The debate rages. But it rages not about whether the universe is fine-tuned or not, that argument has been settled. That argument has been made convincingly by many of the giants of physics, including Leonard Mlodinow, Luke Barnes, Geraint Lewis, Leonard Susskind, Robin Collins, Paul Davies, Martin Rees, John Barrow, John Leslie, Alan Guth, Brian Green, Roger Penrose, the late Stephen Hawking, and many others. They all agree, yes, the universe is extremely fine-tuned. The argument left is how did it get that way.
Oh, there are a few holdouts, Sean Carroll, Lawrence Krauss, and a couple of others. Their objections will be dealt with in a later post.
But what is meant by the term The Fine-Tuned Universe? Just a brief overview of what that means.
There are about 30 or more constants that if any of the values were changed as much as one percent then the universe as we know it would not exist. But these constants are only a small part of the story, even though advocates of the multiverse would like to make them the whole story.
The initial conditions at the Big Bang are unbelievably fine-tuned. Physicist Roger Penrose estimates that the odds of the initial low entropy state of our universe occurring by chance alone are on the order of 1 in 10 10(123).
Initially, in the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang, there existed nothing but an extremely hot “soup”, or plasma, of quarks and gluons. These subatomic particles were the building blocks that would eventually create every proton and neutron in the universe. But here is the critical part, the part that will blow your mind if you only think about it for a while. In these first initial conditions of the universe, there existed the “recipe” for things that would only happen half a billion years later. In these initial conditions of the universe, there existed the recipe for stars and galaxies. There existed the recipe for these stars to fuse heavier elements, and to then explode and fuse the even heavier elements. There existed here the recipe for every element in the universe, elements that would form secondary stars and rocky planets that would orbit them.
Somehow, in those initial conditions, there existed the plan for conditions and events that would not happen for somewhere around half a billion years later. Somehow the Big Bang planned ahead.
Nevertheless, even though a vast majority of physicists and cosmologists do see the universe as being fine-tuned have figured out a way to make this all just a happy accident. They call it the multiverse. If trillions upon trillions of universes exist, then at least one of them will have all these constants, laws, forces, and initial conditions just right for our existence.
But for this to be true then the charge or whatever value these constants possess, would have to be truly random, not firmly set as we find them in this universe. If this is true then each constant or force and initial condition would have a one-in-infinity chance, or close to it, of being correct in each and every universe. The chance of getting just one would be close to one in infinity. The chance of getting just two of them correct would be one in infinity times infinity. The chance of getting three of them right in the same universe would be one in infinity times infinity times infinity. The chance of getting them all correct would be… well, anyone should be able to see where this is going.
So why do virtually all scientists vehemently oppose a fine-tuner? The answer to that question is quite obvious. It lends credence to religion. It is my very strong contention that it does not. Yes, I know, all the internet Bible thumpers such as Stephen Meyer, William Lane Craig, and Deepak Chopra all seize on the fine-tuning argument as proof that the Christian God exists. That is obviously a huge error on their part. The fine-tuning argument is no more an argument for the existence of Yahweh than it is for the existence of Thor, Zeus, Poseidon, or any other mythological god ever created by man.
This website will discuss this and many other related subjects in future posts. A few of them, but certainly not all, are listed below.
The Multiverse
The Many Worlds Interpretation
The Double Slit Experiment
The Crisis in Cosmology
The great non sequitur, or why it does not follow that positing a conscious creator lends credence to the biblical god.
I will try to have a new post every week or so. I also invite others who have opinions on the subject to submit a “Guest Post” for publication.
If you would like to notified of all new posts, then email me at DarwinianOne@gmail.com . All email notices will be sent BCC, Blind Carbon Copy, so no one else will see your email address.
Thank you
Ron Patterson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_ZsDBMPQMI
Great Job Ron…excited for this site!
Many worlds for dummies…like me!!
I agree that the term ‘knowledge’ implies that the data is or has been considered by a conscious intellectual entity (an IE).
When I say (perhaps too loosely) that these things have ‘knowledge’ I refer to the same sort of information you allude to in your post on the double-slit experiment, where you note that …”Simply recording the which-way information will cause the collapse whether it is ever observed or not.” By observed, I take it you that you are meaning that the data is observed by an IE, not just read by a programme.
That record of ‘information’ can be on a memory card which is never read by an IE, yet the mechanical system of the experiment has that information secured as digital data to the point where it does (somehow) affect the quantum outcome.
