The multiverse seems to be an excuse
I’m reading Soylent News and come across the following.
If modern physics is to be believed, we shouldn’t be here. The meager dose of energy infusing empty space, which at higher levels would rip the cosmos apart, is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times tinier than theory predicts. And the minuscule mass of the Higgs boson, whose relative smallness allows big structures such as galaxies and humans to form, falls roughly 100 quadrillion times short of expectations. Dialing up either of these constants even a little would render the universe unlivable.
To account for our incredible luck, leading cosmologists like Alan Guth and Stephen Hawking envision our universe as one of countless bubbles in an eternally frothing sea. This infinite “multiverse” would contain universes with constants tuned to any and all possible values, including some outliers, like ours, that have just the right properties to support life. In this scenario, our good luck is inevitable
Is that why they’ve postulated mutliple universes?
I realize Soylent News is not a physics textbook and that the poster could have got it wrong, but I can’t go look it up in source material. I wouldn’t understand a word of it.
But if that really is the thinking behind assuming multiverses, wouldn’t a much simpler explanation be that the current theories are missing vast aspects of the universe? Maybe we just don’t know everything yet. Human ignorance seems a much likelier explanation than multiverses. Or not?
I would think so. The simpler explanation would be more in accord with Occam’s Razor. I also would not understand a word (or an equation) of the source material. I should review my old math texts from algebra to calculus.
For some reason this discussion reminds me of an interesting definition of life I once read somewhere (don’t remember where): “Life is a local violation of the Law of Entropy.” That is, life is an organized system in a universe where the law is disorganization. Interesting and a bit scary to think that our lives may actually be in violation of a law of physics.
Branjor on November 16th, 2014 at 16:47
It seems the above, violation of the law of entropy, has been used as an argument against evolution, which I didn’t know. As you probably know, that argument has been debunked. I found the following link: http://physics.gmu.edu/~roerter/EvolutionEntropy.htm
Branjor on November 17th, 2014 at 06:43
(I am just not paying attention, am I?)
I’d never heard of the argument against evolution stuff. What will they think of next? Local “violations” of the law refute it about as much as the fact that water evaporates upward refutes the law of gravity. What a bunch of idiots. Anyway, off to read the link now.
quixote on December 3rd, 2014 at 12:06