Disown - you proved the truth of my argument. Read your quoes read the article. apply logic. A million universes were not enough to hands to argue you had a good chance of a royal flush ( life) You needed billions of hands (universes) to argue that life in our universe could be expected by chance. Now below is where susskind explains what happens if is math is wrong or some reason there are not billions of universes (landscapes). here is the final paragraph If we do not accept the landscape idea are we stuck with intelligent design? I doubt that physicists will see it that way. If, for some unforeseen reason, the landscape turns out to be inconsistent - maybe for mathematical reasons, or because it disagrees with observation - I am pretty sure that physicists will go on searching for natural explanations of the world. But I have to say that if that happens, as things stand now we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature's fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the ID critics. One might argue that the hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge is as faith-based as ID.
seems there is a lot of confusion on this thread and on previous threads touching upon the same subject, around which variant of the "principle" people think other people / scientists are referring to... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle#Variants_of_the_anthropic_principle
You just have to butcher it to suit your purpose. Either you have a serious reading comprehension problem or you're evil. Why don't you quote this part: And you have problem comprehending your own post: So you implied that Susskind was ready to propose "his theories" before they found that there could be billions of solutions. But when in fact the opposite happened: This makes a fundamental difference. Now go back and take some reading lessons (and some physics lessons too) before exposing your ignorance here again.
Now I realize where jem misunderstood Susskind. I believe jem did not intentionally misquote Susskind. The problem for Susskind is that string theory is his baby. If we need 10^500 solutions but string theory only provides a million, then most likely string theory will be cast aside and scientists will find other theories more plausible. So for Susskind, this was an important issue and he was happy that it finally worked out to his favor. OTOH, to most other scientists, this made no difference. If the string theory doesn't work out, there are always other theories that can replace it. So for Susskind to say that failure of the string theory would lend ammunition to ID is wrong. He was blinded by his own theory. People on this board actually smarter than I thought - you really don't need the string theory to debunk the fine-tuning argument.
Going backwards. Nice rework of the argument. Your interpretation of my statement is incorrect. Nice try. Are you done wasting my time yet. You are really trying to argue that I misrepresented susskinds work because you think I said he was ready to propose his theories before polchensky's pronouncement. My statment is prone to 2 different reads. One that supports you rmeaningless argument and one that does not. At the time I wrote it I know I was wondering if Susskind would have proposed his ideas anyway (if he had them), but i did not know so I purposely crafted my sentence the way i did. Regarding the quote above and other types of life. I think Susskind made a very reasonsable assement of one of the counter arguments to the AP. it being - our universe may be finely tuned for our life but it could have been finally tuned for life inside a star. it is a legitmate argument but Susskind is not buying i as persuasive.
So it's not the just reading lessons that you need. You also need writing lessons. Tell me, when you say "ready to do A when B happened," what purpose does "ready" serve? Does it not imply that you were ready to do A before B happened? In what language does "ready" mean "not yet ready?"
I'm not an arbiter of probability calculations. This is no different than people who attempt to use linear regression to trend the market. The mathematical lemmas upon which linear regression depends, states that all of the data must be between the endpoints. Yet, technical analysts/traders/etc. routinely use linear regression to predict data points outside of the endpoints. The math demonstrates that such a use is meaningless, without some other extrinsic evidence showing why the trend should continue. The result is that most people who play this game in the market, lose their arse. The same is true of probability. You can postulate trends from the data all you want, but you cannot advance beyond the endpoints without other evidence. Thus, I'm looking for you to provide that other evidence which shows the conditions of existence prior to our universe's existence. This seems an impossible paradox to me. But, if you produce evidence to support your side, I'll have to investigate and try to refute it. Until then...
I guess you are saying you do not care if nobel prize winning physicists might cite the work of physicists who use quantum mechanics to caluculate the odds of life being in our universe. As far as you are concerned it good science.
Here is a paper on quantum theory of the financial market: Quantum market games E. W. Piotrowski and J. SImageadkowski Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Volume 312, Issues 1-2 , 1 September 2002, Pages 208-216 http://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...=2148646&md5=eb48a7dbad575e05e408e0bff12625b2 I'm citing other physicists and showing you that it is indeed possible to compute the odds of QQQQ going up tomorrow using quantum mechanics. Would you believe me? I assure you it's good science.