00:00:00.000 Hello, so today I'm up to the end of Chapter 4. Chapter 4 is about creation and this subsection is entitled fine-tuning.
00:00:08.080 We've already dealt with creation in terms of biological knowledge.
00:00:12.480 One of the interesting things we're now getting to is this huge issue in physics and philosophy of the fine-tuning of the laws of physics
00:00:20.000 or the constants of nature or the parameters of nature, how would people like to put it?
00:00:24.200 If there's one issue that it doesn't matter what kind of physics you're interested in,
00:00:28.640 that physicists in general seem to converge upon, so in my experience it doesn't matter who the physicist is,
00:00:38.880 And the issue is whether or not it's a problem in science as to the degree to which the laws of physics appear to be bio-friendly.
00:00:48.960 So this is all about why the laws of physics have the form that they do.
00:00:53.920 It seems unusual when we look at the details of what the kinds of laws of physics are that we have
00:01:01.680 and the constants of nature that appear in those physical laws,
00:01:05.840 it appears that values all sit on a knife edge that if you were to change any of them ever so slightly,
00:01:13.440 then the conditions which are at the moment in this universe favorable for life
00:01:18.800 would quickly turn the universe into one that isn't favorable for life.
00:01:22.800 So I'm going to have a look at some issues surrounding that.
00:01:28.000 So when I was in high school I was interested in science, I was interested in physics,
00:01:31.920 I was interested in astronomy, and it was towards the end of high school that I picked up
00:01:38.000 And this is the book for which he won the Templeton Prize,
00:01:41.360 which is a very well remunerated prize, I think it's in the millions of dollars.
00:01:46.160 And it was next in the book. It was basically an overview of physics as it stood at the time
00:01:52.880 at the late 90s. And a lot of philosophy was really a summary of important issues in
00:02:01.120 metaphysics and ontology, but really it also concentrated on this very question about
00:02:08.000 whether or not the laws of physics appear to have been a put up job.
00:02:11.920 That's the way that Paul Davies often put the issue and it seems like it's a put up job.
00:02:15.760 It seems as if the laws of physics have been especially,
00:02:20.160 are especially bio-friendly. Now Paul Davies, like many physicists on this topic,
00:02:25.600 don't come down on one side or the other as to what the underlying explanation is.
00:02:30.080 Many present the options and allow the listener to decide for themselves.
00:02:34.480 There's an interesting phenomena here socially as well when we get into talking about
00:02:42.000 For many people who are interested in the issue of religion and arguments foreign against religion,
00:02:46.720 there's something we want to reject the issue outright. There's a school of thought who says,
00:02:50.480 it's just a coincidence. Why can't you accept it to coincidence that the laws of physics
00:02:55.920 are the way they are and we just happen to have appeared in a universe where the laws of physics
00:03:01.360 have the form they do. Now of course this isn't an explanation. A coincidence isn't an explanation.
00:03:08.560 I might mention a few books here. I've mentioned Paul Davies, the mind of God.
00:03:14.880 Paul Davies has many books on this topic. One of the more recent ones that he wrote was called
00:03:18.560 the Goldilocks and Eapman. That's another fantastic book specifically about why it is that
00:03:23.840 not only does earth occupy the physical place that it does around the sun, that's probably
00:03:28.640 our coincidence, but also all of the other kind of coincidences that appear to be out there in terms
00:03:34.160 of the physical constants. Stuff like it just give an example that's often cited when we
00:03:38.800 speak about the universal gravitational constant G. The universal gravitational constant G is one
00:03:45.440 of the things that gives strength to gravity in our universe. But in using Newton's law of gravity
00:03:50.160 or Einstein's general relativity, it doesn't matter. This universal gravitational constant appears
00:03:56.160 in the equations. It has a certain value. It determines the strength of gravity with our universe.
00:04:02.320 If that constant was even fractionally greater than we're talking fractions of a percent,
00:04:08.080 then what would happen is that stars would collapse into black holes and we'd have a
00:04:12.160 featureless universe. If we don't have stars, then we're not going to have complex elements.
00:04:17.360 And so we're not going to have planets and we're certainly not going to have life.
00:04:20.160 We'd have a universe devoid of chemistry. On the other hand, if the gravitational constant
00:04:26.800 was much weaker, stars might not form at all. As the hydrogen began to collapse, what would happen
00:04:33.280 is that it would heat up and then it would start to expand again under thermodynamic rules.
00:04:38.480 So the value of the gravitational constant seems to be finally tuned.
00:04:44.640 Another book on this topic is by a couple of Australians. It was published last year, I believe,
00:04:50.160 and it's called a fortunate universe. It's by Luke Barnes and Garnt Lewis. Luke Barnes is at the
00:04:55.920 University of Western Sydney. Garnt Lewis is at the University of Sydney and they're at this
00:05:00.480 fantastic book as well and it traverses all of these issues about fine chiming. And the way that
00:05:08.080 Luke likes to put things is to consider if you had a safe and the safe had a whole number of
00:05:13.760 dials that you need to twiddle in order to gain access to the safe. We don't really know what
00:05:18.720 all the constants in nature are. I've seen a number like 26. So let's go with 26. If there
00:05:25.760 were 26 dials on this safe and someone broke into the safe, what would be the explanation of how
00:05:32.720 they got in? One possibility is that it could be pure coincidence. They're filled with the dials
00:05:39.760 and they've managed to pick the number on every, the correct number on every single one of those
00:05:44.960 26 dials. That would be a terribly bad explanation. That is not what the police would assume is
00:05:52.720 someone had broken into the safe. That assumed they already had knowledge of what the numbers on the
00:05:57.440 dials should be. And so that seems to be the situation in which we find ourselves. Of course,
00:06:04.240 one objection to the safe analogy might be, for example, that there could be many, many, many, many
00:06:10.400 different combinations that give you access to the safe. We don't know what all the different
00:06:14.880 combinations of constants of nature there are in order to gain a bio-friendly universe. Some of
00:06:22.560 these constants of nature, by the way, include things not only like the gravitational constant,
00:06:26.960 but other things like the mass of an electron or the mass of a quark or the charge of an electron.
