are moving randomly in quantum space.
A trivial amount of faith, but … yes. [added edit: it would probably be several faith jumps up from that level to graduate up to ‘mustard seed’ level!]
Why not [thinking in your terms]? Anticipating that you would respond with: “because I saw you place the coin – you never really flipped it.” …that would lead to my question: so do you agree with me then that identifying a cause [me] for the state of the coin precludes randomness then? [and don’t forget that (on your terms) I’m nothing more than another natural phenomenon myself with no more agency than an unstable nucleus that could decay at any moment.]
I’m generally thinking that when laws govern a phenomena leading to an inevitable conclusion, that the said event then is not random. But you appear to be using random in a more surface way of merely saying “this appears random to us for all practical purposes”. If that is all, then our disagreement evaporates as I do that too. But I still see either A> profoundly opaque mystery at the root of nature if you are right that inherent randomness actually exists. or B> lawful governance all the way down (which renders free-will either illusory or itself entirely opaque --but yet still as a faith conviction of mine.)
So please note that I’m not setting up an A/B scenario where my religion easily informs me which I must favor. Either way this is a fascinating philosophical quandary for me, and one that has been touched not one whit yet by anything I’ve heard offered here within the domain of science.
I am still not seeing anything which shows my description to be wrong.
Just because you can purposefully light a match does not change the fact that thermodynamics is the result of random processes. You keep saying that laws can’t be the result of random processes, yet random processes undergirding natural laws is exactly what we see.
Moving to something I am more familiar with, we could look at Gaussian distributions which is one of the classic models for randomness. The more familiar name for this model is a bell curve or normal distribution:
If certain data fits the normal distribution then it is considered consistent with a random process. One example of this is the results you get in protein chromatography, especially with size exclusion chromatography. What happens is that the molecules you pass over a column take a random walk through the medium in the column. In size exclusion chromatography the medium is made up of tiny beads with pores in them. Sometimes the protein molecules walk their way into the little beads and are slowed down and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they take a quick route around the beads and sometimes they take a long route around the beads. It is like a pack of drunkards wandering through a field of traffic cones, if you will. What do you see if you measure the amount of protein coming off the column? A normal distribution:
Each peak is a Gaussian curve, and each peak represents a different protein with a different size. Big proteins make it through first because there is a lower probability of them fitting through one of the pores in little beads. Smaller proteins have a higher probability of entering into the beads so they are held up longer on average. If randomness didn’t work, you wouldn’t get these results, yet we get these results in experiment after experiment after experiment, including many that I have run.
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It didn’t seem so trivial earlier.
“That may actually be a more deeply profound truth than you might have intended. After all what else can science do but go along with the conviction that “what is, is”. It’s only when we try to pretend this postulate is a theorem that we get ourselves into trouble.”–Merv
So it has gone from profound to trivial, or something like that. From this most previous post, perhaps we could say that the faith needed to accept the reality of the universe is qualitatively and quantitatively different than faith in God. I am not saying that one is acceptable and one is not, only that they are on very, very different levels.
Because there is no evidence to support the extrapolation. If I walk around and only find Americans, should I extrapolate further and say that the entire world is full of Americans?[quote=“Mervin_Bitikofer, post:84, topic:36932”]
[and don’t forget that (on your terms) I’m nothing more than another natural phenomenon myself with no more agency than an unstable nucleus that could decay at any moment.]
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Just as 1 million random rolls of dice will produce a very predictable probability distribution. It is the probabilities that dominate when you have many particles interacting. While we can’t predict the outcome of a single roll, we can predict the outcome of 1 million rolls with pretty good accuracy. That doesn’t stop the roll of the dice from being random.
I also think that this may be an area where our human intuition leads us down the wrong track. We are used to the macroworld, and our brains are evolved/designed to work in that regime. We don’t intuitively understand randomness. We seek out associations in an attempt to do away with randomness, and sometimes those associations are wrong. People famously have lucky charms or superstitions that they think guide events so that they aren’t random. It seems to be something baked into our subconscious.
