From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon May 05 2003 - 22:42:46 MDT
At 06:41 PM 5/5/03 +0200, Anders wrote:
>(some comments at http://www.nature.com/nsu/020812/020812-2.html)
which ends:
< But Susskind's team show that the anthropic principle won't help, because
a vast number of Universes would permit life and yet look quite different
from this one. All of these habitable Universes would result from
'miraculous' statistical events. But there are so many of them that they
would vastly overwhelm a cosmos like ours. Even if 'something' had set the
peculiar initial conditions of our Universe, this would only apply for its
first run. Subsequent recurrences would produce a quite different Universe.
In that case, we'd have to conclude that we are in the first unfolding of
this carefully crafted Universe. This all seems too much like special
pleading, the researchers say. >
What? What? Why should something have `set the peculiar initial conditions'
of *our* Universe? On this Poincare recurrence argument (well, it looks
awfully familiar to me, anyway), ours might well be the remixed result of
many earlier *non*-us-like universes, surely? It's *not* special pleading
for me to note that I hold the views I do and speak English because by
happenstance I was born in Australia last century, rather than two thousand
years ago. The Copernican default assumption can be taken too far,
especially when we're juggling universes.
Damien Broderick
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