00:06:32.960 This thing could be fine structure constant, which determines the strength of the electromagnetic
00:06:38.160 force. So how closely, for example, electrons orbit nuclei around atoms. These things determine
00:06:46.560 the formation of molecules. These things determine whether or not DNA can form self-replicating
00:06:51.360 molecules in ultimately life. So it seems like we have a problem. Now, not everyone thinks that we
00:06:56.880 have a problem. The late Vic Distinger, who was a particle physicist, read a bunch of books on this
00:07:03.040 bunch of papers, gave a bunch of talks, just prior to when he died in 2014, I think, actually
00:07:10.880 wrote to Vic Distinger because I was writing a project myself. I was finishing my masters in
00:07:15.840 astronomy and so I wrote to Vic Distinger because he was about to publish a book. He hadn't published
00:07:20.080 it yet, and so I really needed the information for the project that I had. His book was called
00:07:25.040 the fallacy of fine tuning, and it was coming after the time, so that I need to get a hold of this
00:07:29.680 book. I was very grateful he actually sent me a copy of the book before it was published. So it's
00:07:34.640 thing of the hint is in the title of the book, the fallacy of fine tuning, and he doesn't buy
00:07:40.400 it. He doesn't buy this idea that there's any special mystery to be solved. He disagree with him,
00:07:46.480 but he basically thinks that there's just a lack of knowledge that we've got here. One example
00:07:52.640 uses, which isn't one that these days have brought up very often, but just as a related issue,
00:07:59.120 I suppose. The great Fred Hoyle, who was the astrophysicist of whom we owe much credit for explaining
00:08:06.720 the origin of all the elements. Still a nuclear synthesis is what he explained. So how it is that the
00:08:13.520 elements are forged inside of the cause of stars. He had a problem. One of the problems was in trying
00:08:20.160 to explain early on how different nuclear reactions happen, different fusion reactions happen inside
00:08:25.600 of stars. We had great difficulty in trying to figure out how carbon was formed. The way in which
00:08:33.120 carbon is formed is through a process called the triple alpha process. So what you need in order to
00:08:39.200 create a carbon nucleus is three alpha particles, three helium nuclei. A helium nucleus has two
00:08:47.360 protons, whereas a carbon nucleus has got six protons. So you need three of them to crash into each
00:08:53.120 other in order to form this carbon nucleus. The problem is that if you take three helium nuclei,
00:09:01.200 each of those helium nuclei, having two protons, has got a charge of two plus and positive charge
00:09:07.200 to repel one another. And so when you try and get three of them together, they don't want to go
00:09:11.120 together. So you need exceedingly high energies. It's an exceedingly unlikely event to occur,
00:09:18.080 to get three objects, all of which have positive charges, to combine and to stick together. That's
00:09:22.400 what you need for fusion. So Hoyle had a problem here thinking that that was just too unlikely he'd
00:09:28.000 done the calculations that I don't understand. As it turns out, the mathematics shows that this
00:09:33.040 particular event is exceedingly unlikely to occur. So they had a workaround and they figured out that
00:09:38.480 if you take two helium nuclei, you can form a nucleus of beryllium. And then if the beryllium
00:09:46.160 collides with another helium nucleus, then you can get carbon. But they found that even this was
00:09:51.600 too unlikely, because the beryllium nucleus lasts for a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a second too
00:09:58.240 short in order to form the carbon that was required. Unless and Hoyle predicted this, unless the
00:10:06.000 carbon nucleus thus formed was of high energy. Had a particularly high energy, it's called a resonant
00:10:12.400 state. So he predicted that this resonant state would exist. Public resonance state itself was
00:10:19.040 exceedingly unlikely to happen to extremely precise. It happens at a particular energy. This
00:10:24.960 appeared to be suspiciously finely churned. If the carbon nucleus formed from the collision of these
00:10:31.840 two helium together to form the beryllium and then having a third helium nucleus combined with the
00:10:37.840 beryllium, if the carbon nucleus thus formed didn't have precisely this energy, then you wouldn't
00:10:45.680 end up with carbon at all. And so this tend to be a mystery. And so this is called the Hoyle
00:10:50.800 resonance. He kind of solved the problem in one respect. Namely, this is how carbon is formed.
00:10:55.760 But in the other raised a problem. Namely, why should this energy be so precise? Why should it be
00:11:01.680 at that particular level? Why couldn't you form carbon at any level? And I bought this for a while.
00:11:06.240 I've read this both in the mind of God by Paul Davis and then later on in the Goldilocks Enigma.
00:11:11.840 But in doing research for the project I undertook, I then found a paper by another astrophysicist
00:11:16.640 called Mario Livia. And Mario Livia calculated that the Hoyle resonance wasn't so precise after all,
00:11:24.560 that if you try to create carbon at energy slightly different, then you'll get,
00:11:30.880 then you will indeed get carbon. In fact, you will get the same amount of carbon in our universe if
00:11:35.440 the Hoyle resonance was ever so slightly different to what it actually is in our universe.
00:11:40.160 So what Mario Livia found was that you could fit it with this very precise value for the Hoyle
00:11:45.040 resonance by a small amount. And still get the same amount of carbon being produced in our universe
00:11:50.160 inside the choral stars as what you actually do see in our universe. So if you change the Hoyle
00:11:56.400 resonance, you'd still get carbon. Indeed, you can change the value of the resonance state of this
00:12:03.360 carbon nucleus by quite a bit and still end up with sufficient carbon in the universe for life to appear.