Thus, I concur that the total ‘sense of self’ required by an electron need be no more than a variable assignment in a programme;
bool IAmElectron= TRUE;
that ‘knowledge’ of self, that data, then enables that thing to make decisions about how to respond to its environment, for example:
If (IAmElectron and HeIsElectron) then DoElectron; //goes to a subroutine which contains all the things which this electron has to do in response to the presence of another electron.
If (IAmElectron and HeIsProton) then DoProton; //goes to sub re how to act among protons.
etc.
It is a number crunching game requiring data accumulation and manipulation. It does not need to be ‘conscious’, but the programme has to have been written, complied and put someplace it can run, the parameters have to be set, the sensors need to be on, and the programme has to be running. A laptop or microprocessor is not ‘conscious’, but it could probably provide all the processing power needed for a sub atomic particle to do what such particles are observed to do.
In that manner these inanimate objects do “know what they must do”, tho that could more accurately and usefully be phrased in a way which avoids any hint of consciousness: “they have internal mechanisms which allow them to respond to their environment in a planned way”.
And that is my humble opinion, for today! 🙂
Thanks, Nigel, but that was not what I was hinting at when I said “which way does knowledge collapses the wave function”. Then I asked, “who or what possesses that knowledge”? I never meant to suggest that the particles themselves, or some kind of hardware possesses that knowledge. So the knowledge is possessed but not by any inanimate object. By whom or what? That question is still open.
Note: There is a branch of philosophy that does believe that all inanimate objects are conscious. I am just not a member of that clan.
Thanks Ron! Awaiting your next chapter with bated breath! If you get it right a Nobel Prize awaits you!!
In regard to “.. I do not believe they are conscious and therefore do not “know” anything.”, I think these are two different things. The particle may not have consciousnes in a Descartian ‘I Drink Therefore I Am’ way, but it does have ‘knowledge’ of its surroundings in the same way that a small humanoid robot does. I potter with Arduino microcontrollers, and from that sort of perspective I see that the requisite capabilities of sub atomic particles are quite conducive to programming, and the addition of sensor suites, calculations, references to lookup tables, motion control and all the other ‘abilities’ such things exhibit and REQUIRE.
In fact I would say that a thing having a full suite of these abilities is both a NECESSARY and a SUFFICIENT requirement to properly define such a thing, and to explain its behaviour.
So in that sense these non-conscious things do have ‘knowledge’. They must have, else how do they know what to do. Again I assert that it is not enough to declare that ‘these are the properties of this type of particle’ We must dig deeper.
Keep up the great work!
Nigel wrote: So in that sense these non-conscious things do have ‘knowledge’. They must have, else how do they know what to do.
Nigel, that which is not conscious cannot possibly have knowledge. They do not know what they must do. The knowledge must be possessed somewhere else and guide them in their path.
I am adamant in my opinion that inanimate matter is not conscious. Can you imagine a conscious neutron, smack in the middle of a neutron star, looking around and wondering to itself, “How the hell am I ever going to get out of here?”
If there is consciousness in the universe, then it lies outside of inanimate matter, not inside it. Of course, you are entitled to a different opinion. I just don’t believe that a rock knows anything about itself.
Hi Ron. Good thoughts. What I ask here is, I acknowledge, a similar question to the one you ask – viz.: “How did the Bang inform the behaviour of things which only (they suggest) came into existence half a billion years later?”
My question
Ignoring my brow-wrinkling over the first few Planck intervals of the Bang; once anything became anything,
my question is how did that anything know what it was and what it was to do?
For me even the most fundamental ‘particle’ at the moment of its creation is endowed with a wonderful set of physics and engineering-related attributes.
If I may anthropomorphise such a particle, it has self awareness – it knows what it is (If an electron did not know it was an electron, then it would not be able to determine whether it should be repelled by other electron and attracted to protons, for example)
It knows what it is supposed to do in the many circumstances it will find itself in. it can ‘see’ and sense the properties of all other ‘things’ both far (quarks in my body know to move towards the local Great Attractor 250 million light years away), and near.
