Letters to the Editor
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N.O.M. not a complete failure
Stephen J. Gould’s famous ‘non-overlapping magesteria’ is an awful canard and I seriously doubt that he even believed it himself. Chad Bagley
The notion of non-overlapping magisteria is not, in principle, a bogus one, though Gould certainly made a muddle out of it. A statement like "Science gives us the ages of rocks and religion gives us the Rock of Ages" is a cute turn of phrase, but not too useful in helping to understand the difference. A more helpful distinction is that science is concerned with discovering universal truths about the physical universe, while religion is concerned with discovering personal truths. Or should be-the problem of course is that most religions find themselves unable to stick to what should be their appropriate side of the fence (though in theory perhaps some religions could), hence the neverending conflicts between science and religions trying to peddle faith as universally applicable truth.
Scott Stoeffler
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Circular Logic
So, by an astonishing coincidence, the universe is set up to work exactly the way the universe works? That's like saying the Bible must be true because it says so in the Bible.
Davies is amazed that human life sprung up in a place well-suited for human life? Well, duh. If the laws of physics, the environment, etc., were set up differently, there wouldn't be human life, but there'd be something else, which conformed to these different laws of physics. Life, as Dr. McCoy said, but not as we know it.
It's as if Davies walked into a preschool, where the kids had nothing to play with but Lego, and said "Good thing someone gave all these kids Legos, because otherwise how would they have built all these Lego houses?" Well, if you had given them Lincoln Logs, they'd have built houses out of Lincoln Logs. It wasn't divine fate that the kids had Legos - they were probably on sale.
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A physicist should know better ...
In particular, he should know that (a) one cannot dismiss the critics of his reasoning the way he does. Brushing it under the carpet? On the contrary, if he thought it through he'd realize that in a naturalistic world the likelihood ("probability", in the Bayesian sense) that the nature of the universe supports life given that there is life is one. So there's nothing to explain. (b) he has yet to demonstrate that the constants that are "fine tuned" can vary; (c) he has an extremely platonic view of laws that make them sound like they are "imposed from without" - but that's just idealism all over again whether Platonist, Christian or whatever. To a materialist, laws just are the patterns of being and becoming. (d) subjectvist interpretations of quantum mechanics are worng, provably. "observer" has nothing to do with people, things with minds, or anything of the sort. See, for example. volume 7 of Mario Bunge's Treatise on Basic Philosophy and the earlier work cited there in. 40 years ago this was provably wrong.
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Davies, SF, and Lee Smolin
Interesting to see Paul Davies here. I first ran across him in the early eighties when I read a couple of his popular books on relativity and quantum physics. He's as good as anybody when it comes to getting across the strangeness that is modern physics.
Second, as was pointed out earlier, science fiction has been discussing the points Professor Davies raises for decades, In addition to Frederick Pohl, some other writers who come to mind are Greg Bear, Stephen Baxter, Damien Broderick, and Alastair Reynolds.
Finally, I was kind of surprised that Lee Smolin's name never came up in the discussion. In his 1997 book, The Life Of The Cosmos, Smolin actually proposes a mechanism for producing a universe which, like our own, would have just the right physical constants for the development of life. Smolin's hypotheses is both experimentally testable and falsifiable, it's real science. And on my copy of the book, there's a complimentary blurb on the back cover by none other than Paul Davies.
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Pothole
Saying that the universe must be fine-tuned for us is like discovering a water-filled pothole after a rainstorm and saying, "Look, how amazing, the pothole was made to fit the exact shape of the water that fell into it. It must have been designed that way!"
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Now I'm confused
I thought MONDAYS were “fill the letters section with anti-religious screeds, no matter what the actual article was about” day.
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This Is Nuts
Sorry, Steve Paulson, but radio may be your thing. Your only thing.
Before publishing this sort of drivel, one should cease noticing what's, "popular," and start paying attention to what makes sense.
www.therealnews.com
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Random thoughts
I’d like to comment on a finite bubble universe as part of a multi-universe. Let’s assume that “time” is infinite. If we have a finite universe, that is created by a big bang within the realm of infinite time, the universe most likely would contract back onto itself into the form that preceded the big bang (due to our understanding of gravity). This expansion and contraction would go on infinitely. This means that we would be forced to live our existence over and over again unless we found a way out of the universe. (For within infinite time, the big bang would arrange all sequences of matter in a manner similar to a previous post big bang sequence eventually, and eventually repeatedly.)
I’d like to bring up a topic that would have added to the original article. The discussion of quantum physics could have been expanded. Quantum mechanics quantifies energy. If energy is quantized, then by basic definition, matter is quantized. If both of these are quantized, space must also be quantized (can not go into detail here). With space, matter, and energy quantized, there is an obvious explanation for the uniform speed of light, which is the movement/transference of an electromagnetic wave from one quantized piece of space to another. This opens up many different avenues of discussion related to this article.
(In my opinion, a major fallacy in Paul Davies argument is that life would not exist as it is today if certain criteria were not met. That is a tautology, which can not be argued. What is not mentioned is that life could exist in a different format, but still contain the same essence of consciousness and intelligence. Perhaps carbon-based life could be replaced with silicon-based life, or life could simply be a closed system of controlled transference of one form of energy into another. The intelligence may be the same as carbon based intelligence, but may be created by a differently endowed universe.)