00:12:10.800 And so this is one of the arguments that Stanger points to and says that, well, maybe all of the
00:12:18.080 fine-tuning type problems will turn out to be like this, that if you vary the constants one after
00:12:25.280 another, you will end up nonetheless producing bio-friendly laws. So he's not particularly impressed by it.
00:12:30.640 Because my purpose here isn't to go through all the surrounding literature on the fine-tuning
00:12:36.960 argument. I'll provide a link to the paper that I wrote. In fact, I might even read that paper at
00:12:43.120 some point which does provide an overview of the broad issues, but I'd encourage people to get
00:12:48.240 an unfortunate universe is a great book about this fine-ching problem. And it's a great book
00:12:52.320 because the two physicists that have written it have come from quite different places. They
00:12:58.240 both agree it's a problem. But on the one hand, Grant Lewis says, well, possibly the multiverse
00:13:04.560 could explain this. Now, when I say multiverse, I should probably say megaverse, although there's this
00:13:08.560 nomenclature problem, there's this difficulty with terminology. Multiverse, of course, to me, to
00:13:15.200 David Deutsch, to many other people, means the quantum multiverse. And in the quantum multiverse,
00:13:20.000 all the universes obey precisely the same laws of physics. Indeed, it's the laws of physics that
00:13:25.120 tell us that this quantum multiverse must exist. On the other hand, there is a whole bunch of people
00:13:30.800 who use the word multiverse in a completely different sense. To talk about an ensemble of
00:13:36.880 universes, each of which obeys different physical laws. So it would be like a multiverse of
00:13:43.760 multiverse versus. And so this is why sometimes I just refer to it as the megaverse. The megaverse
00:13:49.760 is scientific in some senses, metaphysical in other senses. There's a sense in which it really
00:13:57.040 is scientific now. I've come to convince myself, and through some of the work that Luke Barnes has
00:14:02.400 been doing recently, on trying to simulate some of these other universes. So we don't have access
00:14:08.560 to these other universes. We don't think the physical access, which kind of relegates these
00:14:13.520 theories to something like string theory. So it's difficult to understand how we can test this
00:14:18.880 experimentally. But there's a weak sense in which we can test them experimentally, I think,
00:14:24.320 by simulating these universes inside of a virtual reality at the moment, those simulations are
00:14:30.880 a very low resolution. So whether or not the calculations that are done inside of these super
00:14:37.600 computers, modeling other physical laws or set to physical laws, how robust those calculations are,
00:14:45.440 our time will tell. And as time goes on, we get better and better super computers than maybe
00:14:50.480 quantum computers will be able to help with this by the way.
00:14:52.960 So when I say we don't have access to these universes, one other post-script before I get
00:14:57.920 into reading the beginning of infinity, the relevant part here. And that post-script is some years
00:15:04.480 ago, a team of physicists at primarily the University of New South Wales, led by John Webb and
00:15:11.680 Michael Murphy did some excellent, interesting work on looking at the change, the possible change,
00:15:18.880 and what's called the fine structure constant that I mentioned earlier. This fine structure
00:15:23.440 constant appears in our laws of physics. It is the thing that sets the strength of the electromagnetic
00:15:29.760 force. So in the same way that we have a constant g that sets the value of gravity,
00:15:36.240 there's another constant that sets how strong the electromagnetic force is in our universe. And
00:15:40.960 that determines things like the size of atoms and therefore bond strength between molecules. And
00:15:45.520 therefore whether or not complex molecules can exist and whether or not life can exist.
00:15:51.760 What this experiment involved was taking some of the most powerful telescopes on Earth,
00:15:57.360 some of the telescopes that are on the top of those big volcanoes in Hawaii, and using those
00:16:02.960 reflecting telescopes to pee into the very distant parts of the universe, where light from
00:16:09.440 quasars was coming. And that light from quasars in its trends at between the quasars and us
00:16:16.240 can in some cases pass through other galaxies. And as it passes through other galaxies,
00:16:23.600 some of that light is absorbed. And one of the remarkable things in astronomy, one of the remarkable
00:16:28.240 things that allow us to know about what's out there are these things called absorption spectra.
00:16:34.480 And in the absorption spectra, when we look at the light coming from the quasars, we see that
00:16:39.680 some of the light has been absorbed. And that light is characteristic, the light that's been absorbed
00:16:44.160 is characteristic of the kinds of materials that are inside the galaxy. Long story short,
00:16:49.440 when we look at the lines, the absorption lines, I'll put a picture up here somewhere of
00:16:56.400 the light coming from the quasars, the distance between the lines is well known in the laboratory.
00:17:02.240 And it's well known in astrophysics as to what the distance between these particular lines is.
00:17:06.960 Now what lines they're looking at at the pens that could be absorption lines from hydrogen,
00:17:11.040 but in this case, I think they used in part magnesium. What they found, and this was a remarkable
00:17:17.520 finding at the time, was that the lines were ever so slightly different in terms of their distance
00:17:24.720 in the distant quasar, in the distant galaxy as compared to what they are here in the laboratory.
00:17:30.800 This has got nothing to do with redshift. It's a completely separate issue to that.
00:17:34.400 Okay, all the lines were redshifted because the galaxies are moving away and they're doing
00:17:38.400 quasars moving away. It's a very, very complicated. They're looking at the distance between
00:17:41.520 the lines, because everything should get shifted by the sound amount. And they found a difference.
00:17:45.280 But so this was very exciting. And I'm saying this because if the constants of nature are
00:17:51.280 somewhere different, are different in some distant part of the universe, then we have to start questioning
00:17:57.920 what we mean by universe. What we mean by universe? Because a universe is something that obeys,
00:18:04.240 a set of physical laws, at least in part that's on where you could define it.
00:18:08.000 Everything that universe obeys the same set of physical laws. So therefore it has the same
00:18:12.320 constant of nature. So if we were to find a region of space out there where the constants of
00:18:18.800 nature were different, if we could see it via some technique by using a telescope such as
00:18:23.520 Michael Murphy and the rest did, may attain did, then we'd kind of be seeing another universe.
