T H E G O L D I L O C K S Z O N E
"There was still a third bed - Baby Bear's bed - with a pink and white spread on it. Goldilocks tried the littlest bed, and it was just right, and so she curled up and was soon fast asleep."
ROBERT SOUTHEY
ROBERT SOUTHEY
One for the boys - click to enlarge
This links in with the trouble with now...Many worlds; the goldilocks theory states that this is the ideal world because it is the coincidence of all the right conditions for life. But the many worlds theory oppens the possiblilities that this is merely one of many worlds and not necessarily the best. Perhaps there is a world where it was willianm that lost the Battle of Hastings, where the Cuba Crisis caused an atomic haulocaust; where the bomb did kill hitler; where the artch duke ferdinand was only lightly wounded; where there wasn't an assasin in the Book Depository or on the grassy knol where we lost the battle of Waterloo, where we heeded the warnings of glabal warning before it was too late
Anthropic principle, many worlds, Intelligent design
The Goldilocks Zone
For years scientists thought that Earth was the only planet in the Solar System that fit the requirements needed for life to exist. Our planet has liquidwater, a breathable atmosphere and a suitable amount of sunshine. If Earth were a little closer to the sun it might be like hot choking Venus; a little farther, like cold arid Mars. In the 1970's scientists dubbed Earth's perfect placement about the Sun as "the Goldilocks Zone."
The Goldilocks Zone seemed a remarkably small region of space. It didn't even include the whole Earth. All life known in those days was confined to certain limits: no colder than Antarctica and no hotter than scalding water, for instance. Today, however, scientists have discovered organisms living in environments that were previously thought to be too extreme for life. Now we know that some microbes can survive in nuclear reactors, boiling-hot water and even highly acidic environments. This month NASA researchers have announced a new species of extreme-loving microorganism, Tindallia californiensis, found in California's highly salty and alkaline Mono Lake.
By studying life in extreme environments on Earth, scientists hope to understand how life could survive in similar locations on other worlds like Marsand Europa. In fact, Mono Lake resembles a place on Mars named Gusev Crater where NASA's Mars rover Spirit will land in 2004. It's unlikely that Gusev Crater has water today, but it may contain fossil evidence of past life. Studying Mono Lake and the extremophiles it harbors may help scientists understand how to identify such fossils.
Establishing the limits for life in environments that provide analogues for conditions on other worlds is a primary goal of astrobiology. Determining how to recognize the signature of life on other worlds is also vital to astrobiology.
aul Davies goes a long way towards suggesting that he believes the creation of life to be somehow the 'goal' of the universe without suggesting that it is the work of a higher intelligence or God. That is to say he tends towards the belief that the principle of life 'builds purpose into the workings of the cosmos at a fundamental (rather than an incidental) level, without positing an unexplained pre-existing purposive agent to inject purpose miraculously.' This belief is his tentative solution to the 'Goldilocks Enigma', the 'reason' why planets such as our own are 'not too hot and not too cold but just right'.
The evolutionary physics that defines the "just-right" conditions for the goldilocks constraint applies to other systems that are similarly developed, time and location-wise, as ours is:
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~imamura/209/mar31/anthropic.html
The goldilocks enigma constrains the parameters to a balance of extremes... so it only applies to galaxies that formed on the same evolutionary time/location "plane" as we did. Planets orbiting stars in galaxies that are too old or too new, too large or too small, do not fit the "coincidentally balanced" nature as the average of extremes... etc... etc... ect... all the way down to the local ecobalances of the ones that do:
http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/spr/2006-02/msg0073181.html
This also resolves the alleged, Fermi "Paradox", as well, since we should not YET expect to hear from similarly developed intelligent life, because their radio transmissions have not had time to reach us... YET... either.
Um... just an FYI, but that's a testable prediction about where and when life will most likely be found elsewhere in the universe.
This paper by A. Feoli, and S. Rampone, further discusses this in context with similarly developed systems, but they fail to take the balance of extremes that defines the "Goldilocks Enigma" into account here, because they apply the mediocrity principle, instead, so their formula and anthropic statement are not quite accurately inserted into the Drake Equation, as would be the case if they'd considered the entire set of anthropic balance points that evolve, (time and location-wise), from the observed, nearly-balanced stucture of the universe itself, all the way down to our own local ecobalance... so their solution and anthropic statement are dramatically generalized and overstated, rather than being specific and pointed toward a fine layer of similarly evolved galaxies, stars, and planets:
"Is the Strong Anthropic Principle Too Weak?"
