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Books & Articles I wrote.

Saturday, June 24, 2006

 

Anthropic Principle and Infinity

This isn't my area of expertise, but having recently read a number of books on infinity, spacetime, universe and so on i figured i had some things to say.

The question is around how the universe exists, what caused it and the various "lucky" equations that surround us that make it all possible. Starting with the Anrthopic Principle, we can at least get a start on it.

" ... if a billion universes existed, with a multitude of laws of nature, then humans would only be aware of those in which humans could emerge, and (no matter how many versions of laws of nature existed) the laws of nature humans saw would only be the laws of nature of those universes in which humans as we know them could emerge.

In other words, the reason we exist is because things so happened so that made it possible that we could exist.

But of course then people argue that the likelyhood of this and all the combined things in the universe is so unlikely as to be absurd. It would take "forever" for such a thing to happen.

The question whilst reading Knowing that ocurred to me is that we are dealing with massively large and small numbers. Indeed numbers in string theory is so small as to be incredulous. They don't quite extend to infinity, but as far as we are aware time does - or rather time as we know it (the universe doen't really have a concept of time as far as i'm aware). Sure, things happen, but the net difference is zero.

Now, if we are to consider time as infinite and if the universe is around 13.2 Billion years old, who is to say that is all that old. 13.2 billion is a pretty small number in string theory. In terms of infinity you can argue it is an infintesimally small number... like the difference between 1 and 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000. In infinity every number can be regarded as small.

So..... is there really any reason why the entire combination of variables that make up the universe at this point in time are simply not the luck of the combination of them at some instance in time? In the same way it may take me a million tries (at that is a low estimate btw!) to make a decent dinner with varying combinations of ingredients, gradually changing them when no-one eats, is it not just possible that the universe now exists simply because an "infinite" number of tries over an "infinity" of time has just finally found something that works? Perhaps at one point gravity was a little too strong so next time it changed a little. The equation that would be required to suggest how these things all interact would be so complex as to be impossible to comprehend, but my reading recently has made me wonder whether such a ridiculous idea couldn't be reality (or some abstraction of it).

Where did all this start? How did the ingredients get created and who set the values in the first place, or changes them? This is where you may start to really wonder what the control centre of everything is and who is controlling it. I find it quite hard to believe or understand these things just happening.

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