00:18:29.200 We'd be seeing universe that obeys a different set of physical laws. So this was exciting
00:18:33.280 at the time because to me it sort of implied perhaps that as you get further and further away,
00:18:38.240 kind of going back in time as well. But as you're going further and further away, maybe you're
00:18:41.600 seeing into an ever so slightly different universe and maybe if you could see even further,
00:18:45.440 you'd see a wildly different universe in someone. Okay, kind of a bizarre idea.
00:18:50.160 As it was, sadness struck a few years ago when they found out that all of the results that
00:18:56.960 they published were infected by the same systematic error. I'll provide a link to the papers
00:19:02.160 and if you're interested in looking at that, it's something that I found really fascinating,
00:19:05.520 not only in terms of the physics, I think it was a really important physics technique that they
00:19:09.280 figured out, but not only that this is a wonderful example of how scientists self-correcting because
00:19:13.760 immediately Michael and his team published all the results saying, you know, we kind of, we have
00:19:20.640 got this excellent technique, but the things that we said about the fine structure constant
00:19:24.080 changing aren't actually true. So they haven't found the fine structure constant changing,
00:19:28.080 but it's still, nonetheless, it could be a technique for literally seeing another universe,
00:19:31.920 possibly, possibly. So let's just preface what we're about to hear from the beginning of
00:19:38.160 infinity with the possibilities of what's going on with this fine change. So it seems like
00:19:44.080 electrons have just the right charge in order for complex molecules to exist. It seems like the
00:19:50.160 value of gravity is just right for stars to form and planets to form. It seems like all the other
00:19:54.640 constants of nature that we could enumerate have just the right value such that if there are any
00:19:58.560 different than we wouldn't have life in the universe at all, we'd have some boring universe
00:20:02.480 that was nothing but a black hole or boring universe that was nothing but guess. The two options
00:20:06.640 before us appear to be and a most commonly said to be either a designer has created this universe
00:20:14.800 subsidized by our friendly. Paul Davies kind of puts it as, it appears like the universe has a
00:20:21.360 purpose. He's not saying there's necessarily a designer, but there's some kind of purpose behind
00:20:27.440 it all. There's some reason behind it all. And so if there's a reason, then it's no wonder that
00:20:34.080 the universe is bio-friendly because maybe we are the reason. We are the universe trying to look at
00:20:39.600 itself or something like that. Again, we're starting to get into metaphysics there. On the other hand,
00:20:44.800 people who reject that and don't like that will go to or jump to this idea of the megaverse,
00:20:49.760 the cosmological multiverse, where every single possible set of physical laws that we can imagine,
00:20:58.560 that is possible beyond what we can imagine, but every set of physical laws that is possible,
00:21:04.480 I think it's a class actually. In other words, it's an uncountable number. There's no way to even
00:21:10.880 begin counting this number to collect an infinite class of universes, an infinite class of physical
00:21:17.440 laws, that if all of them exist, then we are just one of the infinite number that exists.
00:21:24.880 And so therefore, the mystery is solved because all the universes are out there. Most of them
00:21:30.000 aren't filled with life. And so we find ourselves in one where it's possible to have life.
00:21:36.560 So the wonderful thing now about David Deutsch's approach to this, of course, everything,
00:21:42.080 every issue that he raises, he's going to put his own personal spin on it. And this is no exception.
00:21:47.360 And so I'm very excited to read the next part of creation, chapter four,
00:21:52.320 function. So let's just get into it. He writes under the subtitle function. The physicist
00:21:59.440 Brandon Carter calculated in 1974 that if the strength of the interaction between charged particles
00:22:04.720 were a few percent smaller, no planets would ever have formed. And the only condensed objects in
00:22:09.840 the universe would be stars. And if it were a few percent greater, then no stars would ever explode.
00:22:15.520 And so no elements other than hydrogen, helium would exist outside of them. In either case,
00:22:20.080 there will be no complex chemistry. And presumably, no life. Another example. If the initial
00:22:26.160 expansion rate of the universe at the Big Bang had been slightly higher, those stars would
00:22:30.640 have formed. And there will be nothing in the universe but hydrogen at an extremely low
00:22:35.440 and every decreasing density. If it had been slightly lower, the universe would have
00:22:39.200 re-collapsed soon after the Big Bang. Similar results have since been obtained for other
00:22:43.920 constants of physics that are not determined by any known theory. For most, if not all of them,
00:22:49.040 it seems that if they had been slightly different, there would have been no possibility for life
00:22:53.360 to exist. This is a remarkable fact, which has even been cited as evidence that those constants
00:22:58.400 were intentionally fine-chined, A.E. designed by a supernatural being. This is a new version of
00:23:04.000 creationism. And of the design argument, now based on the appearance of design in the laws of
00:23:09.600 physics, ironically given the history of the controversy, the new argument is that the laws of
00:23:14.000 physics must have been designed to create a biosphere by Darwinian evolution. It even persuaded
00:23:19.600 the philosophy Antony Flue, formerly an enthusiastic advocate of atheism, of the existence of a
00:23:25.760 supernatural designer, but it should not have. As I shall explain in a moment, it is more to
00:23:30.560 be clear that this fine-chining constitutes an appearance of design in paleysense. But even if it
00:23:36.480 does, that does not alter the fact that invoking the supernatural makes for a bad explanation.
00:23:41.920 And in any case, are you in for supernatural explanations on the grounds that a current
00:23:46.720 scientific explanation is flawed or lacking is just a mistake? As we carved in stone in Chapter 3,
00:23:53.040 problems are inevitable. There are always unsolved problems, but they get solved. Science continues
00:23:59.120 to make progress, even or especially after making great discoveries, because the discoveries themselves
00:24:05.360 reveal further problems. I'm just me talking, I'm just prefacing the next point with. This has
00:24:12.240 been, according to my Kindle, highlighted 80 times around the world, so I'll just read this to you.
