spending a lot of detail hoping that jem will finally understand is probably a waste of time. with jem its not about undertstanding. its about finding any crack in our current knowledge that he can slip his god in. "If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence." -Bertrand Russell
1. I would take your response more seriously, if you did not act like it was a fact we had multiverses --- by saying "as when" fools like free thinker think you just used science to explain the fine tuning when wall you did was make a conjecture... which stands for the idea.. that if you infinite anything you can have any result. 2. How the hell would you know multiverses would be infinite. Susskind stated in his book he was not ready to propose the idea of multiverse was enough to explain the fine tuning, until Polchinsky's math found that string theory offered 10 to the 500 solutions. I realize this is all sci fi fantasy... about these universes existing but who are you to say there are infinite other universes? seriously... there are guys on this board criticism those who suggest there is a Creator... and you are proposing infinite other universes. penrose is tough, as I said earlier, but I differ with your conclusion about whether he thinks there is fine tuning. Penrose does seem to be working with a different model, but he says the tuning is so precises there is no way a multiverse would explain the in fine tuning.
I also note your statement about the chances seems to be off. if just one constant - the cosmological constant is estimated to be tuned to one part in 10^53 what would the odds be when you combine all these tunings together. Which I think is a legit question, unless science finds a theory of everything.
Interesting''ID '' read, Teleologist Its allo interesting while i think you are somewhat right on Creationism, in that more Bible believers figure the earth is closer to 6,000/+ year old rather than 6 billion/+.Thats speculation, not fact. Both those numbers/+[6k & billions/+old ] are in my bible footnotes; but @ no time have i seen or heard anyone say GOD did create the earth in 6,000/ years, mainly because the Bible does not say that. Thats simply some speculation./opinion, on both sides. Evolution is easily disproved by 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Obviously all together, the odds of any of them occurring are all the same. What is it that you don't get about that? An influence, gravity, means certain combinations will form a fully fledged universe. Stephen Hawking, someone you like to mention a lot can inform you about it, if you'd stop trying to squeeze a Creator God into places it doesn't belong all the time.
There are many bible believers that will say they and the Bible can prove you wrong. They have GOD on their side just as much as you. About evolution however, you most certainly are wrong . Evolution is not disproved by the 2nd law of thermodynamics, easily or otherwise. With a Bible, or with science.
Again, Penrose means a different thing. He refers to the solutions of string theory, and calls each solution a "universe". This is not the multiverse. The number of string theory solutions is high, but finite. Multiple universes would exist even if the theory had only one solution. They are generated from the brane dynamics of the 11 dimensional space our universe is embedded in, according to string theory. Their number must be infinite because the generating space and time is not finite. The multiverse model was developed by Gabriele Venenziano, one of the fathers of string theory. It is not conjecture, but based on solid mathematics. You can look it up in the Internet. Although Penrose talks about multiple universes and fine tuning, he means something entirely different, and this may be confusing. You must understand the context. I don't know where you got this number from, but you must have misunderstood something. The cosmological constant can be derived from the Hubble constant, which is only known today with an accuracy of about 2%. Therefore calculating a precision of 10^53 for it is nonsense. No physical constant today can be estimated with this precision. Besides, the cosmological constant just determines the life time of our universe, and it has a relatively wide range within life can evolve. Fine tuning mostly limits other constants, such as light speed, Planck's constant etc.
You keep bringing up possibilities as if they are conclusions. If it were obvious then explain how all the tuning were set and state whether you are making a conjecture or not. And don't give me that conjecture about gravity causing it without putting gravity in the context of a multiverse.... here is the intro to the paper at the cornell university library... I have already given you the paper many times. http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0602091v2 We put forward a framework for cosmology that combines the string landscape with no boundary initial conditions. In this framework, amplitudes for alternative histories for the universe are calculated with final boundary conditions only. This leads to a top down approach to cosmology, in which the histories of the universe depend on the precise question asked. We study the observational consequences of no boundary initial conditions on the landscape, and outline a scheme to test the theory. This is illustrated in a simple model landscape that admits several alternative inflationary histories for the universe. Only a few of the possible vacua in the landscape will be populated. We also discuss in what respect the top down approach differs from other approaches to cosmology in the string landscape, like eternal inflation.
1. weinberg gave us the 10 to the 53. Its posted here on et dozens of times. 2. Penrose on video argues the multiverse idea is not enough to explain the fine tuning. Could you provide links to what you say Penrose is saying. 3. regarding the history of string theory and the multiverse conjecture... we discussed this on ET from right about the time Susskind released his book. I argued that Susskind was saying our universe appeared designed and Stu and typical ET atheist clowns argued I was wrong. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/b...w/15powell.html Although string theory resists translation into ordinary language, its central conceit boils down to this: All the different particles and forces in the universe are composed of wriggling strands of energy whose properties depend solely on the mode of their vibration. Understand the properties of those strands, the thinking once went, and you will understand why the universe is the way it is. Recent work, most notably by Joseph Polchinski of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has dashed that hope. The latest version of string theory (now rechristened M-theory for reasons that even the founder of M-theory cannot explain) does not yield a single model of physics. Rather, it yields a gargantuan number of models: about 10500, give or take a few trillion. Not one to despair over lemons, Susskind finds lemonade in that insane-sounding result. He proposes that those 10500 possibilities represent not a flaw in string theory but a profound insight into the nature of reality. Each potential model, he suggests, corresponds to an actual place - another universe as real as our own. In the spirit of kooky science and good science fiction, he coins new names to go with these new possibilities. He calls the enormous range of environments governed by all the possible laws of physics the "Landscape." The near-infinite collection of pocket universes described by those various laws becomes the "megaverse." Susskind eagerly embraces the megaverse interpretation because it offers a way to blow right through the intelligent design challenge... we have been discussing this here on ET since Susskind wrote the book and explained he waited for polchinsky's math before he put forth the conjecture that all the solutions were universes. I will give you some background on the multiverse conjecture.