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9812093
We discuss the Carter's formula about the mankind evolution probability following the derivation proposed by Barrow and Tipler. We stress the relation between the existence of billions of galaxies and the evolution of at least one intelligent life, whose living time is not trivial, all over the Universe. We show that the existence probability and the lifetime of a civilization depend not only on the evolutionary critical steps, but also on the number of places where the life can arise. In the light of these results, we propose a stronger version of Anthropic Principle.
... and uh... when you apply the Goldilocks Enigma, rather than the mediocrity principle, to the Drake Equation, then a much more accurate and testable formula falls-out along with a more accurate statement about a strong biocentric principle... just in case nobody noticed.
UPDATE:
Peter Woit made the following statement in the comments section of his "rewiew" of Davies' book, and it is important as it applies to this thread, so I'm bringing it in now:
The “principle of mediocrity”, or more generally, the use of a multiverse model that gives an a priori statistical distribution of values of observables, combined with the anthropic principle as a selection effect, can in certain cases give predictions.
As this applies to our obseverd universe.
The "cosmological principle" gives a "mediocre" multiverse-"like" priori statistical distribution of values of observables, but this is not what is observed and is the reason for the anthropic physics that defines the "Goldilocks Enigma", so the combined effect of the Cosmological Principle with the Goldilocks Constraint... defines a Biocentric Cosmological Principle.
The average of extreme opposing runaway tendencies that are common to the anthropic coincidences make many testable predictions about the observed universe.
Like, life will not be found on Mars or Venus, but it will be found in other systems that meet the goldilocks criterion.
'Read em, and weep'... where "weep" is like a code-word to anticentrists to willfully ignore the hard evidence.The biggest question: why did he leave us?Stephen Cauchi
September 17, 2006
Paul Davies: scientist and author.
Photo: Andrew Quilty
AdvertisementAdvertisementINTERNATIONALLY acclaimed scientist and writer Paul Davies has left Australia after 16 years and moved to the United States.
British-born Professor Davies, 60, the author of more than 20 popular science books including Superforce,Other Worlds and How to Build a Time Machine, was professor of natural philosophy at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology (ACA), which he helped establish, at Macquarie University. He has moved to Arizona State University where he will establish and head a space science centre.
Professor Davies' move will leave a gaping hole in Australian science, where his talent has been recognised with an Advance Australia Award and two Eureka prizes. He has also won a number of international prizes, including the Templeton Prize in 1995.
ACA director Malcolm Walter said Professor Davies would be sorely missed. "It was very sad. He's been a tremendous asset here and a very stimulating person to have around. We're all very disappointed."
Professor Walter said the move "had been in the wind for quite a while. They've been wooing him for quite some time. He was made an offer that he couldn't refuse. They really wanted him and they made sure they got him."
Via email, Professor Davies told The Sunday Age he was still "reeling from the shock of transition".
The new centre at Arizona State University, he said, would be a "cosmic think tank" designed to "address all the Really Big Questions, such as how the universe came to exist, why it is so uncannily suited for life, are we alone, what is the destiny of mankind, etc … as far as I know, this is the first time that a university centre has been dedicated to such an agenda.
"The specifics have not yet been worked out, but I expect in the first instance to develop an 'origins' theme: origin of the universe, origin of life, origin of consciousness, origin of the laws of physics."
Professor Davies said he did not move because he was disillusioned with Australian science policy or the ACA, which, he said, had been an "enormous success". "I am now ready to take on another challenge and one has been presented to me … of course it is exciting to be working for the largest university in the United States."
Professor Davies, who was born in London, came to Australia in 1990 after working at the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and was at the University of Adelaide before moving to Macquarie University. "I came to Australia as a refugee from British science, which was at that time in bad disarray," he said.
"I have always been enormously impressed by the enthusiasm with which my presence in Australia has been received — from the public, from the media, from politicians and from academia.
"Naturally Australia is a small player on the scientific stage, but it certainly punches above its weight.
"I think the ACA is a world-class centre and very highly regarded here in the US. I plan to make frequent return visits and to strengthen the already good links between the ACA and Arizona State University."
Professor Davies said he would be releasing a book next month called The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe just right for life?
