so did you hear about the philosophy major who read too many layman's articles on quantum mechanics?
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
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Anyway, from the viewpoint of an astronomer doing observatinal cosmology, it is univerally assumed that our existence is not necessary to the universe (and some theorists disagree). So our existence is, at best, a consistency check. This makes multiverse scenarios attractive, obviously. While their validity is not directly testable, it *is* possible to observationally test inflation, which offers a wide menu of model-dependent options for creating, as a side effect, a multiverse ensemble (or at very least, lots of large causally disconnected regions of spacetime, which works fine so long as the Hubble length stays much shorter than the pre-inflation correlation scale). So working cosmologists tend not to worry about it too much.
Of course, neither inflation nor the landscape had entered the scene in 1973 or whenever it was, so such an out wasn't obviously available to Wheeler et al. That Hawking has said incoherent things more recently than that is more an indication that he's still Hawking than anything else.
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The physics that I use to support my own personal views is valid in context with a quasi-static version of Einstein's finite cosmology, where particle pair creation from vacuum energy **causes** negative pressure and expansion to increase via vacuum "rarefaction", but without running away, because this effect gets offset by the increase in the matter density. So, tension between the vacuum and ordinary matter increases instead, and this necessitates that the integrity of the forces will eventually/inevitably be compromised and we will have another big bang, because a true strong anthropic constraint of the forces **necessarily** entails a reciprocal connect to the human evolutionary process, which indicates that physicists should look for a stability mechanism that also enables the universe to **leap** to higher orders of the same basic structure in order that the second law of thermodynamics never be violated.
As evidenced by our leap from apes to harness fire, and beyond...
Say buh-bye to inflationary theory too, btw... ;)... since a universe that has a big bang with certain volume resolves all the anthropic problems without the need for stringy-loopy-nuthin...
I have put Einstein's reintepreted cosmolgy before many PhD theorists, and the closest thing to a rebuttal that I ever get is that this is the same mechanism that is used in inflationary models, so it's valid in that, "un-necessary" context, as well.
Okay, well, you asked, but that's just my own theory. It is irrelevant to the fact that Davies just wrote this book using Wheeler's interpretation, nor is it important to my ability to defend the proper mainstream interpretations of the anthropic physics:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Goldilocks-Enigma-Universe-Just-Right/dp/0713998830/ref=sr_11_1/026-8934482-6040423?ie=UTF8
I can assure you that I can defend the position that the observed universe is strongly anthropically constrained, until all "assumptions" and speculation is validated by a ToE, or at least, *maybe*, a valid proven theory of quantum gravity. Until then, the observed universe defines our cosmology.
If you want to claim that your "univerally assumed" belief supercedes my years of study of the anthropic physics, then I'm ready and prepared to defend my self and sanity.
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