00:24:18.400 The next sentence says, therefore, the existence of an unsolved problem in physics is no more
00:24:24.160 evidence for a supernatural explanation than the existence of an unsolved crime is evidence that a
00:24:29.280 ghost committed a single objection to the idea that fine-chining requires an explanation at all
00:24:37.040 is that we have no good explanation implying that planets are essential to the formation of life,
00:24:41.760 or the chemistries. The physicist Robert Ford wrote a superb science fiction story,
00:24:47.040 drag and zag, based on the premise that information could be stored and processed,
00:24:51.600 and life and intelligence could evolve through the interactions between neutrons.
00:24:55.680 On the surface of a neutron star, a star that has collapsed gravitationally to a diameter of
00:25:00.160 only a few kilometers, man gets so dense that most of its matter has been transmuted into neutrons.
00:25:06.320 It is not known whether this hypothetical neutron analogue of chemistry exists, nor whether it could
00:25:11.120 exist if the laws of physics were slightly different. Nor do we have any idea what other sorts of
00:25:15.040 environment permitting the emergence of life would exist under those a variant of laws.
00:25:20.160 The idea that similar laws of physics can be expected to give rise to similar environments is
00:25:25.200 undermined by the very existence of fine-chining nevertheless. Regardless of whether the fine-chining
00:25:31.680 constitutes an appearance of design or not, it does constitute a legitimate and significant
00:25:37.120 scientific problem for the following reason. If the truth is that the constants of nature are not
00:25:43.120 fine-chined to produce life after all, because most slight variations in them do still commit
00:25:48.720 life and intelligence to evolve somehow, though in dramatically different types of environment,
00:25:53.200 then this would be an unexplained regularity in nature and hence a problem for science to address.
00:25:59.840 So that's really interesting. So if changing the laws of physics,
00:26:05.120 higgledy piggledy, changing the conservation momentum law, changing the law of gravitation,
00:26:12.000 changing the constants of nature, if changing these still permits life to arise,
00:26:16.720 then that's a regularity in nature. That's really unusual. It's like, why do all these
00:26:20.640 variations still cause life? Life is like this fundamental thing to physics. It's definitely
00:26:24.880 something to explain if that was the case. Back to the book. If the laws of physics are fine-chined,
00:26:30.000 as they seem to be, then there are two possibilities. Either those laws are the only ones to be
00:26:35.360 instantiated in reality as universes, or there are other regions of reality, parallel universes,
00:26:41.280 and here he's not talking about the quantum parallel universes. He's talking about universes
00:26:46.960 with physical laws, so let me just repeat that back to the book. If the laws of physics are fine-chined,
00:26:52.960 as they seem to be, then there are two possibilities. Either those laws are the only ones
00:26:56.880 instantiated in reality as universes, or there are other regions of reality, parallel universes
00:27:01.360 with different laws. In the former case, we must expect that to be an explanation of why the laws
00:27:06.480 are as they are. It would either refer to the existence of life or not. If it did, that would
00:27:12.480 take us back to paleo's problem. It would mean that the laws had the appearance of design for creating
00:27:17.040 life, but had not evolved. Well, the explanation would not refer to the existence of life,
00:27:21.920 in which case it would leave and explain why, if the laws are, as they are, for non-life
00:27:27.520 related reasons, they'll fine-tune to create life. If there are many parallel universes,
00:27:33.440 each with its own set of laws of physics, most of which did not permit life, then the idea would
00:27:38.480 be that the observed fine-chine is only a matter of parochial perspective. It is only in the
00:27:43.360 universes that contain astrophysicists that anyone ever wonders why the constant seem fine-chined.
00:27:48.960 This type of explanation is known as an anthropic reasoning. It is set to follow from a
00:27:53.680 principle known as the weak anthropic principle. Though really no principle is required, it is just
00:27:58.320 logic. The qualifier weak is there because several other anthropic principles have been proposed,
00:28:03.600 which are more than just logic, but they need not concern us here. Just as a side note, the link to
00:28:09.120 my paper below contains a little bit of a summary of some of the other anthropic principles back
00:28:16.000 to the book. However, on closer examination, anthropic arguments never quite finished the explanatory
00:28:22.400 job. To see why, consider an argument due to the physicist Dennis Jiamen, who is, just by the way,
00:28:28.960 this is me talking again, who was one of David Deutsch's supervisors or bosses at some point,
00:28:34.800 back to the book. Imagine that, at some time in the future, theoreticians have calculated,
00:28:40.800 for one of those constants of physics, the range of its values for which there would be a reasonable
00:28:45.600 probability that astrophysicists of a super kind would emerge. So that range is from 137 to 138,
00:28:53.360 no doubt the real values will not be whole numbers, but let us keep it simple. They also calculate
00:28:58.160 the highest probability of astrophysicists occurs at the midpoint of the range when the constant
00:29:03.600 is 137.5. Next, experimentalists say how to measure the value of that constant directly,
00:29:10.640 in laboratories, or by astronomical observations say, what should they predict?
00:29:15.280 Seriously enough, one immediate prediction from the anthropic explanation is that the value
00:29:20.080 will not be exactly 137.5. For suppose it were, by analogy, imagine that the balls I have a
00:29:27.760 dartboard represents the values that can produce astrophysicists. It would be a mistake to predict
00:29:33.280 that a typical dart that strikes the balls I will strike it at the exact center. Likewise,
00:29:38.640 in the overwhelming majority of universes in which the measurement could take place,
00:29:42.320 because they contain astrophysicists, the constant would not take the exactly optimal value for
00:29:47.200 producing astrophysicists, nor be externally close to it, compared with the size of the balls I.
