Why this universe? New calculation suggests our cosmos is typical
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
This doesn't seem to be an answer to why the fundamental constants are set for an interesting universe with stars and atoms that do chemistry. Not ones full of dispersed hydrogen, or one big mass, or ones with uninteresting chemistry where nothing happens. See "fine-tuned universe".[1] Still, it's a step forward.
Even the headline of this article smells bad, right? Typical as opposed to what? When I see an albino squirrel, I know that it is atypical. I have seen thousands of squirrels, and other mammals, and I have good reason to believe that an all-white squirrel with red eyes is out of the ordinary. I can calculate how many of them there are out of the population and get a ratio to operationalize my definition of "atypical". I can learn more about genetics and biology and melanin and understand an underlying cause for the condition and make predictions about albino-ness in other animals that is falsifiable through further investigation.
In this case though we just have an untestable mathematical model for 'possible universes' (whatever that means) that puts our universe near the top of some abstract bell curve. I understand that smart people made it and that it is very technical and fancy, but I also know that it is made outside of the scientific process becuase I know that we have never observed another universe, we don't have an understanding of how universes are made, we don't know what the possible bounds are for the constants of nature (because they are...constant...). So I consider this to be like a very technical art project.
The argument that god created the universe is also a fine tuning argument, but no one seems to give that one much credence.
"Look, these cards are only standing because they were so carefully placed!" "So what would it look like if they weren't?"
"Entropy"
FWIW, Return of the God Hypothesis by Stephen Meyer is a surprisingly well-argued book, exploring such support.
On point 2, it only looks to fulfill a functional specification if you beg the question. Otherwise, we're simply generating a description of what is.
Stephen Meyer is a founder of the Discovery Institute, a political group who lobby conservative issues and state as part of their mission to promote "a rigorously God-centered view of creation". That doesn't mean Meyer's work on intelligent design is incorrect, per se. But it does strongly suggest that he is starting with a conclusion and then working backward, which is the antithesis of proper scientific research. There are also plenty of eviscerating rebuttals to Meyer if his bias doesn't dissuade.
His is not scientific research, but the book IMHO is a surprisingly effective and professional weaving of philosophy, history of philosophy, popular science, and history of science toward consideration of Natural Theology.
Point 1: Shannon applies. Point 2: s/supporting a hypothesis/required to support an interpretation/
He acknowledges IIRC that we do not know ranges for potential tunings of physical constants, if that description applies. Has his reference to unexplained low entropy in the Universe been eviscerated? I can't assess his arguments about sparse solutions in protein/fold design space; if you cite a rebuttal of course I'm interested.
You should hang around people who do a lot of mushrooms, they can clue you in to the others, duuuuuude.
The reason scientists want our universe to be "typical" is that the more we can generalize our findings, the more we can make predictions. For example if we can find an equation that gives us the cosmological constant exactly, we can get rid of it as a free parameter. Not only it is philosophically satisfying, but we may also use that equation to find something else, like a new particle, maybe even a practical application.
Or alternatively you could ask, why isn't it fine-tuned even harder, with life in every corner? After all it's astonishingly empty in most places.
The puddle of water looked at its oddly shaped surroundings. Every odd curve and unnamed shape that comprised the edge of the puddle was perfectly fit by the surrounding terrain. The puddle marveled at this, such a thing was surely not chance, what phenomenon is behind this mystery? Why does the terrain surround me, a mere puddle, so perfectly?
And that's the issue is this model is trying to 'work backward' and justify our universe and it's constants as being mathematically harmonious and 'typical' without having any understanding of what the actual value of 'typical' is.
We write the modeling program and somewhere we write
FINE_STRUCTURE_CONSTANT=1/137;
./my_universe.sh --fst=0.007 ...
It is fun to think about but it can't produce scientific results. It's epicycles, coming up with more complicated stories that over-fit for a singular observation.
Well, we’re looking for a reasoning that would support that they couldn’t have been something else, and the article is about one way of coming closer to that.
There are really only two possibilities: Either there’s a reason why they are what they are, then we want to find that reason, or there is no reason, then in other words they are arbitrary.
But one goal of science is to provide explanations of why the world is how it is. If we can somehow reduce the apparent arbitrariness of a parameter, or remove it completely (by having it be a mere logical consequence of something else we know), then that increases what we can explain about the universe.
Do we assume that our universe will turn out to be elegant because that's what we'd most prefer?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem#Historical...
Maybe cognition that develops in a cosmos and is able to reason about cosmoi is more likely to develop models of cosmoi that make their/its own cosmos very typical.
Give me two different universes where cognition exists but where the fundamental constants differ. Would you expect the ability to perform syllogism would be fundamentally biased to reflect the constants which brought about their existence?
I think I need to be published!
Then everything humanity will ever reach or know has Kolmogorov complexity no larger than this X. My intuition is that if you take X to be too small, the general "nothing's special about the universe and it's all extremely typical" argument and you must surely reach a contradiction. Surely not everything is so incredibly compressible, is it?
Physicists keep crying about fine tuning and what not, but honestly, I would be even more surprised if the initial conditions and the laws of physics were extremely small. Because we already know the laws of physics are relatively simple, I would put my bets on the initial conditions having most of the entropy.
“All values in the cosmos are integers. Decimals exist to help humans make comparisons between objects.”
I am wary of this. Just because you have a good predictive model based on math, and the math can be made rigorous using ZFC / Cauchy sequences / infinite decimals / etc., doesn't mean that any of those rigorous mathematical concepts are literally running the real universe.
Personally I don't think there's any reason to believe that any numbers, even zero and one, have any existence outside of being concepts in our heads.
