SeN Continues Its Love Affair With The Discovery Institute

[Everybody Wang Chung]

Interesting clip about universes popping into existence all the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrBuE15CvCo

[huckelberry]

How about the airliner fall argument?

Another way of trying to escape the “Strong Anthropic Principle,” the idea that the universe seems in some sense to have been designed to be friendly to life and even to intelligent life, is to posit the existence of an essentially infinite number of number of universes. On this notion, the fact that we just happen to live in a universe in which we can live (note the tautology) is pretty much sheer dumb luck, and not even especially interesting. (See the link to my Deseret News article above.) If I fall thirty-five thousand feet from an airplane and somehow survive unhurt, well, I just happen to live in a universe in which that happened. Move along! There’s nothing to see here!

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... uning.html

Vesna Vulović (Serbian Cyrillic: Весна Вуловић, pronounced [ʋêsna ʋûːloʋitɕ]; 3 January 1950 – 23 December 2016) was a Serbian flight attendant who holds the Guinness world record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute: 10,160 m (33,330 ft; 6.31 mi). She was the sole survivor after an explosion tore through the baggage compartment of JAT Flight 367 on 26 January 1972, causing it to crash near Srbská Kamenice, ........

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87

Daniel inadvertently proves the point against him. Every time he wanders away from the safety of copying and pasting others' ideas, he gets it wrong.

Drumdude, the person surviving a 33 thousand foot fall is interesting. I am not following what you are seeing as Daniel proving the point against him. I do not understand what you see that you think he has gotten wrong.

[dastardly stem]

I do think the multiverse is about as big an ask, belief-wise, as God. It’s like a tax shelter that costs as much as paying taxes. If the multiverse is someone’s alternative faith, fine, but they shouldn’t try to claim at the same time that they’re so much more scientific and rational than us credulous theists.

People who like the multiverse idea, as I understand it, aren't positing it because they're adamant its true like theists do for God. That seems to make them a bit more rational. "its possible" or "its an idea I like" is not quite on the same rational grounds of saying "its unquestionably true" as theists often like to put it.

[drumdude]

How about the airliner fall argument?



https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... uning.html




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87

Daniel inadvertently proves the point against him. Every time he wanders away from the safety of copying and pasting others' ideas, he gets it wrong.

Drumdude, the person surviving a 33 thousand foot fall is interesting. I am not following what you are seeing as Daniel proving the point against him. I do not understand what you see that you think he has gotten wrong.

It's clear when you see how he edited his post. He was trying to say that surviving a 33-thousand-foot fall was as unlikely as a universe popping into existence with the exact properties necessary for human life to exist. Clearly, it's not. Now he has added the additional condition that a drop of his favorite soft drink not be spilled during the fall.

It demonstrates that his belief in something being unlikely is an assumption. He didn't know what the odds were for surviving a fall from that height and now he does. He doesn't know what the odds are for specific Universal conditions being created, either. It's likely he's just as wrong there as well.

[Doctor Steuss]

The proprietor seems to have updated part of his post. The relevant part currently reads:

If I fall fifty-five thousand feet from a high-altitude airplane without a parachute and somehow land on my feet, completely unhurt, with my unspilled cup of Coke Zero with ice still in my hand, well, I just happen to live in a universe in which that happened. No questions needed. No mystery. Move along! There’s nothing to see here!

It previously read:

If I fall thirty-five thousand feet from an airplane and somehow survive unhurt, well, I just happen to live in a universe in which that happened. Move along! There’s nothing to see here!

Well now.

Incidentally, increasing the fall to fifty-five thousand feet doesn't change the odds.

2500 ft, 30000 ft, 55000 ft, 60000 ft... velocity at impact with the earth is the same.

