1. Stu... when you have to comment on typos you know you are trolling your ass off.... 2. Ricter Lets... make this clear... I am not arguing past Stu... he is completely misrepresenting the state of science. I will pose a question and answer for you. . if you dispute the answer let me know. Q. Do many scientists say the cosmological constant is tuned to over 100 decimal places.... Answer yes... Susskind, Weinberg and almost every other scientist acknowledges that fact... Q. Is that that an example of the extreme fine tuning of the constants of our universe ... Answer Yes. Q. Do any scientists think that you can properly say the comological constant could have been that finely tuned by luck. A. We are not aware of any that pick luck as a good answer. Q. So what are the possible explanations... a. Tuner b. One day we will discover some fundamental understanding that explains why the universe is tuned for life. c. Almost infinite other universes. --- (by the way... all of the above Q and A is in the Susskind video I posted numerous times on this thread.)
Exactly the kind of dishonesty I am objecting to, along with the dissemblance that goes into trying to mix and confuse different and distinct arguments to which Ricter refers. The Tuner being alluded to is not science. It is religious and doesn't belong in science.
Starting at 6 minutes in Susskind states exactly what I have been saying. So you see Stu is lying about many things. He pretends theses scientists do not say the CC is tuned to over 100 decimal places. In fact at one point he said it is just a place holder and could be zero. Compare Stu's crazy claim to this... And remember watch at 6 minutes... where Susskind says God. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/2cT4zZIHR3s?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> [/B][/QUOTE] [/B][/QUOTE]
For the record... in the video above, Susskind speaks of razor's edge fine tuning of the cosmological constant. He speaks of it so precisely he corrects the interviewer and says the 120 decimal place digit is a 2 not a one. (really its in the video... he makes sort of geeky... sorry I have to correct this but... its a 2 not 1. its on in the video.. yet this is the bullshit Stu slings... "The cosmological constant is unknown. If you understood anything about the subject you'd understand that much. Susskind is being no more precise than Albert Einstein who entered the factor (Lambada) in his gravitational equation for the cosmological constant. Einstein had the constant at implied zero. Susskind has it at an infinitesimally higher positive. A tiny fraction off of zero. Susskind states he is not being precise. He says so. He forewords all with it appears or there is an appearance... No one knows yet what the value is. Susskind arrives at it via string theory, which you stated is nothing but speculation. So then is the suggested cosmological constant at 120 decimal places from zero speculative , being derived from speculative string theory." ---- can believe how 100% opposite of the truth Stu is. He is completely crazy out of his mind lying when he says Suskind says he is not being precise.
I should stay out of this argument. It's been ongoing without resolution since... perhaps about the time Man developed a sense of cause and effect. Say, a million years.
A scientist says the word god and you go apoplectic. A god explanation , the 'Tuner' you are alluding to, would be a religious assertion, not a scientific explanation. This is how Susskind previously explained god...."The cosmic landscape: string theory and the illusion of intelligent design " Susskind doesn't mention the words fine-tuning throughout. So how exactly is he saying exactly what you are saying? When Susskind says "there seems to be" or "there appears" or "an appearance of" , how is Susskind being precise? When you already have information that counters what you assert, is it really all you can do but repeat the same assertion again and again? Does all you know about the cosmological constant really come from that one video? In Einstein's General Relativity the cosmological constant is at zero. Referring to the video, Susskind puts it a tiny 120/122 decimal places away from zero. Were Einstein and Susskind contemporaries and had Einstein made a similar vid to that of Susskind's, you'd be demanding the cosmological constant was fine-tuned by a 'Tuner/Creator/God' to zero. All you know and claim about the cosmological constant would be coming from Einstein's vid, just as it is now from Susskind's. There are reasons now why Einstein might not have been precise in tacking on his cosmological constant to General Relativity at implied zero. There are also reasons why he was later not being precise in removing it when hearing of the Friedmann/Sitter model predicting an expansion of space-time without a cosmological constant. So ask yourself who is actually being precise.... Einstein or Susskind. In the context you're trying to conjure with, they can't both be. More broadly it is clear physicists don't have a consensus on the correct calculation for a cosmological constant. It may well turn out dark energy will be a far better explanation anyway. All you are doing is willfully and deceitfully ignoring fact in preference to forming a pre-conclusion in spite of them.
