Maybe we should drop the reference to "Christian misuse". Mainly because I've seen and believed — in my huge naivete on the subject — that claim about the constants of physics being ridiculously close to what would exclude (our form of) life ... in respected popular science magazines and I think even on PBS's Nova program. So regardless where this notion might have originated, its promoters are now far and wide. Also: I always took the claim to mean that the fine-tuning is true IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD OF the universe, and for our kind of life. The situation may be very different if you get either far enough away from our part of the universe, or if there are other universes not connected to ours, or if there are life forms that are entirely unlike what we have on this little planet. In any of these cases, it's reasonable to think that we're where we are because that's where the conditions for our kind of life are. For one thing, entropy increases in our part of the universe even though that is not considered a fundamental law of physics but rather something depending on initial conditions. --Dan
On May 6, 2015, at 5:33 PM, meekerdb <meekerdb@verizon.net> wrote:
My (late) friend Vic Stenger wrote a book on this, "The Fallacy of Fine Tuning", mostly to debunk Christian misuse of fine-tuning arguments. He analyzes the Hoyle resonance calculation as you do and the stability of the proton. Rich Deem's neutrino mass. Why is gravity so weak. Deuterium abundance. Inhomogeneities in the earlier universe. Rees's "nuclear efficiency" parameter. The book discusses about thirty putative examples of fine-tuning; some serious, some just misconceptions (the speed of light is so fast). Many of his examples are from Martin Rees and Hugh Ross. Hugh Ross has a website where these examples seem to be mass produced: http://www.reasons.org/articles/the-proton-neutron-mass-difference-illustrat...
Vic also discusses the speculative, holographic principle answer to why Lambda is so close to zero, but not zero. I'll send you a copy of Vic's book if you like.
I think there are some general arguments against the significance of so called fine-tuning. One of them is that there is no canonical measure on these parameters. By expressing fine-tuning in terms of percentage of the measured value, one is implicitly taking the measured value as a scale parameter and assuming values far from it (logarithmically) are equally probable.
There's an argument just based on dimensionality, that says if the parameter space of universes has many dimensions and there's a compact life-friendly region, then among all the universes supporting life you're most likely to find yourself on one near the edge of the region.