It can tell if other things have electric charges, if they have magnetic fields, if they have mass, if they are to be attracted or repelled by them wherever they occur near or far, singly or in combination with other things – a very big lookup list. This lookup list then tells the thing if it is to behave as if it is attracted to all other other particles by inverse square or cube laws (depending on things called ‘forces’ – electric, magnetic, gravitational etc) or not affected by them at all. It has the ability to manoeuvre (to respond to these forces, to travel in vaguely elliptical paths around some other things, to accelerate or stop) so it must have an energy supply powering its propulsion system in order to affect these changes in velocity.
An electron, for example, knows its duty. It knows to travel in a path around the nuclei of atoms, to be deflected this way and that by various ‘fields’ and forces, to shuffle along a wire, or to race through a slit, or two, and splatter into a detector.
This requirement for knowledge of self, and knowledge of mission, perception of the attributes of the outside world, navigation, propulsion etc applies to every fundamental particle and to all things made from these building blocks.
Science seems to brush this off by just saying things like: “These are the properties of an electron; of a quark; of a photon etc”. I believe science must ask my question,: “How do these ‘fundamental particles’ know what they should do? How did that information make it though the alleged singularity at the start of it all, and get promulgated to each and every particle which makes up the entire universe?”
NW20220122
Thanks, Nigel for the reply and interesting questions. You wrote:
My question is how did that anything know what it was and what it was to do?
Damn good question Nigel. What was to happen half a billion years after the Big Bang had to be in the mix right from the beginning. The recipe had to be there. The next question is, how did it get there? Stay tuned, I intend to give my opinion in my next post. My answer, that is my opinion on this subject, is far too long to include in a reply.
As to the properties of electrons, and other sub-atomic particles, I do not believe they are conscious and therefore do not “know” anything. Their charge, spin, and mass are in them right from the beginning. How did they get there? Another question that I will attempt to answer. That post will be out in approximately ten days, or that is my best guess.
So how do we get added to this new site/list?
You are on the mailing list Ihor. Thanks for the interest.
What ist the universe that we observe? Generally we confuse the concept of reality our brain creates with the reality that exists. The world seems to be a holographic structure, an quantum lattice (as the entanglement of photons seems to prove). Time and space are concepts, created by human consiousness (by a brain, similar to the quantum lattice and therefore capable to interact with it). So, the idear of a beginning, time going by, and reaching any kind of end are just human concepts, who in the multidimensional lattice itself do not exist. If we think of the universe as a folded, multidimensional system, where past and future constantly interact, we get rid of some of the aspects of finetuning. Like a bullet that does not have to be shot exactly at its target, because it flies from there into the barrel at the same time. All interpretations in terms of space and time are a limited human approach to the true nature of the universe, which seems to be rather timeless and without spacial extension while at the same time capable to represent all our experiences, because it is, in its basic structure, similar to the brain and like that, it is also conscious.
You wrote: “Time and space are concepts, created by human consciousness (by a brain, similar to the quantum lattice and therefore capable to interact with it).”
Concept, noun, an abstract idea, a general notion I think you are mistaken. Humans have a concept of time and space but time and space are not themselves a concept. Humans did not create time and space. They are real. Humans have been around for less than one million years. Time and space have been around for over thirteen billion years.
I cannot think of the universe as folded. I do not believe the past and future interact at all. We live in the ever present “now”. Nothing can influence the past. There is no way it can possibly change.
I am sorry WTFC, I just don’t buy your postmodern dialogue. I see the universe as it is. I believe in deep time and deep space. We are conscious of them but our consciousness did not create them.
Ron, that is a very old discrepancy, much older than postmodernism. Basically, it goes back to Platon vs Aristoteles, Berkeley vs Hume, Hegel vs Schopenhauer. Quantum entanglement hints that the holistic nature of time and space is real: every part of space contains every other. And so does time.
I understand all that WTFC, however, that does not imply that reality, or space and time, is just a concept created by our minds.
Thanks for your reply Ron, I see I misread the thrust of your argument. Thinking that we are somehow special has been refuted first by Galileo and then by Darwin among others. Now I see that your question is more along the lines of the Why is there Something rather than Nothing? type. Without the fine tuning there would be nothing to see here! I’m afraid I don’t have any answers to offer but I look forward to hearing what others think and also your article on quantum mechanics. Quantum Entanglement has fascinated me for a long time and if it is true then the whole universe was entangled at its beginning. And thus everything is still connected somehow to everything else. Mind blowing for sure!
