Re: The misanthropic universe

From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon May 05 2003 - 22:42:46 MDT

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    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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