As you note, I think we both can slice these questions up into the observable and the metaphysical. For the metaphysical I tend towards the conclusion of “I don’t know”. For some people that is an uncomfortable position to take, and that’s fine. However, the observable is something I can know so I tend to put more weight onto it. You appear to find something inspiring in metaphysical views, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
As a parting thought, how boring would this world be if we all agreed with one another? 
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The trivial faith I was referring to was the faith that we exist and such similar things that all of us accept with no problem. What I see as so profound and far from trivial (to those who are curious about truth) is to possibly see science as its own kind of potentially untethered or allegedly self-contained system adrift amidst larger truths. Or that is my more clumsy version of your more succinct phrase “science is a tautology” that you offered only in opprobrium. There isn’t much to make of that, granted. I continue to look to science for as much truth as it can reveal. My reflection is that science untethered from any metaphysics is, I suggest, a mere tautology. I know you disagree with that; but there we are.
[my own emphasis added in above.]
We can’t predict the single roll, you say. And why is that? Are you saying that science cannot go there? That it’s beyond science?
The sum total of everything I’ve been saying is nearly captured in that one concessionary sentence of yours. The significance of that is the only thing I’ve labored to put forward for your consideration.
I’d better stop and catch up on what other people have been saying in this thread too, and your responses to them. Sorry if I overlooked much in my hasty replies between work today.
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The fine-tuning could be Incredibly precise… a 1 in a million combination.
But nevertheless… it will always be the occupants of such a slinky configured space that think it means something.
When all it means is that it produces a universe where intelligent creatures are born … and then conclude it must prove Intelligent Design.
Clarification: I believe God designs. But you can’t Prove it from fine-tuning.
[quote=“gbrooks9, post:88, topic:36932, full:true”]But nevertheless… it will always be the occupants of such a slinky configured space that think it means something.
you can’t Prove it from fine-tuning.
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Well George - fine-tuning does indeed “mean something”. I’m mystified as to how you could think otherwise. It’s just that nobody quite knows what it actually means.
It either means that we need new physics which could give us a physical mechanism to explain it, or that we need to reach for probability by proposing an empirically based philosophical notion like a “string landscape” multiverse or that we should just abandon the question altogether as to “why?” the constants we have are in the seemingly unnatural, knife-edge range conducive to complex chemistry rather than having more natural but non-complex chemistry-permitting values, and put it down to happenstance or that there is (again going beyond science and invoking philosophy) some kind of purpose behind the universe that enables complex chemistry (i.e. God).
Whatever opinion a person takes, it “means something” or else the problem wouldn’t present itself to us in the first place.
Moreover, if the answer ultimately lies outside scientific inquiry (if we really, really can’t find a conventional answer from first principles) - in untestable and undetectable philosophical notions like a multiverse or God - then we will never have any concrete “proof”, because only observable science can provide us with that.
We will just be left with an unexplained mystery that different people will naturally interpret differently based upon their own reasoning, since you can’t falsify either an immaterial God or an unobserved multiverse. That itself, would certainly “mean something” about the limits of the scientific endeavour: indeed it would be a paradigm shift every bit as profound as the discovery of “new physics”.
Whatever way you approach it, the unnatural “fine-tuned” behavior of the system is pointing us to something profound that we don’t yet know, whether:
(1) radically new physics beyond the standard model;
(2) the conclusion that science has limits to answering some “big questions” that will need to remain the preserve of speculative philosophy/metaphysics (i.e. explained by an untestable multiverse or God)…
(3) the realization that we simply should not being asking the “why?” question in the first place and need to just be satisfied with happenstance (which requires a change in mind-set akin to the QM “shut up and calculate” approach of David Mermin)
It cant, and shouldn’t, be trivially dismissed or put down to aesthetics. If you do find it trivial, then my guess is that you don’t really understand the problem of fine-tuning. It’s not a triviality.
IMHO, you may be the first person whom I’ve ever come across, of any persuasion, that has considered this problem and thinks it “means nothing”.
