twistor59 wrote:I would say that "why" is a difficult question answer satisfactorily, even in principle.

Science usually proceeds by building models, and we consider that we've made progress when we get better and better agreement between the model's prediction and experimental measurements.

When the agreement gets good, we may loosely say that elements of the model "exist in reality". So we say that a proton "is" composed of 3 quarks etc.

But "why" questions can always be pushed further and further back. I suppose you can conceive of the situation where we produce some ultimate theory and a mathematical proof that "it can be no other way". Then, maybe you've terminated the chain of "why" questions satisfactorily....

Anyway, for gravity, why do things attract each other ?
Because objects cause spacetime to be curved + because objects freely moving IN curved spacetime will tend to move towards each other.

Is that an answer to "why" though ? Not really - because you then ask why an object causes spacetime to be curved... etc etc

Paul Almond wrote:I think that a lot of the perceived justification for theism comes out of a misunderstanding of what "why" really means.

Darkchilde wrote:

Anyway, about gravity: we are still looking for the graviton, the carrier for the gravitational force. The graviton is to gravity what the photon is to electromagnetism.

Ciwan wrote:

Paul Almond wrote:I think that a lot of the perceived justification for theism comes out of a misunderstanding of what "why" really means.

Thanks Guys.

Interesting answers ... can you expand/elaborate on the above please ?

I think hard, but I still don't see the clarity in the statement "the why question is the wrong question to ask" << can someone help me understand why that statement is logical and rational.

In simple English please.

Thank You.

Anthropomorphism is any attribution of human characteristics (or characteristics assumed to belong only to humans) to animals, non-living things, phenomena, material states, objects or abstract concepts, such as organizations, governments, spirits or deities. The term was coined in the mid 1700s

Anthropocentrism describes the tendency for human beings to regard themselves as the central and most significant entities in the universe, or the assessment of reality through an exclusively human perspective.[2]

Character of anthropic reasoning

Carter chose to focus on a tautological aspect of his ideas, which has resulted in much confusion. In fact, anthropic reasoning interests scientists because of something that is only implicit in the above formal definitions, namely that we should give serious consideration to there being other universes with different values of the "fundamental parameters" — that is, the dimensionless physical constants and initial conditions for the Big Bang. Carter and others have argued that life as we know it would not be possible in most such universes. In other words, the universe we are in is fine tuned to permit life. Collins & Hawking (1973) characterized Carter's then-unpublished big idea as the postulate that "there is not one universe but a whole infinite ensemble of universes with all possible initial conditions".[27] If this is granted, the anthropic principle provides a plausible explanation for the fine tuning of our universe: the "typical" universe is not fine-tuned, but given enough universes, a small fraction thereof will be capable of supporting intelligent life. Ours must be one of these, and so the observed fine tuning should be no cause for wonder.

But how seriously can we take the multiverse? And which specific multiverse should we assume? — this question must be answered before any quantitative anthropic predictions can be made. Although philosophers have discussed related concepts for centuries, in the early 1970s the only genuine physical theory yielding a multiverse of sorts was the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. This would allow variation in initial conditions, but not in the truly fundamental constants. Since that time a number of mechanisms for producing a multiverse have been suggested: see the review by Max Tegmark.[28] An important development in the 1980s was the combination of inflation theory with the hypothesis that some parameters are determined by symmetry breaking in the early universe, which allows parameters previously thought of as "fundamental constants" to vary over very large distances, thus eroding the distinction between Carter's weak and strong principles. At the beginning of the 21st century, the string landscape emerged as a mechanism for varying essentially all the constants, including the number of spatial dimensions.[29]

The anthropic idea that fundamental parameters are selected from a multitude of different possibilities (each actual in some universe or other) contrasts with the traditional hope of physicists for a theory of everything having no free parameters: as Einstein said, "What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world." Quite recently, proponents of the leading candidate for a "theory of everything", string theory, proclaimed "the end of the anthropic principle"[30] since there would be no free parameters to select. Ironically, string theory now seems to offer no hope of predicting fundamental parameters, and now some who advocate it invoke the anthropic principle as well (see below).

The modern form of a design argument is put forth by Intelligent design. Proponents of intelligent design often cite the fine-tuning observations that (in part) preceded the formulation of the anthropic principle by Carter as a proof of an intelligent designer. Opponents of intelligent design are not limited to those who hypothesize that other universes exist; they may also argue, anti-anthropically, that the universe is less fine-tuned than often claimed, or that accepting fine tuning as a brute fact is less astonishing than the idea of an intelligent creator. Furthermore, even accepting fine tuning, Sober (2005)[31] and Ikeda and Jefferys,[32][33] argue that the Anthropic Principle as conventionally stated actually undermines intelligent design; see fine-tuned universe.

Paul Davies's book The Goldilocks Enigma (2006) reviews the current state of the fine tuning debate in detail, and concludes by enumerating the following responses to that debate:

The absurd universe

Our universe just happens to be the way it is.

The unique universe

There is a deep underlying unity in physics which necessitates the universe being the way it is. Some Theory of Everything will explain why the various features of the Universe must have exactly the values that we see.

The multiverse

Multiple Universes exist, having all possible combinations of characteristics, and we inevitably find ourselves within a Universe that allows us to exist.

Creationism

A creator designed the Universe with the purpose of supporting complexity and the emergence of Intelligence.

The life principle

There is an underlying principle that constrains the universe to evolve towards life and mind.

The self-explaining universe

A closed explanatory or causal loop: "perhaps only universes with a capacity for consciousness can exist." This is Wheeler's Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP).

The fake universe

We live inside a virtual reality simulation.

Omitted here is Lee Smolin's model of cosmological natural selection, also known as "fecund universes," which proposes that universes have "offspring" which are more plentiful if they resemble our universe. Also see Gardner (2005).[34]

Clearly each of these hypotheses resolve some aspects of the puzzle, while leaving others unanswered. Followers of Carter would admit only option 3 as an anthropic explanation, whereas 3 through 6 are covered by different versions of Barrow and Tipler's SAP (which would also include 7 if it is considered a variant of 4, as in Tipler 1994).

The strong anthropic principle (SAP) as explained by Barrow and Tipler (see variants) states that this is all the case because the Universe is compelled, in some sense, to have conscious life eventually emerge.

Ciwan wrote:I still don't see the clarity in the statement "the why question is the wrong question to ask" << can someone help me understand why that statement is logical and rational.

matt wrote:In contrast, the "weak" anthropic principle seems valid in that it's basically saying that if the universe hadn't produced intelligent life, we wouldn't be here to ponder the questions of how and why, and that there's no reason to see the fact that we are as in any way remarkable.