Multiverse: the idea that our Universe is just one among innumerably many, each of which is controlled by different parameters in the (otherwise fixed) laws of nature. Thus there would have been no Earth, no carbon, et cetera, let alone the human brains to study those.īroadly, five different responses to the impression of fine-tuning have been given:ĭesign: updating the scholastic Fifth Way of Aquinas ( 1485/1286), the Universe has been fine-tuned with the emergence of (human) life among its designated purposes. Either way, there would have been no ‘structure’ in the Universe in the form of stars and galaxies.Įven given the above fine-tuning, if any one of the three short-range forces had been just a tiny bit different in strength, or if the masses of some elementary particles had been a little unlike they are, there would have been no recognizable chemistry in either the inorganic or the organic domain. If the state of the hot dense matter immediately after the Big Bang had been ever so slightly different, then the Universe would either have rapidly recollapsed, or would have expanded far too quickly into a chilling, eternal void. The former control chemistry and hence life as we know it, whereas the latter is responsible for the overall evolution and structure of the Universe. Twentieth Century physics and cosmology have revealed an astonishing path towards our existence, which appears to be predicated on a delicate interplay between the three fundamental forces that govern the behavior of matter at very small distances and the long-range force of gravity. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Instead, we suggest that fine-tuning requires no special explanation at all, since it is not the Universe that is fine-tuned for life, but life that has been fine-tuned to the Universe. In fact, fine-tuning and Design even seem to be at odds with each other, whereas the inference from fine-tuning to a Multiverse only works if the latter is underwritten by an additional metaphysical hypothesis we consider unwarranted. Having reviewed the literature and having added several observations of our own, we conclude that cosmic fine-tuning supports neither Design nor a Multiverse, since both of these fail at an explanatory level as well as in the more quantitative context of Bayesian confirmation theory (although there might be other reasons to believe in these ideas, to be found in religion and in inflation and/or string theory, respectively). We analyze this issue from a sober perspective. In view of this, some have taken the opportunity to revive the scholastic Argument from Design, whereas others have felt the need to explain this apparent fine-tuning of the clockwork of the Universe by proposing the existence of a ‘Multiverse’. Our laws of nature and our cosmos appear to be delicately fine-tuned for life to emerge, in a way that seems hard to attribute to chance.
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