相关论文: Sciama's argument on life in a random universe: Di…

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…

I shall present three arguments for the proposition that intelligent life is very rare in the universe. First, I shall summarize the consensus opinion of the founders of the Modern Synthesis (Simpson, Dobzhanski, and Mayr) that the…

The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe. The expectation that the universe should be…

The fact that life has evolved in our universe constrains the laws of physics. The anthropic principle proposes that these constraints are sometimes very tight and can be used to explain in a sense the corresponding laws. Recently a…

I will propose the notion that the universe is digital, not as a claim about what the universe is made of but rather about the way it unfolds. Central to the argument will be the concepts of symmetry breaking and algorithmic probability,…

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.…

Current evidence suggests that the cosmological constant is not zero, or that we live in an open universe. We examine the implications for the future under these assumptions, and find that they are striking. If the Universe is cosmological…

The doomsday argument is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the total lifetime of the human race. By examining the case of an individual lifetime, I conclude that the argument is fundamentally related to consciousness. I derive…

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,…

In a multiverse context, determining the probability of being in our particular universe depends on estimating its overall habitability compared to other universes with different values of the fundamental constants. One of the most…

Despite the success of modern physics in formulating mathematical theories that can predict the outcome of experiments, we have made remarkably little progress towards answering the most fundamental question of: why is there a universe at…

According to quantum theory, randomness is a fundamental property of the universe yet classical physics is mostly deterministic. In this article I show that it is possible for deterministic systems to arise from random ones and discuss the…

I examine some recent findings in cosmology and their potential implications for the emergence of life in the universe. In particular, I discuss the requirements for carbon-based life, anthropic considerations with respect to the nature of…

In this article, we attempt to convince the reader that the origin of life was such an exceptionally unlikely event that it probably has never occurred elsewhere. This involves an explicit calculation using the laws of physics which, while…

I present a short and almost irrefutable arguments that life does use quantum mechanical correlations in an essential way. The very same argument applies, mutatis mutandis, in relation to any abundant resource, and observations bears this…

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…

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 Drake equation has been used many times to estimate the number of observable civilizations in the Galaxy. However, the uncertainty of the outcome is so great that any individual result is of limited use, as predictions can range from a…

We argue that whether the universe is infinite or finite is less crucial than usually supposed. Paradoxes of repeating behaviour in the infinite, or eternal inflationary, universe can be alleviated by a realistic definition of differing…

Our laws of nature and our cosmos appear to be delicately fine-tuned for life to emerge, in a way that seems hard to attribute to chance. In view of this, some have taken the opportunity to revive the scholastic Argument from Design,…