Alice, thanks for the reply. But make no mistake I do have an ax to grind. I hope to make that point clear in the next few months. But what really burns my ass is people who see the obvious fine-tuning of the universe then immediately see this as proof of their favorite version of god. They make the jump from the sublime to the absurd.
The universe is what it is. Since we are in it, we are the ones that could develop in a universe like this one. The creatures that are here are the ones that can exist with the constants being what they are. Maybe it could have started out with different constants and then there would be different entities that inhabited it. It might be awe inspiring and mysterious as to its origins, but I don’t feel that it was specifically created in a certain way just to produce humans. And there will be many life forms that come after we are gone!
Alice, some people make the fine-tuning argument all about life. I do not. If we get to rocky planets with liquid water, life will take care of itself.
The real fine-tuning part is getting from the Big Bang to stars, galaxies and planets. The initial conditions of the universe had to be fine-tuned else the early universe would have collapsed upon itself or flew apart before any stars could form. Every atom in the universe heavier than hydrogen or helium was created in stars vis stellar nucleosyntheses. That process had to be extremely fine-tuned. Every atom had to be fine-tuned or else stars would not shine, and no heavier atoms would have ever formed. And I could go on forever. Hundreds of things had to be fine-tuned to get from the quark-gluon plasma of the early universe to rocky planets with liquid water a billion years after the Big Bang.
And you want to skip all the way to life, several billions of years later. Hell, the fine-tuning had already happened long before that.
so the universe is fine tuned because all the alternatives would not be viable.
As there was no-time and no-space before this universe we inhabit , then there would be plenty of no-time and no-space for all the alternatives to have been tried and failed .
Or our universe was the first , or -nth or last interation ?
how could we tell ?
echoes in the fabric of this universe ?
sorry if this post sounds silly but I am striving with my megre intellect to help out
Forbin
The alternatives are not just infinite, but the number of possible universes is infinity, times infinity, times infinity… forever. Anyway Forbin, who is doing all this creating alternate universes? If there is a universe creating machine, that machine must be fine-tuned. But there is not one whit of evidence that more than one exists. This one is extremely fine tuned. This one must be explained.
Why would there be evidence in this universe of other universes?
And why would the universe creation machine need to be fine tuned? If it is spamming out infinite^infinite possible universes couldn’t ours just be the extreme outlier?
Max wrote: Why would there be evidence in this universe of other universes?
There is no reason whatsoever that such evidence should exist. There cannot possibly be evidence of shit that people just make up.
And why would the universe creation machine need to be fine tuned?
Really now? Do you think that is a legitimate question? This universe is extremely fine-tuned. Anything that created this, or other universes must be also fine-tuned.
There cannot possibly exist an infinite number of anything physical. That includes universes.
thanks Ron
the concept of infinity and forever are ones we make whilst inside a universe , I’m not sure they apply to no-time no-space.
Same for if the universes are parallel created or serial created – how would we know? by any effect on the current universe we are in? I read articles stating we can calculate from qautum physics a possible number of universes but this is still done inside this universe. we don’t know anything past the point origin. yet.
As for a machine or creator , I have to be careful here I dont run into the “turtles all the way down” problem. Besides why should there be a creator . machine or god/s ? Inside this universe natural evolution doesn’t need one ( and that maybe because this particular universe doesnt need one, possible other may need too ) so I doubt that a no-space no time exsistance / pre-point origin needs one
uh, heavy going , humour may help
God testing a software – you’ve probably seen it …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToTgcBRC4FE&t=1s&ab_channel=KISKIS-keepitshort
thanks again ,
Forbin
Forbin, only living things can evolve. There is no such thing as “survival of the fittest” with inanimate matter. Inanimate matter just is.
Of course, the universe did evolve from the quark-gluon plasma at the Big Bang. But that was not like biological evolution, or survival of the fittest. The recipe for stars, galaxies and planets was in there from the beginning.
I will have a post on that in a month or so. My next post, out in a few days, will be on the double-slit experiment.
I’m looking forward to your ideas and your wicked humor.
Our subjective experience of time is anthropic and deeply misleading, a source of many of our deeply held misconceptions regarding the nature of the universe and our place in it.
Exactly SW. Same with the “Big Bang”. There was no bang, because there was no ear. Anthropocentric concepts are useless when it comes to the understanding of the universe. If the universe had to try a billon tricks in nine-hundred-thousand-trillion years it still would be just a snap of god’s fingers, so to say.