Any epistemology is going to be limited in what it can reveal, and that is a good thing. The mere act of trying to discern between what is false, what isn’t known, and what is true requires discernment of some kind, and that will inevitably limit what you can reveal. For science, that discernment is focused on empirical evidence. The big question within any epistemology is “How do we determine what is true?”, and each epistemology is going to differ in how it approaches that question. This is why I try to preface my posts with “from a scientific view” to denote what epistemology I am using.
As to the metaphysical groundings of science, they are pretty simple, what you would probably define as “similar things that all of us accept with no problem”:
- The universe is rational.
- The universe is consistent through space and time.
- Natural processes are sufficient for understanding the Universe.
Of course, there is a lot of debate as to how one defines nature, consistency, or what is rational. Nonetheless, science is grounded in metaphysics so it isn’t as untethered as you may think.
It is meant as more of analogy than anything else. When you get down to the nitty gritty of this example the roll of the dice is not truly random. If you precisely measured the forces put on the dice and mapped their predicted path on the craps table you could predict the outcome.
What I was getting at is how a large group of particles governed by a set probability can produce a predictable outcome even though the actions of a single particle can’t be predicted. This is why we can measure the half life of an radioactive isotope even though each decay event is random.
If I could nit pick for just one second, you don’t need to directly observe the multiverse in order to test for it. We have some very rough ideas of what a hypothesis might look like which could lead to ways we could test for a multiverse (e.g. string theory). In the future we may even be able to create regions of space with extremely high energy densities which could allow us to test the multiverse idea. I’m not sure what path we have towards testing for an immaterial creator deity. Perhaps there is a way, or perhaps not, but there doesn’t seem to be a path at the moment.[quote=“Vouthon, post:89, topic:36932”]
It cant, and shouldn’t, be trivially dismissed or put down to aesthetics. If you do find it trivial, then my guess is that you don’t really understand the problem of fine-tuning. It’s not a triviality.
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Aesthetics is one of the more interesting parts of theoretical physics, IMHO. A common theme is that there should be these elegant and concise equations that explain how the universe works, but what if that isn’t true? Big and messy ideas are often shunned in favor of sleeker and simpler models. Is this human bias, or is this a real thing? Time will tell (hopefully).
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I agree aquaticus, those are valid points.
Yes, its possible that we wouldn’t need to directly observe a multiverse - but it would still be required to have testable consequences/arise as an inevitable consequence of a theory with testable predictions.
The problem is that it doesn’t fulfil any of this criteria and there seems to be no way of making it falsifiable.
String Theory is not a theory but a framework. At the moment, it can be made to predict almost “anything”. And SUSY is nowhere in sight.
In principle, I don’t think we can test for a multiverse. We need to be cognizant of the horizons.
As for God, I don’t think it would ever - again even in principle - be possible to test for the existence or non-existence of an immaterial being.
In terms of aesthetics: its a very human desire to have an elegant, knowable universe. The quest for a GUT (grand unified theory) stems from this.
Some critique the multiverse on the ground that its “messy” (i.e. Steinhardt) but I think that’s of far less significance than its testability.
IMHO perhaps, we have no right to demand from nature that she fit our preconceived bias in favour of elegance, “concise equations” and simplicity as you suggest but undeniably its an assumption that most physicists make. We just don’t know at present.
Oh absolutely, @Vouthon. It does mean something. And it is probably most helpful to Physicists.
But, logically, it doesn’t mean God’s existence. It’s trivial when it comes to God.
Imagine one million rocks. and there is just one rock with lichen growing on it … because it is the only rock with all the right attributes (location, humidity, air flow, whatever it is that makes Lichens happy).
Does this tell you that an intelligent awareness did it? No. But it is amazing…
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Hi again George,
I’m glad you recognize that it does mean something!
No one looking at this problem (well, ok, ID’ers excepting but I mean no objective person) is suggesting that fine-tuning “logically means God’s existence”.
As I noted earlier on in this thread, for physicists 'fine-tuning’ is indicative that there is a certain sensitivity of an outcome to some input parameters or assumptions, as well as a contrast between the wide range of possibilities and the narrow range of the particular outcome in question. The incredible delicacy of the cancellation is particularly disturbing, perplexing, demanding of a solution. On account of this amazing sensitivity, it means that the properties of our universe have to be, very precisely, just as they are.
