Related papers: Defending The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning
I assess various proposals for the source of the intuition that there is something problematic about contextuality, ultimately concluding that contextuality is best thought of in terms of fine-tuning. I then argue that as with other…
When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back…
The Anthropic Principle has been with us since the 1970s. This Principle is advanced to account for the "fine tuning" of the 25 constants of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Were these constants very different, life could not exist.…
Detailed observations of the temperature fluctuations in the microwave background radiation indicate that we live in an open universe. From the size of these fluctuations it is concluded that the geometry of the universe is quite close to…
We are at a specific period of modern cosmology, during which the large increase of the amount of data leads to the idea that the determination of cosmological parameters has been achieved with a rather good precision. There is a large…
Niels Bohr's arguments indicating the non-applicability of quantum methodology to the study of the ultimate details of life given in his book "Atomic physics and human knowledge" conflict with the commonly held opposite view. The bases for…
Our Universe is a vast, tantalizing enigma - a mystery that has aroused humankind's innate curiosity for eons. Begging questions on alien lifeforms have been thus far unfruitful, even with the bounding advancements we have embarked upon in…
We discuss the fine-tunings of nuclear reactions in the Big Bang and in stars and draw some conclusions on the emergence of the light elements and the life-relevant elements carbon and oxygen. We also stress how to improve these…
In his essay "Nature Conformable to Herself" the late Murray Gell-Mann expands on an observation of Newton that theories of seemingly disparate phenomena in the universe often make use of similar ideas and similar mathematical structure.…
A general Friedmann big-bang cosmology can be specified by fixing a half-dozen cosmological parameters such as the photon-to-baryon ratio Eta, the cosmological constant Lambda, the curvature scale R, and the amplitude Q of (assumed…
We point out that the horizon problem encountered in standard text-books or review papers on cosmology is, in general, derived for world models based on Robertson-Walker line element where homogeneity and isotropy of the universe -- \`a la…
We study a fundamental issue in cosmology: Whether we can rely on a cosmological model to understand the real history of the Universe. This fundamental, still unresolved issue is often called the ``model-fitting problem (or averaging…
The reader surely knows what particles physics is about: finding building blocks of nature that appear elementary at a given time and study their interactions - so why in the world this essay? The problem is how to arrive at a fundamental…
It is a widespread belief that results like G\"odel's incompleteness theorems or the intrinsic randomness of quantum mechanics represent fundamental limitations to humanity's strive for scientific knowledge. As the argument goes, there are…
At time of writing, large language models (LLMs) are beginning to obtain the ability to design, execute, write up, and referee scientific projects on the data-science side of astrophysics. What implications does this have for our…
In recent years, criticism of the methodology of particle physics beyond the Standard Model has increased, diagnosing too much reliance on aesthetic criteria for theory development and evaluation. Faced with several decades of experimental…
The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of…
An interesting consequence of the modern cosmological paradigm is the spatial infinity of the universe. When coupled with naturalistic understanding of the origin of life and intelligence, which follows the basic tenets of astrobiology, and…
The oft-repeated claim that life is written into the laws of nature are examined and criticized. Arguments are given in favour of life spreading between near-neighbour planets in rocky impact ejecta (transpermia), but against panspermia,…
We propose a new mechanism to solve the fine-tuning problem. We start from a multi-local action $ S=\sum_{i}c_{i}S_{i}+\sum_{i,j}c_{i,j}S_{i}S_{j}+\sum_{i,j,k}c_{i,j,k}S_{i}S_{j}S_{k}+\cdots$, where $S_{i}$'s are ordinary local actions.…