[Physics Guy]

Cosmology was never really my field. I did hang around for several years with some people whose field it was, and who were good at it, but that was nearly 30 years ago now, so I may well be out of touch. I do suspect that Ethan Siegel may not be entirely reliable, however, in spite of his genuine credentials. Something he harped on in blog posts for years, as a pet idea, sounded to me as though it wasn't really self-consistent. I withheld judgement, since it wasn't my field, but then I found Sean Carroll making the same criticism of Siegel's idea, and since it is much more Carroll's field, I felt my suspicion was confirmed. I'm afraid I forget the details now about what Siegel's glitch was, even though this was only a few years ago. I'd still advise taking Siegel with a grain of salt, though.

Siegel claims that, because of cosmic inflation, it's inevitable to have lots of "bubble" universes, like the entire universe that is visible to us, separated by huge amounts of void. Inevitabilities tend to come and go in cosmology; claims that something is logically necessary have been offered as substitutes for actual evidence since ancient times. That gambit doesn't have a good track record. Inflation has some real points in its favour, but inflation has hardly been tested by observation to the standards for which we aim in hard science.

Anyway, even if Siegel were right about that inflationary kind of multiverse, it doesn't imply that fundamental constants can be different in the different local bubbles, or that any of the bubble universes can have different kinds of fundamental particles and interactions. The inflationary multiverse is still really only one universe in that sense. If it's fundamentally fine-tuned in our local bubble, it's fine-tuned everywhere. On the other hand, if we're only talking about fine tuning the initial conditions that led to particular kinds of stars and planets, within a single set of fundamental laws, then I don't think we even need the multiverse to avoid fine tuning. Our visible universe has enough stars and planets all by itself.

People have proposed wilder multiverses than the one of many inflationary bubbles, even a multiverse in which all mathematical possibilities are realized somewhere. That would give a definitive anthropic explanation without fine tuning, but it is sheer speculation that doesn't seem any less arbitrary to me than postulating a Creator.

You can try to spice up the inflationary universe by making the particles and interactions that we know be emergent properties that kind of cook out from a more fundamental set of laws, and arguing that exactly what cooked out could be different in different bubbles, even though the truly fundamental laws are the same. That sort of notion is at least a little more connected to reality than the wildest kind of multiverse, but there's still no evidence for it at all.

[Res Ipsa]

Thanks, PG. I appreciate the feedback.

[Marcus]

Good catch, Tom. Dan took Tim Barnett's article and copied it faster than a high school senior the day before Spring Break.

If a student turned that in, the teacher would certainly have some questions.

Good Lord!! Another plagiarized blog post from DCP?!

I appreciate the discussion here, but the bottom line for me is, Peterson plagiarized yet another blog entry.

[Physics Guy]

Changing the analogy from merely surviving the fall, to surviving it with unspilled Coke, doesn't help. Either that unspilled Coke scenario is literally impossible, or else it's possible but highly unlikely.

If it's literally impossible then the unspilled Coke scenario simply fails as an analogy for evolving life, because we know that it's possible for life to evolve. We are here.

As long as the analogy is to a rare but technically possible scenario, then it fails to rebut the multiverse alternative to fine tuning, because it merely requires a large enough number of tries for someone to land safely with unspilled Coke. The multiverse scenario, whatever its faults, does offer a literally infinite number of "tries" at evolving life, including (in the more extreme multiverse notions) tries at generating all the necessary values of fundamental constants and so on.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

The proprietor seems to have updated part of his post. The relevant part currently reads:

It previously read:
Well now.

Incidentally, increasing the fall to fifty-five thousand feet doesn't change the odds.

2500 ft, 30000 ft, 55000 ft, 60000 ft... velocity at impact with the earth is the same.

What is it with Dowsin’ Dan and absurd examples to make his Mormon creation fantasies plausible? SMH, argumentum ad absurdum . He and his ample ass would’ve died from hypoxia and freezing to death, too. But that’s beside the point! That’d be crazy! Now. You know what’s not crazy? An anthropomorphic polygamous god that lives near a star named Kolob that governs by capricious fiat and trickery. See? Dan’s the smart guy believing that.

Man. Mormons. The idea they have the corner on reason is laughable and pathetic. Idiots.

- Doc