The Anthropic Principle

A logical explanation is said to follow from many-worlds quantum theory. 

A dimensionless constant is always obtained as the ratio of two quantities measured in the same units. A familiar example is a freely moving electron which is characterized by a de Broglie wavelength = h/mv and a Compton wavelength c = h/mc. The ratio a = Xc/X b = v/c is a dimensionless quantity which depends on the velocity of the electron. For an electron in the ground-state H atom, Xds = Sttoq = 27r/i /me and a assumes the constant value of jhe, known as the fine-structure constant. 

It has been a major objective of standard cosmology to explain the fine-structure constant as dictated by the anthropic principle (Barrow Tipler, 1988) p. 288-310, or even divine intervention. An award-winning theorist (Feynman, 1990) writes  

It [a) has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago,. is it related to tt, or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms Nobody knows. It s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the hand of God wrote that number, and we don t know how He pushed His pencil . 

By considering the electron as a wave structure rather than a point particle (Boeyens, 2010) the need of such speculation falls away. The same applies to the other dimensionless quantities of cosmological significance. 

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The notion of the inevitability of life appears to be present in science in many forms. In my opinion the anthropic principle, for example, belongs in this category. This can be expressed in different ways but the basic idea is that the universal constants, the geometric parameters, and all things of the universe are the way they are in order for life and evolution to develop (Barrow and Tipler, 1986 and 1988 Davies, 1999 Barrow, 2001 Carr, 2001). It is the post hoc argument that since we are so improbable, our presence must signify a purposeful universe. 

The anthropic principle can be expressed in more sophisticated forms, but I believe that my simplihcation given above is not at all far from the target. In fact, one reads in the primary literature, for example in Paul Davies book (Davies, 1999) ... 

This view is held, although not always expressed as an adherence to the anthropic principle, by several authors in the field. For example Freeman Dyson (1985) writes ... 

The argument of the anthropic principle - that the great laws of nature are the way they are otherwise there would be no life - is a truism at many levels. If one considers the atmosphere, there would be no life if there were more oxygen, or less oxygen or a higher temperature, or a lower one or less humidity, or more humidity, etc. The same is true in the molecular world. Of course if on Earth there had only been diketopiperazines and not amino acids or if sugars did not have the size they have or if lipids were three times shorter, then we would not have life. 

In which we encounter Einstein, Rumi, God, the anthropic principle, Stephen Hawking, the Bible, Proust s hyper-realities. The Lobotomy Club, Sushi Never Sleeps, acto/5, brain surgery, Italian filmmaking, neorealism, stellar nucleosynthesis, the Big Bang, Paul Davies, Frank Tipler, Marcel Proust, H. P Lovecrafi, Andrei Linde, Sir Fred Hoyle, Rudy Rucker, Robert Jastrow, The Templeton Foundation, multiple universes, Paul Kammerer, synchronicity, and the shoreless sea of love. 

Yes. We exist because of cosmic coincidences, or more accurately, we exist because the seemingly finely tuned numerical constants permit life. Some people who believe in the anthropic principle believe these numbers to be near miracles that possibly suggest an intelligent design to the Universe. 5... 

Quoted in John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler The Anthropic Cosmological Principle The Anthropic Principle and Biochemistry (p. 541)... 

I suppose that everybody starting with this contradiction between these views on time would have gone in the same direction. What are the alternative possibilities Einstein said that we are automata but we don t know that we are automata and time is an illusion. Other people, like Descartes or Kant, stated that we are in a dualistic universe. Even in current literature, like in Hawking s A Brief History of Time, you find this duality. On the one hand, it is stated that the universe can be understood geometrically, while, on the other hand, there is the anthropic principle, which introduces evolution. My main point is to go beyond this duality and to reach a unified view by extending the theory of dynamical systems. 

Despite the abundant evidence for huge plume events, such as the immense Bushveld event, the anthropic principle implies that the whole Earth has not experienced 2>100°C greenhouse conditions as long as life has existed. Since then, there have always been parts of the Earth below about 100°C, and since the evolution of mesophiles there have been parts of the Earth below about 40°C. Possibly the plume events have simply been too small to disrupt global climate beyond habitability. Or possibly life itself has played a hand. 

