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Author Topic:   Statistical impossibility??
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 314 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 14 of 47 (344109)
08-27-2006 11:35 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by CatholicBioTeacher
08-24-2006 4:10 PM


I have also heard that to get around the staggering statistics people have stated that there are many Universes that we just don't know about.
Not quite. This has been proposed, but not, as you suggest, to answer the question of fine-tuning.
I believe that you are referring to the inflationary hypothesis, originally proposed by Alan Guth (whose book I have read, but some years ago, so I am not exactly an authority).
Guth's proposal was intended, originally, to solve problems in cosmology, the "horizon problem" and the "flatness problem". It is summarized here.
quote:
Triggered by the symmetry breaking that separates off the strong force, models suggest an extraordinary inflationary phase in the era 10-36 seconds to 10-32 seconds. More expansion is presumed to have occurred in this instant than in the entire period ( 14 billion years?) since.
The inflationary epoch may have expanded the universe by 1020 or 1030 in this incredibly brief time. The inflationary hypothesis offers a way to deal with the horizon problem and the flatness problem of cosmological models.
Lemonick and Nash in a popular article for Time describe inflation as an "amendment to the original Big Bang" as follows: "when the universe was less than a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second old, it briefly went through a period of superchanged expansion, ballooning from the size of a proton to the size of a grapegruit (and thus expanding at many, many times the speed of light). Then the expansion slowed to a much more stately pace. Improbable as the theory sounds, it has held up in every observation astronomers have managed to make."
Now, what does this have to do with fine-tuning? Well, one of the physical implications of the inflationary hypothesis seems to be that our universe would be one of many universes in spacetime --- it is reasonable to call them different "universes" because we could never reach or observe another one. And these other universes would have physical constants different from our own. (This is a consequence of the absence of communication between the different universes.)
So then it is only necessary to invoke the Weak Anthropic Principle to see why we live in one of those universes that can support life --- no matter how unlikely they happen to be.
Is any of this true?
As I have said, we cannot observe these other universes --- by definition, that's what makes them other universes. So the reason to believe that they exist is because their existence is a logical consequence of the inflationary hypothesis --- we can't have the IH without having all these extra universes.
So it boils down to how much confidence you have in the inflationary hypothesis. As it says in the quotation above, it fits the astronomical observations.
But it also rests on certain ideas about particle physics: about symmetry breaking and the origin of the strong nuclear force. So far as I know, the current state of play with this is that scientists say that in order to test this aspect of the hypothesis, they need someone to buy them a much bigger steel donut. For a partial list of stuff which might be true in this field, have a look here.
You see the problem?
I hope this was informative --- welcome to the forums, by the way.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : 'Cos I found a missing link...
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by CatholicBioTeacher, posted 08-24-2006 4:10 PM CatholicBioTeacher has not replied

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 314 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 41 of 47 (356995)
10-17-2006 6:05 AM
Reply to: Message 35 by warner
10-16-2006 11:47 AM


"From the probability standpoint, the ordering of the present environment into a single amino acid molecule would be utterly improbable in all the time and space available for the origin of terrestrial life."
This is a flat falsehood. Amino acids have repeatedly been produced by non-biotic reactions. It takes mere days and can be done in the confines of a laboratory.
(sounds a lot like the improbability that evolutionist claim for creation beliefs)
No. Creationist beliefs are not improbable. They are false.
A Swiss mathematician, Charles Eugene Guye, actually computes the odds against such an occurrence at only one chance in 10(160). That means 10 multiplied by itself 160 times, a number too large even to articulate.
And since experiments have proved him wrong, the assumptions underlying his math were flawed.
NB: You mean 10^160 or 10160.
Another scientist expressed it this way:
"The amount of matter to be shaken together to produce a single molecule of protein would be millions of times greater than that in the whole universe. For it to occur on earth alone would require many, almost endless, billions of years." The Evidence of God in an Expanding Universe, p. 23.
Of course, proteins are not produced by "shaking matter together", so such a calculation is irrelevant.
How can we explain the naive insistence of evolutionists to believe something so extremely out of character for their scientific background?
The obvious answer to your question is that scientists do in fact have opinions which are consistent with their scientific background, whereas you, being a non-scientist, have been bamboozled by a lot of unscientific nonsense.
Since it is bleedin' obvious that scientists understand science, you could have thought of this yourself instead of lowering yourself to your paranoid rantings about "bigotry" and "suppression" and "dogmatism" and "dishonesty".

This message is a reply to:
 Message 35 by warner, posted 10-16-2006 11:47 AM warner has not replied

  
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