00:29:52.560 So, see how that concludes. If we did measure one of those constants of physics and found that it
00:29:58.480 was extremely close to the optimum value for producing astrophysicists, that would statistically
00:30:03.360 refute, not corroborate, the anthropic explanation for its value. Of course, that value
00:30:08.880 might still be a coincidence, but if we were willing to accept astronomically unlikely
00:30:13.440 coming sentences as explanations, we should not be puzzled by the fine tune in the first place,
00:30:17.680 and we should tell Paoli that the watch on the heat might just have been formed by chance.
00:30:22.640 Furthermore, astrophysicists should be relatively unlikely in universes whose conditions
00:30:27.600 are so hostile that they barely permit astrophysicists at all. So, if we imagine all the values
00:30:33.200 consistent with the emergence of astrophysicists arrayed on a line, then the anthropic explanation
00:30:39.040 leads us to expect the measured value to fall at some typical point, not too close to the middle
00:30:45.040 or to either end. However, and here we are reaching the skyarmours main conclusion,
00:30:50.560 that prediction changes radically, if there are several constants to explain. For although
00:30:55.840 any one constant is unlikely to be near the edge of its range, the more constants there are,
00:31:00.560 the more likely it is that at least one of them will be. This can be illustrated pictorially
00:31:05.440 as follows, with our bullseye replaced by a line segment, a square, a cube, and we can imagine
00:31:11.440 this sequence continuing for as many dimensions as there are fine tune constants in nature,
00:31:16.640 arbitrarily defined near the edge, as meaning within 10% of the whole range from it.
00:31:22.080 Then in the case of one constant as shown in the diagram, 20% of its possible values are
00:31:27.280 near one of the two edges of the range, and 80% are away from the edge, but with two constants,
00:31:33.360 a pair of values has to satisfy two constraints in order to be away from the edge,
00:31:38.480 only 64% of them do so, hence 36% are near the edge. With three constants nearly half the possible
00:31:44.720 traces are near the edge, with a hundred constants over 99.999% of them are. So I'll just pause
00:31:54.160 there for a moment, but the way that you can do the maths for the square here is to say, well,
00:31:59.440 you've got 0.8 in the horizontal direction and 0.8 in the vertical direction, and 0.8 times 0.8 is
00:32:05.440 6 for leaving 1 minus 0.64, which is 0.36 in the edge, and then if you've got the cube,
00:32:11.680 you've got 0.8 times 0.8 times 0.8 times 0.8. If you do 1 minus 0.8 times 0.8 times 0.8,
00:32:18.880 then you have 0.48 or 48.8% back to the book. So the more constants are involved,
00:32:26.800 the closer they're having no astrophysicist, a typical universe with astrophysicist is.
00:32:32.240 It is not known how many constants are involved, but it seems to be several,
00:32:35.680 in which case the overwhelming majority of the universes in the anthropically selected region
00:32:40.560 would be close to its edge, hence Shiyama concluded. The anthropic explanation predicts that
00:32:46.560 the universe is only just capable of producing astrophysicists, almost the opposite prediction
00:32:52.880 from the one that it makes in the case of one constant. On the face of it, this mind
00:32:58.640 in turn seemed to explain another great unsolved scientific mystery, known as Fermi's problem,
00:33:04.160 named after the physicist Enrique Fermi, who is said to have asked us, where are they?
00:33:09.280 Where are the extraterrestrial civilizations? Given the principle of mediocrity,
00:33:13.520 or even just what we know of the galaxy and the universe, there is no reason to believe that
00:33:18.320 the phenomenon of astrophysicist is unique to our planet. Similar conditions presumably exist
00:33:23.840 in many other solar systems, so why would some of them not produce similar outcomes?
00:33:28.560 Moreover, given the timescars on which stars and galaxies develop, it is overwhelmingly unlikely
00:33:33.360 that any given extraterrestrial civilization is currently at a similar state of technological
00:33:37.920 development to ours. It is likely to be millions of years younger by a non-existent or older.
00:33:43.440 The older civilizations have had plenty of time to explore the galaxy,
00:33:46.960 or at least to send robot space probes or signals. Fermi's problem is that we'd not see any
00:33:52.800 such civilizations, probes, or signals. Many candidate explanations have been proposed,
00:33:58.880 and none of them, so far, are very good. The entropic explanation of fine-tuning,
00:34:03.680 in the light of Sheyama's argument, might seem to solve the problem neatly.
