Posted: Jul 27, 2010 5:46 am
xrayzed wrote:AMR wrote:
So tell me what points did I overlook specifically?
How about "pretty much all of it".
Your response was basically head-nodding to a few points, a bit of standard handwaving, considerable misreading, a touch of bitching about "straw men", plus a fair dollop of gibberish and non-sequiturs. About the only point where do try to deal with the actual content you fuck it up.
Wrong. He clearly mentions the parameters on the previous page.(Stenger)
I have made a modest attempt to obtain some feeling for what a universe with different constants would be like. Press and Lightman (1983) have shown that the physical properties of matter, from the dimensions of atoms to the order of magnitude of the lengths of the day and year, can be estimated from the values of just four fundamental constants (this analysis is slightly different from Carr and Rees [1979 ]). Two of these constants are the strengths of the electromagnetic and strong nuclear interactions. The other two are the masses of the electron and proton.
And you accuse me of not reading the paper. Nice one.
And you, of course, miss the central point of my refutation of Stenger's MonkeyGod simulation effort. Stenger's own program (detailed in his paper NATURAL EXPLANATIONS FOR THE ANTHROPIC COINCIDENCES -- what you originally linked to is apparently a rough draft of that paper) only explores one aspect of a putative "randomly generated" universe: stellar lifetimes. Yet all stellar lifetimes estimated by his creaky program are inferior to those we happen to enjoy in our universe. Our sun is projected to remain on the main sequence for approximately 10 billion years. Stenger's stars, generated with parameters artificially constrained within 10 orders of magnitude he says, only manage to last 1.5 billion years and these were his best results obtained in only 2 of his 100 simulations. If his contention, that a wide range of physical parameters would also result in a liveable universe, was correct one would expect something like a range of stellar lifetimes some similar to "our" universe, and some lifetimes perhaps even longer but ALL WERE INFERIOR, and by a wide margin.
tytalus: In 2008 a team from McGill University found 4.28 billion year rock in northern Quebec, the Earth's age is usually estimated to be 4.6 billion years; the first life forms, primitive microfossils, are dated at about 3.5 billion years. The Cambrian explosion of biodiversity took place only about 550 million years ago suggesting that evolution of multicellular cephalization -- intelligence -- is even more difficult and requires more time than the emergence of life itself. As for "goalposts", how about any universe that wouldn't be rendered into hard vacuum within a few parts in 10120? The whole discussion of stellar lifetimes is about a 5th order concern once you get past the cosmological constant problem.