No God implied. God is a philosophical/theological concept, not a scientific one.
But the problem with your rock analogy (other than the problems noted earlier by Heddle, which you should read over again imho, because you seem to be forgetting that fine-tuning is global, not about local habitability but the existence of any complex chemistry or heavy materials at all), is that it assumes a multiverse. In other words you are using the very logic that you flag for criticism in relation to God: “Fine-tuning logically means the existence of a multiverse”. It doesn’t, anymore than it means “God did it”.
But we are not talking about rocks, or planets. We are talking about the universe , the only universe we can observe and know to exist, and whether our universe really is all their is or if spacetime is infinitely larger, with an infinite number of “bubbles” spawned from an eternal cosmic inflation, each with their own distinct vacuum energies in the different regions.
You assume the existence of this infinity of unseen regions beyond our universe, the reach of our telescopes, the particle horizon and the speed of light, where the vacuum energy is much larger and conditions are inhospitable to the existence of life, such that our “fortunate” vacuum energy is therefore a selection effect.
That’s perfectly fine and plausible philosophically. But it rests on an untested assumption, an untested belief.
Because whereas we know their are other rocks and other planets, we do not know that their are other universes and have no evidence at the moment to even infer the existence of these other universes, anymore than we do God.
If there are other universes, that is amazing. But we have no way of potentially falsifying your statement, which makes it scientifically meaningless.
Therefore, if you want to put the multiverse probability argument forward as a viable explanation of the problem (which you certainly can), you are appealing to an unseen infinity beyond what we can observe and test (indeed beyond conventional science) to explain the features of our own single universe, which is currently unfalsifiable.
As such, it is little different from an argument appealing to the immaterial agency of an infinite God, also being as He is an untestable and unfalsifiable philosophical explanation. Both explanations - infinite God or infinite multiverse - reach for explanations beyond the universe to explain the unique properties of the universe, either as intentional purpose or a selection effect, because they are essentially admissions of failure in trying to find an answer from first principles within the universe itself.
There is a world of difference between imagining a “million rocks” and imagining a “million universes”.
The fine-tuning argument has always perplexed me. I understand the need for a fine-tuner from a religious perspective but I personally don’t see anything other than chaos and randomness in the Universe, maybe I’m missing something.
My current understanding of the argument is; A fine-tuner (FT) started the Universe with homo-sapiens being the ultimate end goal.
If I accept current agreed upon dating and events, the FT process went something like this:
The FT, somehow existing outside of time and space, decides to start the Big Bang to put the Universe in motion.
The FT then waits 9 Billion years to select our galaxy out of 2 Trillion possible galaxies.
The FT then selects our Sun out of a possible 100 Billion stars in the Milky Way, in a seemingly random part of the galaxy, to shape our solar system.
After selecting the 3rd planet the FT then does a number of unknown things to make that planet habitable.
The FT then waits an estimated 700k years for the meteorite bombardment to slow down and the planet to cool before starting single-cell life through a yet unknown process.
The FT then waits another 1 Billion years before starting multicellular life.
The FT then waits another 2 Billion years before starting fish and anthropods.
The FT also planned (allowed?) at least 5 mass extinction events, Ice Ages, Snowball Earth, Desert Earth, Pangea breaking into continents, etc.
Finally after 4 Billion years of fine-tuning, the FT starts mammals and after another 300k years; Homo Sapiens arrive.
Call me a skeptic but I fail to see intelligent fine-tuning in this process.
If something is amazing and could only be done by an intelligent Being, what does this tell you?
Isn’t it the same as you coming across some footprints that you recognize as only belonging to a dog?
Is your problem with the intelligent aspect here or the fine tuning?
It seems that a large number of intelligent humans have many hours to track down these facts. Does intelligent track intelligence, or lack of intelligence?
I may have started out my initial reply with false assumption; a fine-tuner would necessarily be intelligent.