everything you write Stu is some sort of lie... its crazy... you are a troll. Susskind does not mention the words fine tuning in his book? Are you on drugs... The point of the book was that when Polchinsky calculated there were 10 to the 500 string theory solutions... Susskind could posit those solutions were real universes and he could therefore explain the fine tunings in our universe... like the Cosmological Constant... calculated by his friend Weinberg... http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/books/review/15powell.html?_r=0 Physicists are not like ordinary people, and string theorists are not like ordinary physicists. Even compared with their peers, crafters of the arcane model of reality that is string theory think in terms of sweeping explanations of nature's design. Leonard Susskind, a founder of the theory and one of its leading practitioners, brazenly lays out this no-boundaries attitude on the first page of his new book. His research, he declares, "touches not only on current paradigm shifts in physics and cosmology, but also on the profound cultural questions that are rocking our social and political landscape: can science explain the extraordinary fact that the universe appears to be uncannily, nay, spectacularly, well designed for our own existence?" THE COSMIC LANDSCAPE String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. By Leonard Susskind. Illustrated. 403 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $24.95. Related First Chapter: 'The Cosmic Landscape' (January 15, 2006) Readers Forum: Book News and Reviews What troubles Susskind is an intelligent design argument considerably more vexing than the anti-evolution grumblings recently on trial in Dover, Pa. Biologists can point to unambiguous evidence that evolution truly does happen and that it can account for many otherwise inexplicable aspects of how organisms function. For those who take a more cosmic perspective, however, the appearance of design is not so simply refuted. If gravity were slightly stronger than it is, for instance, stars would burn out quickly and collapse into black holes; if gravity were a touch weaker, stars would never have formed in the first place. The same holds true for pretty much every fundamental property of the forces and particles that make up the universe. Change any one of them and life would not be possible. To the creationist, this cosmic comity is evidence of the glory of God. To the scientist, it is an embarrassing reminder of our ignorance about the origin of physical law. Until recently, most physicists took it on faith that as they refined their theories and upgraded their experiments they would eventually expose a set of underlying rules requiring the universe to be this way and this way only. In "A Brief History of Time," Stephen Hawking recalled Albert Einstein's question "How much choice did God have in constructing the universe?" before replying that, judging from the latest ideas in physics, God "had no freedom at all." Like many leading physicists at the time, Hawking believed that scientists were closing in on nature's essential rules - the ones that even God must obey - and that string theory was leading them on a likely path to enlightenment. 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. If every type of universe exists, there is no need to invoke God (or an unknown master theory of physics) to explain why one of them ended up like ours. Furthermore, it is inevitable that we would find ourselves in a universe well suited to life, since life can arise only in those types of universes. This circular-sounding argument - that the universe we inhabit is fine-tuned for human biology because otherwise we would not be here to see it - is known as the Anthropic Principle and is reviled by many cosmologists as a piece of vacuous sophistry. But if ours is just one of a near-infinite variety of universes, the Anthropic Principle starts to sound more reasonable, akin to saying that we find ourselves on Earth rather than on Jupiter because Earth has the mild temperatures and liquid water needed for our kind of life. Although Susskind's title and central motivation are drawn from this fascinating debate over design, most of "The Cosmic Landscape" is structured not around philosophy but around the nuts-and-bolts concepts of modern particle physics. Here Susskind's long years as a theorist and lecturer at Stanford University prove a mixed blessing. He is a good-humored and enthusiastic tour guide but he clearly does not know how baffling he sounds much of the time. He coaxes the reader along with rhetorical questions and charmingly corny allegories. Still, this isn't much help when it comes to material like "Let's suppose that the Calabi Yau manifold has a topology that is rich enough to allow 500 distinct doughnut holes through which the fluxes wind. The flux through each hole must be an integer, so a string of 500 integers has to be specified." Um, is this going to be on the exam? Susskind's insider perspective also lends an air of smugness to the whole affair. He falls prey to the common error of Whig history: interpreting past events as if they were inevitable stepping stones to the present. He allows remarkably little doubt about string theory considering that it has, as yet, not a whit of observational support. "As much as I would very much like to balance things by explaining the opposing side, I simply can't find that other side," he writes in his concluding chapter. Such braggadocio begs for an anthropic question of its own. Humans have been around in more or less their present form for about 150,000 years; detailed stories of the origin of the world run as far back as the first written languages and surely existed in oral form much earlier still. How likely is it that this generation, right now, is the lucky one that has discovered the final answer? I'm not a physicist, but if I were putting money on the table, I wouldn't take those odds. Corey S. Powell is a senior editor at Discover magazine and author of "God in the Equation: How Einstein Transformed Religion."
OMG. You were talking -about a video- you must have posted more times than atoms in the universe. You said... "Starting at 6 minutes in Susskind states exactly what I have been saying." In response I said -about the video- you've posted more times than soft mick.... "Susskind doesn't mention the words fine-tuning throughout. So how exactly is he saying exactly what you are saying?" He does not say the universe IS fine-tuned. He doesn't even mention the words fine-tuned. The reference I made to the book is about how Susskind previously explained god contrary to the way YOU assert Susskind must mean god is some sort of explanation -in the video-. He includes those things as explanations which people do in general, including god as a metaphor for intelligent designer he previously categorized in his book and its title as an illusion. Instead of querying reasonably, you keep fabricating bullshit conclusions from stuff people, including myself, are not saying. Next, In this context as far as he is being precise about 120 decimal places .... so is Einstein being precise when he has the cosmological constant at zero and then removes it all together. You are missing the point again. Now you've posted just a review of Susskind's book that doesn't even quote Susskind's book saying the words fine-tuning, in order to castigate my comment that Susskind doesn't say the words fine-tuning. I can only presume you start drinking around lunch time.
You are a fricken troll. In the interview the interviewer asks him about fine tunings and he responds. could you be more dense. With respect to the book... you are such a fricken troll that is what the book is about... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind The Cosmic Landscape[edit|edit source] Main article: The Cosmic Landscape The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design is Susskind's first popular science book, published by Little, Brown and Company on December 12, 2005.[23] It is Susskind's attempt to bring his idea of the anthropic landscape of string theory to the general public. In the book, Susskind describes how the string theory landscape was an almost inevitable consequence of several factors, one of which was Steven Weinberg's prediction of the cosmological constant in 1987. The question addressed here is why our universe is fine-tuned for our existence. Susskind explains that Weinberg calculated that if the cosmological constant was just a little different, our universe would cease to exist.