so did you hear about the philosophy major who read too many layman's articles on quantum mechanics?

[dragonladyflame]

There's this principle called the Weak Anthropic Principle. It's basically a response to the question people sometimes phrase as, "Wow, isn't it odd that the universe consists of the amazingly unlikely concatenation of circumstances that allowed humanity to come into being?" The Weak Anthropic Principle replies, "I guess so, but it obviously

Comments

[milliganhasears]

From a historical standpoint, the WAP problem predates string "landscape" studies, and was proposed precisely as a way out of the fact that no proposed "theory of everything" uniquely predicts the properties of the universe we live in. This gets to be quite a serious problem if you assume that there is only one universe, and is thus one inspiration for various attempts to view our universe as one element of a larger statistical ensemble

[island01]

milliganhasears

[milliganhasears]

Out of curiosity, Island01, are you a string theorist, a philosophy student, or a hobbyist

[island01]

I'm with the "some [atheist] theorists", (like Paul Davies), "disagree", category, although I'm just a student of theoretical physics and nature for too many years than I'd care to admit. The last five have been spent studying the anthropic physics

[dragonladyflame]

Why is improbability such a problem? Improbable things happen all the time. I don't get why people obsess over how improbable the existence of the universe is. So? It's not like improbability = impossibility.

God I loathe probability theory.

[island01]

If it's even relevant.

We had a big bang and our models tell us that it should have evolved in ONE certain way, per the least action principle.

This is not what is observed.

It is the failure of science to explain why normal turbulance driven models don't derive what is observed which prompted physicists to make note of a bunch of balance points in nature that are intricately related to both the structure of the universe and the existence of carbon based life, and this is expected to somehow account for the otherwise completely unexpected structuring of the universe.

In this context it is expected that WE are somehow relevantly woven into the path of least action, as expected.

Probabilities only come into play when you bail on first principles, and that ain't science, it's fantasy-land-fizix.

[agnoster]

"Probabilities only come into play when you bail on first principles, and that ain't science, it's fantasy-land-fizix."

Right. Because we don't see any probabilistic behaviour in QM.

[island01]

Believe it or not, agnoster, the jury is still out on that one too, until QM can be unified with complete theory of quantum gravity. Relativity, when extended to the time domain without quantum effects is purely deterministic.

Gerard 't Hooft is a big "modern day" advocate of deterministic quantum mechanics, although he's about done being prouctive, me thinks...

Quantum Gravity as a Dissipative Deterministic System
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9903084

Determinism beneath Quantum Mechanics
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0212095

The mathematical basis for deterministic quantum mechanicshttp://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604008... )