You seem to be positing that may not be the case, a fine-tuner could be initially bad at tuning and then, after trial and error, finally get it right. Am I understanding your point correctly?
That certainly would fit with the data better than an omniscient fine-tuner.
I’m afraid that’s not the argument.
There is nothing at all special about our galaxy. “God” certainly didn’t intervene to “select” it. We live on a perfectly ordinary planet orbiting an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy — nothing unexpected, all very natural. We are adapted to our planet, our habitat, through natural selection. FT has nothing to do with planet habitability. It’s about the fact that we have any planets, stars or complex chemistry at all that can lead to the emergence of sentient life.
Fine-tuning is not a local argument about some alleged divine agency with respect to our little patch of space-time but rather about the universe as a whole: we live in an extraordinarily unnatural universe, it goes, — one that is as unexpected as a vase balanced to within an atom’s breadth of falling off a table, or (to use Professor Arkani-Hamed’s favoured description of naturalness) as unexpected as walking into a room and discovering a pencil balanced on its point. Is the pencil glued? Held by a string? Magnets?
Perhaps some extreme ID folk would believe it as you spelled it out, I don’t know, but the argument from fine-tuning tends to assume (for all ostensible purposes) a sort of “Deistic God”. It’s a “natural” argument, not one presupposing a revelatory God who intervenes after the act of creation and establishment of initial conditions, laws, fundamental constants etc. Rather it assumes that He simply leaves the universe to unfold, naturally and in a mechanistic manner, within the framework He has pre-determined and set.
Only your first statement applies for the sake of the FT argument: “The FT, somehow existing outside of time and space, decides to start the Big Bang to put the Universe in motion” (although being timeless and immutable, without a before/after, you couldn’t really say He “decided”).
It’s at that point that the fine-tuning comes in.
If we rewind the Universe to a time just a few picoseconds following the Big Bang, it started off with a set of initial conditions and fundamental constants, a number of which (the argument goes) had to be, very precisely, just as they are or else the universe would have expanded too quickly for galaxies and stars to form; would have been sterile and consisted of no complex chemistry or heavy materials - really just an undifferentiated cloud of hydrogen and helium, without the possibility of any life of any sort emerging in it. And we have no idea where the values came from, for instance the value of the cosmological constant, working from first principles - the values are not as we expect but on the “edge”, in the narrow range necessary for complex chemistry and thus life to develop.
As such, the properties of our universe had to be “set” very precisely to values that are not readily explained by theory. Different combinations of properties would have yielded conditions in which complex life could not have evolved, but our universe is “fine-tuned” within a narrow range of possible values for complex chemistry and carbon-based life.
> There is nothing at all special about our galaxy. “God” certainly didn’t intervene to “select” it. We live on a perfectly ordinary planet orbiting an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy — nothing unexpected, all very natural. We are adapted to our planet, our habitat, through natural selection.
Completely agree.
FT has nothing to do with planet habitability. It’s about the fact that we have any planets, stars or complex chemistry at all that can lead to the emergence of sentient life.
Is there sentient life on other planets? Homo Sapiens?
we live in an extraordinarily unnatural universe, it goes, — one that is as unexpected as a vase balanced to within an atom’s breadth of falling off a table, or (to use Professor Arkani-Hamed’s favoured description of naturalness) as unexpected as walking into a room and discovering a pencil balanced on its point. Is the pencil glued? Held by a string? Magnets?
How do you know this? Do you have another Universe to compare against?
And we have no idea where the values came from, for instance the value of the cosmological constant, working from first principles - the values are not as we expect but on the “edge”, in the narrow range necessary for complex chemistry and thus life to develop.
Are you saying the FT intervened for the Universe as a whole and we were lucky enough to be in a part of it that allowed life to arise?
As such, the properties of our universe had to be “set” very precisely to values that are not readily explained by theory. Different combinations of properties would have yielded conditions in which complex life could not have evolved, but our universe is “fine-tuned” within a narrow range of possible values for complex chemistry and carbon-based life.
Are we (homo sapiens) the ultimate goal of the fine-tuning?