Related papers: Defending The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning
In a room with five cosmologists there there may easily be ten theories of cosmogenesis. Cosmogenesis is a popular topic for speculation because it is philosophically deep and because such speculations are unlikely to be proven wrong in the…
Scientific cosmology has now reached its period of maturity with the establishment of a standard model, which is the theory of an expanding universe. The question of whether this expansion resolves itself, in the past, into a singularity…
The Universe could be spatially flat, positively curved or negatively curved. Each option has been popular at various times, partly affected by an understanding that models tend to evolve away from flatness. The curvature of the Universe is…
This is a broad and in places unconventional overview of the strengths and shortcomings of our standard models of fundamental physics and of cosmology. The emphasis is on ideas that have accessible experimental consequences. It becomes…
It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant…
We reconsider a well known problem of quantum theory, i.e. the so called measurement (or macro-objectification) problem, and we rederive the fact that it gives rise to serious problems of interpretation. The novelty of our approach derives…
Random sampling in high dimensions has successfully been applied to phenomena as diverse as nuclear resonances, neural networks and black hole evaporation. Here we revisit an elegant argument by the British physicist Dennis Sciama, which…
Is the Universe (a spatial section thereof) finite or infinite? Knowing the global geometry of a Friedmann-Lema\^{\i}tre (FL) universe requires knowing both its curvature and its topology. A flat or hyperbolic (``open'') FL universe is {\em…
The essay argues that the standard cosmological model is one sided and incomplete. Its recognition of the primacy of radiant energy has no rational justification and empirical verification and, therefore, is arbitrary and subjective. The…
The matching of our epoch of existence with the approximate equality of dark energy and dark matter energy densities is an apparent further fine-tuning, beyond the already troubling 120 orders of magnitude that separate dark energy from the…
Science is a crowning glory of the human spirit and its applications remain our best hope for social progress. But there are limitations to current science and perhaps to any science. The general mind-body problem is known to be intractable…
We argue that models in which an observable variation of the fine structure constant is explained by motion of a cosmic scalar field, are not stable under renormalization, and require massive fine tuning that cannot be explained by any…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
The solution of a fine tuning problem is one of the principal motivations of Supersymmetry. However experimental constraints indicate that many Supersymmetric models are also fine tuned (although to a much lesser extent). We review the…
Recent analysis of the Planck measurements opened a possibility that we live in a non-flat universe. Given the renewed interest in non-zero spatial curvature, here we re-visit the light propagation in a non-flat universe and provide the…
Current theories of particle physics lead to the unavoidable conclusion that there must have been several phase transitions in the early universe. Further, in the context of these theories, it is possible that cosmological phase transitions…
Evidence for fine-tuning of physical parameters suitable for life can perhaps be explained by almost any combination of providence, coincidence or multiverse. A multiverse usually includes parts unobservable to us, but if the theory for it…
In some cosmological theories with varying constants there are anthropic reasons why the expansion of the universe must not be too {\it close} to flatness or the cosmological constant too close to zero. Using exact theories which…
Two people may claim both to be naturalists, but have divergent conceptions of basic elements of the natural world which lead them to mean different things when they talk about laws of nature, or states, or the role of mathematics in…
Recently we proposed that the acceleration of the Universe could be due to gravity leaking to extra dimensions. This scenario gives an alternative to the cosmological constant or quintessence. In [astro-ph/0106274] the authors claimed that…