00:34:08.240 If the contents of physics in our universe are only just capable of producing astrophysic,
00:34:13.440 then it is not surprising that this event has happened only once. Since it's happening twice
00:34:19.200 independently, in the same universe would be vanishingly small. Unfortunately,
00:34:24.720 that turns out to be a bad explanation too, because focusing on fundamental constants
00:34:29.600 is proactive. There is no relevant difference between one, the same laws of physics with
00:34:34.560 different constants, and two different laws of physics. And there are infinitely many logically
00:34:39.600 possible laws of physics. If they were all instantiated in real universes, as has been suggested by
00:34:44.880 some cosmologists such as Max Tegmark, it would be statistically certain that our universe is
00:34:49.920 exactly on the edge of the astrophysic producing class of universes. So this is great. Often,
00:34:55.040 this is me talking my commentary. Often these discussions about fine-tuning, there's a fixation on
00:35:00.880 the constants purely upon the constants, and less attention is paid to the form of the laws of physics
00:35:07.040 themselves. And the form of the laws of physics is a crucial thing that we could manipulate if we
00:35:13.120 were some all-powerful god, or if we had control of various different universes. And so David's
00:35:19.040 about to get to the discussion about why, assuming that there are an infinite class of universes
00:35:24.880 out there, all of which instantiated completely different physical laws really doesn't solve the
00:35:30.000 problem whatsoever. The problem is definitely there. So we will proceed. He writes,
00:35:36.320 we know that that cannot be so from an argument due to finement, which he applied to a slightly
00:35:42.080 different problem. Consider the class of all possible universes that contain astrophysic. And consider
00:35:46.560 what else most of them contain. In particular, consider a sphere just large enough to contain your own
00:35:52.240 brain. If you are interested in explaining fine-tuning, your brain in its current state counts as an
00:35:57.680 astrophysicist for these purposes. In the class of all universes that contain astrophysic,
00:36:02.880 there are many that contain a sphere. His interior is perfectly identical to the interior of your
00:36:07.200 sphere, including every detail of your brain. But in the vast majority of those universes,
00:36:10.960 there is chaos outside the sphere. Almost a random state. Since most random states are by
00:36:17.360 far the most numerous, a typical such state is not only amorphous, but hot. So in most
00:36:21.840 such universes, the very next thing that is going to happen is that that chaotic radiation
00:36:26.080 emanating from outside the sphere will kill you instantly. At any given instant, the theory that
00:36:31.200 we are going to be killed in a picosecond, hence, is refuted by an observation, a picosecond later,
00:36:37.440 whereupon another such theory presents itself. So it is a very bad explanation, an extreme
00:36:42.880 version of the gambler's hunches. The same holds for purely anthropic explanations of all
00:36:48.480 under fine-tuning, involving more than a handful of constants. Such explanations predict that
00:36:53.440 it is overwhelmingly likely that we are in a universe in which astrophysic is only just possible,
00:36:58.960 and will cease to exist in an instant. So they are bad explanations. This is this idea of Boltzmann
00:37:04.000 brains, where if you assume that the, if you assume randomness obtains out there in the universe
00:37:12.240 or out there in reality beyond our universe, then randomness implies that everything that
00:37:16.480 can possibly happen is going to happen somewhere or other at some point. And when we say
00:37:20.480 possible to happen, logically possible could happen. And that includes you yourself, your brain,
00:37:26.560 your consciousness, right now, popping into existence, and then popping out of existence now.
00:37:31.840 And what we are saying about that here, what they are saying about that here is that that's
00:37:36.160 an exceedingly bad explanation. It doesn't explain anything, it doesn't explain why the laws of
00:37:39.680 physics have the form that they do. Of course, everything could popping through existence now and
00:37:43.200 then pop out of existence. I think I first heard this at university that God could have done that,
00:37:47.600 that he could have clicked these fingers and everything comes into being, including you with
00:37:54.080 your memories right now and at any moment it could disappear again as well. And I found that
00:37:59.280 an exceedingly bad explanation at that time as well. Back to the book. On the other hand, if the
00:38:05.680 laws of physics exist in only one form, with only the values of a few constants differing from one
00:38:11.360 universe to another, then the very fact that laws with different forms are not instantiated is a piece
00:38:15.680 of fine-tuning that that anthropic explanation leaves unexplained. The theory that all logically
00:38:21.600 possible laws of physics are instantiated as universes has a further severe problem as an explanation.
00:38:26.720 As I shall explain in chapter 8, when considering infinite sets, such as these, there is often
00:38:31.680 no objective way to count or measure how many of them have one attribute rather than another.
00:38:36.960 On the other hand, in the class of all logically possible entities, those that can understand
00:38:43.200 themselves as the physical reality that we are in does are surely in any reasonable sense
00:38:49.280 a tiny minority. I'll just pause there for a moment. So when he says that there's this class
00:38:54.320 of all logically possible entities, there is a tiny sliver of logically possible entities that
00:39:00.640 can understand themselves. Namely, universes like ours in which we have evolved and we now are part
00:39:06.880 of the universe that is understanding itself, just continuing. So that's a tiny minority. He says,
00:39:12.800 the idea that one of them just happened without explanation is surely just a spontaneous
00:39:18.960 generation theory. In addition, almost all the universes described by those logically possible
00:39:23.920 laws of physics are radically different from ours. So different, that they do not properly fit
00:39:28.400 into the argument. For instance, infinitely many of them contain nothing other than one bison
00:39:33.040 in various poses. And last for exactly 42 seconds, infinitely many others contain a bison
00:39:38.560 and a astrophysicist. But what is a astrophysicist in a universe that contains no stars,
00:39:43.840 no scientific instruments, and almost no evidence? What is a scientist or any sort of any sort of
00:39:49.600 thinking person, any universe in which any bad explanations are true? Almost all logically
00:39:55.520 possible universes that contain astrophysicist are governed by laws of physics that are bad
00:39:59.920 explanations. So should we predict that our universe too is inexplicable or has some high but
00:40:06.320 unknowable probability to them? Thus, again, anthropic arguments based on all possible laws
00:40:15.200 are ruled out for being bad explanations. For these reasons, I conclude that while anthropic reasoning
00:40:21.280 may well be part of the explanation for apparent fine-tuning and other observations, it can never
00:40:25.760 be the whole explanation for why we observe something that would otherwise look too purposeful
00:40:30.880 to be explicable as coincidence. Specifically, specific explanation in terms of specific laws
00:40:37.600 of nature is needed. And here we've finished the subsection kind of of the fine-tuning part,
00:40:45.280 and we're going to the conclusion about the whole chapter. So some remarks are made about
00:40:49.920 neodalminism as well. And he writes, the reader may have noticed that all the bad explanations
00:40:55.120 that I'll have discussed in this chapter are ultimately connected with each other.
00:40:58.000 Expect too much for anthropic reasoning. I wonder too carefully about how Lamarckism could work,
00:41:03.600 and you get to spontaneous generation. Takes spontaneous generation too seriously,
00:41:08.160 and you get to creationism, and so on. That is because they all address the same underlying
00:41:12.480 problem, and are all easily variable. They are all, they are easily interchangeable with each other,
00:41:19.120 or with variants of themselves, and they are too easy as explanations. They could equally
00:41:24.560 will explain anything. But neodalminism was not easy to come by, and it is not easy to tweak.