For the first paragraph it is my understanding that the universe is discrete/quantizied and it is not running on 'real numbers'.
You can map and mapping is useful, but the map lives in your head and isn't the territory.
> For the first paragraph it is my understanding that the universe is discrete/quantizied and it is not running on 'real numbers'.
This is a widely believed folk myth among software engineers, but it isn't supported by evidence. There are some speculative theories that try to solve some problems in physics by quantizing space, but right now they are no more empirically supported than other speculations.
1. "Russell’s No Man’s Land" [0]
2. "The hollow universe of modern physics" [1]
[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2020/08/russells-no-mans-la...
[1] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-hollow-universe...
> Which makes at least intuitive sense that there isn't anything which contains infinite information.
There are no real numbers outside of human beings' minds. The information in a number, real or otherwise, is a theoretical mathematical concept from human minds for which there is no evidence in nature.
There is no definitive evidence that nature confirms to either continuous or discrete math at the smallest scales, but for now, if you look at theoretical physics papers, you will see integrals and derivatives, not sums and differences.
There is actually some debate about that, and for good reason. There are even a couple of practicing physicists looking at how predictions would differ assuming the universe has finite precision, and if I recall correctly the results from that investigation are non-trivial.
So for there to be a wide range of possible things happening from the initial starting point (including you and I having this conversation right now), IMO it follows that a complete description of the initial conditions would have to be absurdly (infinitely?) large to cause the universe to replay to this exact moment if you started it all over again.
In other words, the size of X would have to be extremely large… so I think I agree with you.
(Edited once I realized that myself and OP are likely in agreement.)
y’=y^(1/3)
with y(0) = 0
has an infinite number of solutions.
No. Information complexity does not obey conservation laws. The initial rule for generating the Universe is simple, but as time goes on information complexity only increases exponentially. It's a singularity of information complexity and we are at the center of it.
(This is the real reason, by the way, why aliens don't exist and Fermi's "paradox" isn't really.)
Quantity of information absolutely does follow conservation laws, at least in quantum mechanics.
I like your line of thinking and I'm actually quite excited about this recent shift in physics to a more information-theoretic line of inquiry.
Is it fair to state a corollary of your question this way? Given a complete description of some hypothesized universe/multiverse generator (essentially the next layer down that we are actively trying to discover), the Kolmogorov complexity (or some variation of K-Complexity) of this description must be greater than the K-complexity of any generated universe.
In my view, it would be very weird if this were not true. And (to me) it would be even weirder if this K-complexity was some large number but still less than infinity.
Only if it is deterministic, which certainly seems not very plausible. (You could say everything is a probability distribution, but to me it seems to get extremely complex after that, collapse?)
>Because we already know the laws of physics are relatively simple, I would put my bets on the initial conditions having most of the entropy.
Just because the laws are simply expressible does not imply they are simple. A variational minimization problem can be very easy to state (certainly that seems a good candidate for a "true" law of nature), but it can easily be as hard as a PDE!
But what I think is really interesting that this extreme complexity can only be found in extremely large and small scales. E.g. Newtons laws are phenomenal at predicting the universe at "human scales". The systems which can arise in Newtonian physics can be extremely complex, but their descriptions are usually very simple. Deviations from Newtonian predictions either are very small or arise only at large/small scales.
IIRC Constructor theory builds on this, in a way, it defines some very basic and simple building blocks out of which the rest of the laws that govern our universe.
A collapsing quantum state is so far the only proposed process which would result in a nondeterministic universe. The problem is that absolutely nothing is known about it, and everything around it is fishy.
I personally think that the concept of the universal wavefunction makes more sense.
But maybe if you subscribe to multiple worlds interpretation then the hardest part might be specifying which universe you're in, which would require number of bits proportional to the time since the big bang.
A problem: if you consider the contents of the universe (and the precise state of the contents at a given snapshot in time) to be part of "the universe", you have the hard problem of consciousness to tend with (in that humans are a part of the universe, and they rearrange its contents on a regular basis).
> Only if you take some interpretation that there's real physical process of measurement which we don't understand and is indeterministic you can get randomness.
Randomness is not the only means to achieve a non-deterministic universe, there is also the possibility of non-deterministic forces being in play, like human activity.
Of course, one can assert that human cognition is deterministic (no other option may even be available in some cases!), but science strongly suggests that simply asserting something to be true does not necessarily cause it to be true (though it does often cause it to appear to be true to pre-trained instances of human consciousness, a phenomenon which science has well demonstrated).
Abstractly(!), humans seem to be in a very similar cognitive state as they were when they ran on sub-perceptual religious axioms.
https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/155593/meaning-of-th...
This sounds similar to saying, "This photograph can be expressed in this small number of bits, therefore it's not special." Why does one imply the other?
The probabilities of trillions of galaxies suggest it is more likely we are 1 of many, rather than 1 of 1.
Just because, for example, an ancient tribe in Europe lived in the north and might never see others because they're 100's of miles away - doesn't mean the tribe is 1 of 1.
Maybe we are special, for example space around our solar system is emptier than usual, maybe due to a super nova blasting stuff away. But chances are we are not all that special, just in an early part of the game where nobody expanded into our neighborhood yet
I’d like to see some sources for this, because this sounds like unscientific, unprovable drivel.
1: https://ouci.dntb.gov.ua/en/works/7PgprAO9/ https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.08448v2.pdf
IMO that well is dry and our future breakthroughs will come from focusing on the observers of the universe.
(Thanks for attending my Ted talk)
Of course we don't know which ones, so assuming any one thing to be normal is the best approach. But looking at the big picture, there are bound to be flukes. Not having any would be an even bigger fluke
Especially considering we may not know what all the parameters are.