Related papers: Gauging Fine-Tuning
Fine-tuning studies whether some physical parameters, or relevant ratios between them, are located within so-called life-permitting intervals of small probability outside of which carbon-based life would not be possible. Recent developments…
It is commonplace in discussions of modern cosmology to assert that the early universe began in a special state. Conventionally, cosmologists characterize this fine-tuning in terms of the horizon and flatness problems. I argue that the…
Single-field inflationary models which generate primordial black holes through the enhancement of the curvature primordial power at small scales are commonly criticized and frequently dismissed because they require a large amount of…
When a physicist says that a theory is fine-tuned, they mean that it must make a suspiciously precise assumption in order to explain a certain observation. This is evidence that the theory is deficient or incomplete. One particular case of…
The physical processes that determine the properties of our everyday world, and of the wider cosmos, are determined by some key numbers: the 'constants' of micro-physics and the parameters that describe the expanding universe in which we…
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…
A well-known topic within the philosophy of physics is the problem of fine-tuning: the fact that the universal constants seem to take non-arbitrary values in order for live to thrive in our Universe. In this paper we will talk about this…
Fine-tuning in physics and cosmology is often used as evidence that a theory is incomplete. For example, the parameters of the standard model of particle physics are "unnaturally" small (in various technical senses), which has driven much…
Fine-tuning criteria are frequently used to place upper limits on the masses of superpartners in supersymmetric extensions of the standard model. However, commonly used prescriptions for quantifying naturalness have some important…
It is commonly argued that an undesirable feature of a theoretical or phenomenological model is that salient observables are sensitive to values of parameters in the model. But in what sense is it undesirable to have such 'fine-tuning' of…
Cosmological fine-tuning has traditionally been associated with the narrowness of the intervals in which the parameters of the physical models must be located to make life possible. A more thorough approach focuses on the probability of the…
Cosmography is a model-independent phenomenological approach to observational cosmology, relying on Taylor series expansions of physical quantities as a function of the cosmological redshift or other analogous variables. A recent work…
Finetuning and Naturalness are extra-empirical theory assessments that reflect our expectation how scientific theories should provide an intuitive understanding about the foundations underlying the observed phenomena. Recently, the absence…
Even when completely and consistently formulated, a fundamental theory of physics and cosmological boundary conditions may not give unambiguous and unique predictions for the universe we observe; indeed inflation, string/M theory, and…
The fundamental laws and constants of our universe seem to be finely tuned for life. The various multiverse hypotheses are popular explanations for the fine tuning. This paper reviews the four main suggestions on inference in the presence…
We investigate whether inflation requires finely tuned initial conditions in order to explain the degree of flatness and homogeneity observed in the Universe. We achieve this by using the Eisenhart lift, which can be used to write any…
The solution to fine tuning is one of the principal motivations for supersymmetry. However constraints on the parameter space of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) suggest it may also require fine tuning (although to a much…
The precision era of multi-messenger astronomy, together with modern astrophysical, cosmological, and gravitational wave observations, increasingly points toward the existence of a ``dark" sector that cannot be explained within the…
(abridged) Both fundamental constants that describe the laws of physics and cosmological parameters that determine the cosmic properties must fall within a range of values in order for the universe to develop astrophysical structures and…
All single-field inflationary models invoke varying degrees of tuning in order to account for cosmological observations. Mechanisms that generate primordial black holes (PBHs) from enhancement of primordial power at small scales posit…