In 1913, long after Charles Darwin had argued for the htness of organisms for their environment, the Harvard chemist Lawrence J. Henderson pointed out that the organisms would not exist at all except for the htness of the environment itself. Fitness there must be, in environment as well as in organism, he declared near the outset of his classic work. The Fitness of the Environment (1913, p. 6). While most of Henderson s contemporaries ignored the philosophical implications of this work, as John Barrow and Frank Tipler have noted, it still comprises the foundahon of the Anthropic Principle as applied to biochemical systems (1986, p. 143). 

Carter, B. (1974). Large number coincidences and the anthropic principle in cosmology. 

Linde, A. (2003). Inflation, quantum cosmology, and the anthropic principle. In Science... 

B. Carter. Large number coincidences and the anthropic principle in cosmology. In Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, International Astronomical Union Symposium No. 63, ed. M. S. Longair. Dordrecht Reidel (1974), pp. 291-8 also The anthropic principle and its implications for biological evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, A310, 347 (1983). 

Fitness of the cosmos for the origin and evolution of life from biochemical fine-tuning to the Anthropic Principle... 

The idea that the cosmos is in some sense biocentric has been supported over the past several decades by the discovery of biocentric fine-tuning of the fundamental physical constants (see also the contributions of other authors in this volume), the so-called cosmic coincidences (Car and Rees, 1979 Davies, 1982 Barrow and Tipler, 1986). One such coincidence is the lucky fact that the nuclear resonances of and O are exactly what they need to be if carbon is to be synthesized and accumulate in any quantity in the interior of stars. The energy levels of these resonances ensure that is first synthesized in stellar interiors from collisions between Be and helium nuclei and that the carbon synthesized is not depleted later. This discovery was made by Hoyle in 1953 while working at Caltech with William Fowler (Hoyle, 1964). An intriguing aspect of the discovery is, as Hoyle later pointed out (1994, p. 256), that it was a prediction from the Anthropic Principle. From the cosmic abundance of carbon, Hoyle inferred probable coincidences in the nuclear resonances that facilitated and promoted the synthesis of carbon (Barrow and Tipler, 1986, pp. 250-5). Hoyle s discovery was widely acclaimed, not only as a major scientific discovery, but also as evidence for the biocentricity of nature. 

The Anthropic Principle is the name given to a collection of related arguments of this type, in which observations about the existence or form of life are used as evidence to constrain theories of the natural laws from which life arises. The different forms of the Anthropic Principle are conventionally divided by philosophers... 

If we take into attention that hitmans are also, according to Vernadsky, a regular part of the biosphere (see below the noosphere concept of Vernadsky), this approach can be classified as a version of the anthropic principle. 

Barrow and Tipler provide three versions of the anthropic principle (AP). (1) The weak AP maintains fliat file observed physical and cosmological values are restricted by the requirement that carbon-based life exists. (2) The Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP) is a more speculative statement namely that The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history" (Barrow Tipler, 1986, p. 21). (3) The Final AP , Jntelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out" (Barrow Tipler, 19 p. 23). 

Stephen Hawking (1988), widely recognized as the ultimate authority on big-bang cosmology and the anthropic principle gave a detailed answer to this question in his all-time best seller, that probably needs no further introduction. In his own words (p. 50) he claims credit for the idea... 

Although no record of this exposition could be found in the literature, it probably agrees with the view of those poorly informed cosmologists who "talk about expanding space". The nasty consequence is that the rate at which the universe is thought to expand is much slower than c, but in cosmology it is always possible to argue around unpleasant contradictions. In this instance the idea of inflation comes to the rescue, while the anthropic principle remains on standby. 

Many attempts have been made to defuse the A problem. A common strategy is by vague reference to unexplored, but likely, effects of otherwise well-known ideas, such as divine intervention, quantum uncertainty, many-worlds theory, wormholes or the anthropic principle, to account for any apparent theoretical inadequacies. It requires little more than some reassurance on the future vindication of a viable theory that may now appear flawed. We read (Schwarzschild, 1989) ... 

This means that the probabilities of a many-world wave function allows an infinitude of universes connected by wormholes that drain away the excess vacuum energy until A = 0, the value dictated by the anthropic principle or creationist design. The effect of the tiny wormholes, of Planck length, may be likened to osmotic seepage through a semipermeable membrane. 

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