TO SERVE MAN

[substitute]

The Anthropic Principle is the most ridiculous thing I have seen produced by real grown-up scientists.

It's fascinating in a train-wreck way to watch geeks reinvent wheels. Clearly there wasn't any need to stay awake during Philosophy 10, much less do any reading on the subject later on when they got big ideas about the place of humanity in the

Comments

Theory

[torgo_x]

I can't remember who it was (John Horgan?) who observed that scientists are generally pretty good at doing science and generally pretty bad at thinking about it all. It's an odd situation.

Puddle

[torgo_x]

«...imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking,
'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I
find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me
staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in
it!'»--Douglas Adams, as quoted in by Richard Dawkins in his
eulogy for Adams

Re: Puddle

[amorpoeta]

mrhinelander here. Superlative, is what this is. Right on.

I saw him read his stuff once, funny guy, and he read funny too.

[king_tirian]

Somewhere along the line, we fell into the grievous fallacy of thinking that science was the pursuit of measurable truth. If we'd all get it through our heads that science is actually the pursuit of pretty accurate predictive models, then it would be clear why scientist shouldn't waste their time teaching creationism or that the the universe "had" to unfold in such a way that we'd be here to observe it.

agree

[substitute]

I imagine that cosmology is a slippery slope. "Theoretical" shouldn't mean "theological," but maybe the rigorous discipline of mathematics can get tiring for physicists too. It's kind of sad.

[mendel]

It's funny you put it that way, because I always figured the Anthropic Principle, out of the hands of kooks, was the exact opposite: that it's not remarkable that the Universe appears to be carefully tuned to support human life, but rather that it just happens to be that way and thus we happen to be here -- a reminder to those who might think otherwise that the probability of past events is always 1.

[substitute]

Unfortunately "out of the hands of kooks" has a probability of 0.

It's hard to hold on to randomness and the real strangeness of the Universe; Daddy is a lot easier to deal with even for eggheads it seems.

Hey, I resemble that remark!

[island01]

I'm one of the "kooks" that contributed to the write-up on the anthropic principle in Wikipedia, and uh... I've gotta tell ya's that you're clueless... lol

Daddy is a lot easier to deal with..."Daddy" has absoutely nothing to do with real scientific interpretations that don't include random chance occurrence due to any form of intrinsic finality that exists within the physical process. You guys have made a lot of assumptions about the actual nature of the universe that depend on theoretical projections that haven't been fully justified by science yet, so nothing has been decided, and the fact that you guys just "know" what's correct despite the evidence, indicates that you practice religion better than you understand how science is done

Re: Hey, I resemble that remark!

[substitute]

All that you have to do is to define the mysterious stability mechanism that causes the universe to be "anthropically constrained" and there won't be any more speculation about mumbo-jumbo anything.

Y'all come right back 'soon as you find that.

[gcrumb]

WAP? SAP? PAP? FAP? CRAP?

Sounds like it was designed to be absurd....

... Either that, or it's a long-lost Three Stooges sketch.

[gcrumb]

Hmmmmm... a Three Stooges sketch would nicely explain the universe I currently inhabit, now that I think about it.

gcrumb begins work on thesis titled Tristoogelate Cosmology.