00:41:30.000 Try to tweak it. Even as far as Darwin's own misconceptions, and you will get an explanation that
00:41:34.480 doesn't work nearly as well. Try to account for something non-dalwinian with it, such as a new
00:41:39.680 complex adaptation of which there were no precursors in the organism's parents, and you will not
00:41:44.240 be able to think of a variant with that feature. And swabbing explanations are attempting to account
00:41:49.200 for purposeful structure, such as the fine tune constants, in terms of a single active selection.
00:41:55.680 That is unlike evolution, and it cannot work. The solution of the fine tune puzzle is going to
00:42:01.040 be in terms of an explanation that will specifically explain what we observe. It will be, as we
00:42:07.520 look at it, an idea so simple, that we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?
00:42:14.320 In other words, the problem has been not that the world is so complex that we cannot
00:42:18.880 understand why it looks the way it does, but it is that it is so simple that we cannot yet understand
00:42:25.360 it, but this will be noticeable only with hindsight. All those bad explanations, the biosphere,
00:42:31.920 are the fails who address the problem of how the knowledge and adaptations have created,
00:42:35.920 or they explain it badly. That is to say, they all underrate creation, and, ironically,
00:42:41.680 the theory that underrates creation most of all, is creationism. Consider this,
00:42:46.560 if a supernatural creator would have created the universe at the moment when Einstein or Darwin
00:42:51.040 or any great scientist appeared to have just completed their major discovery, then the true
00:42:55.840 creator of that discovery, and of all early discoveries, would not have been not that scientist,
00:43:02.960 but the supernatural being. Such a theory would deny the existence of the only creation
00:43:08.480 that really did take place in the genesis of that scientist's discoveries.
00:43:12.560 And it really is creation. Before a discovery is made, no predictive process could
00:43:18.720 reveal the content or the consequences of that discovery. For if it could, it would be that
00:43:23.920 discovery. So scientific discovery is profoundly unpredictable, despite the fact it is determined
00:43:30.560 by the laws of physics. I'm just going to pause there because that's amazing, and this brings
00:43:35.360 in some issues that people have about free will. And we're starting to think that free will is
00:43:43.440 tied up very much with this idea of creativity, or at least it's synonymous in a way with creativity.
00:43:50.640 That it doesn't matter what the laws of physics are, the laws of physics cannot. We cannot derive
00:43:56.880 the laws of physics, the discoveries in science themselves. As he says there, it's not possible for
00:44:05.760 a predictive theory, a predictive process, to reveal the content of discoveries of scientific
00:44:12.080 discoveries, because if there was such a theory that could predict the content of scientific
00:44:15.920 discoveries, then it would include that discovery. It would be that discovery. So
00:44:20.880 scientific discoveries are profoundly unpredictable, the growth of knowledge is profoundly unpredictable.
00:44:24.320 Even though it is determined by the laws of physics. And this is a subtle and often misunderstood
00:44:33.520 point back to the book. I shall say more about this curious fact in the next chapter. In short,
00:44:40.240 it is due to the existence of emergent levels of explanation. In this case, the upshot is that what
00:44:46.880 science and creative thought in general achieves is unpredictable creation. X, Nilo,
00:44:52.560 so does biological evolution. Now the process does. Creationism, therefore, is misleadingly
00:44:59.440 named. It is not a theory explaining knowledge as being due to creation, but the opposite.
00:45:05.120 It is denying the creation happen in reality by placing the origin of the knowledge in an
00:45:09.840 explanation must realm. Creationism is really creation to nile, and so are all those other false
00:45:16.480 explanations. The puzzle of understanding what living things are and how they came about has given
00:45:23.680 rise to a strange history of misconceptions, near misses and ironies. The last of the ironies is
00:45:29.360 that the neo Darwinian theory, like the popular theory of knowledge, really does describe creation,
00:45:35.360 while their rivals, beginning with creationism, never could. That's the end of the chapter. That's
00:45:41.600 wonderful, so if I could just recap that bit there. Creationism says that God created everything,
00:45:48.240 which means that God created all of the knowledge, including the knowledge of how ironstone got to
00:45:54.880 his theory of relativity, including how Darwin got to his theory of evolution, one after selection.
00:46:00.240 So everything that people create isn't actually a creation, because it was already there in
00:46:05.600 the mind of God at some point. And so creationism is denying actual creativity, actual creativity
00:46:12.400 is done by people, and it's inherently unpredictable. And so this is the weird thing about creationism.
00:46:17.280 It denies actual creativity. What explains actual creativity? Two things. The theory of evolution
00:46:23.920 by natural selection, neo Darwinism, and end-perperian epistemology, the way in which knowledge grows.
00:46:30.000 We understand neither theory perfectly. Well neither theory are we able to turn into a predictive
00:46:38.320 theory such that we can program, we can't capture the algorithm for either of these theories
00:46:45.200 into a computer program. But we understand something. There's a whole bunch of people who deny
00:46:51.520 neo Darwinism, creationists, and so on. There's a whole bunch of people who deny
00:46:55.520 popular inner epistemology as well, or who fail to understand either often, I think that's actually
00:47:00.800 the case. The creationists just don't understand neo Darwinism, and people who deny
00:47:05.920 a superior epistemology just aren't familiar with it enough. Anyway, this was one of the most
00:47:10.720 exciting parts of the book for me so far, this idea of fine-cheening, a whole bunch of links down
00:47:16.720 below to books related to this, or try and make a video of my own paper as well. Thanks for watching
00:47:23.920 and we'll see you in chapter five, the reality of abstractions next, which is also very exciting.
00:47:29.840 This has a lot to do with the nature of mathematics, which is in the fabric of reality. It's one of
00:47:35.680 my favorite chapters of the fabric of reality, and so I might do a little bit of
00:47:39.040 meshing of those two together. It's a very exciting chapter. It's a very poorly understood
00:47:48.000 chapter as well, so reality of abstractions is up next. See you next time.