The book examines various theories on why the universe is suitable for life, including multiverse theory, anthropic selection and string theory landscapes.The Goldilocks EnigmaPosted on September 22, 2006 by woitPaul Davies is an author of many popular science books, often dealing with topics in cosmology and particle physics. He has been based in Australia for the last sixteen years, but is now moving to the US, taking up a new position at Arizona State University, where he will establish a new center he describes as a “cosmic think tank”.He also has a new book coming out, entitled The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right For Life?, and a major concern of this one is the multiverse and anthropic reasoning. I was asked to write a review of the book for the British Magazine New Humanist, and the review has appeared in their September/October issue. One reason I agreed to do the review (besides the fee in the upper two figures) was that I thought I might write about the book here anyway. Here’s the text of the review. It’s somewhat different than my other postings here, since it’s written for a much wider audience and constrained by space limitations to be rather short. As a result, it unfortunately doesn’t go as deeply as I would have liked into discussing some of the issues raised in the book.Review for New HumanistPaul Davies’ new book The Goldilocks Enigma wrestles with some of the deepest philosophical issues around, but concentrates on one in particular: “why is the world the way it is?” He approaches this question through a discussion of a hot topic in theoretical physics that most scientists refer to as the “Anthropic Principle”, but which Davies chooses to label the “Goldilocks Enigma”. This refers to the fact that the physical laws that govern the universe are “just right” for the development of life. Relatively small changes in certain parameters would make it uninhabitable by the likes of us and we wouldn’t be here.What should one make of this? Religion has a quick explanation, that God set things up so that we can exist. “Intelligent Design” is the currently popular name for explanations of physics or biology that invoke a higher intelligence that chose to make the world the way it is. This explanation suffers from the lack of any way to ever test it.Davies spends much of the first half of the book providing an introduction to the modern scientific view of physical laws and cosmology, working up to the latest and trendiest of these. For more than twenty years now, theoretical physics has been dominated by a very speculative idea known as “string theory”. Very roughly, this involves replacing elementary particles with objects more like loops, and it crucially requires six extra dimensions beyond the three space and one time dimension we’re familiar with.One must do something like wrap up the six dimensions to make them unobservably small, but then the properties of particles and thus our physical laws depend on how this is done. Initially there was much optimism that there would be only a small number of consistent choices for how to handle the six dimensions, and one of these choices would agree with what we observe. Recent results in string theory appear to show that this isn’t the case; instead an unimaginably large number of possibilities exist. Indications are that if one can get our observed universe this way, one can also get just about any variation of it, and legitimate scientific predictions are not possible.Instead of abandoning string theory as a hopeless cause since it can’t predict anything, some string theorists have chosen to promote the idea that our universe is just part of a “multiverse” of all the nearly infinite possibilities allowed by string theory. One of the few thingsone can then predict is that we must be in a part of the multiverse that is “just right” to allow our existence. Debate rages amongst physicists over whether or not this idea is really testable and thus scientific.Davies provides a careful description of this currently popular multiverse scenario and its explanation for why things are the way they are, including some mind-boggling implications involving infinite numbers of copies of ourselves, and the possiblity that the universe is a simulation. He contrasts it with the common belief among many physicists that there is a simple unique mathematical structure underlying the physical laws that describe the universe. The problem he sees with this belief is that there’s no reason to expect that such a mathematical structure should pick out exactly the parameters that are “just right” for life. But then again, does it really make sense to have any expectations about this? It’s not clear that a sufficient answer to the question “Why is the universe just right for life?” isn’t simply: because otherwise we wouldn’t be asking the question.The last chapter of the book moves away from conventional points of view among physicists to some much more speculative answers to the “why is the world the way it is?” question that Davies finds appealing. These involve some version of the idea that life itself is in some way or other built into the laws of the universe, that they inherently lead to the evolution of life. He looks to information theory and quantum mechanics for hints of how this might come about. Like the multiverse, this kind of speculation tends to suffer from a lack of any known way to test it. The hallmark ofthe scientific method is the insistence that theories have the property that one can confront them with experiment in a way that allows one to decide whether they work or not. One’s answer to the “why is the world the way it is?” question should be a theory of this kind.Davies concludes with the admission that, in the end, he finds all the different answers he has examined to be wanting. He notes that we’re the evolutionary products of the pressures of a specific environment, and only recently beginning to be liberated from these. Our minds may still be far too crude and our knowledge of the universe too fragmentary to allow us to perceive the correct answers to these existential questions. In the meantime, Davies has provided an engaging and very readable account of the range of answers we have come up with so far.Peter WoitPaul Davies's new book The Goldilocks Enigma wrestles with some of the deepest philosophical issues around, but concentrates on one in particular: 'why is the world the way it is?'He approaches this question through a discussion of a hot topic in theoretical physics that most scientists refer to as the 'Anthropic Principle', but which Davies chooses to label the 'Goldilocks Enigma'. This refers to the fact that the physical laws that govern the universe are 'just right' for the development of life. Relatively small changes in certain parameters would make it uninhabitable by the likes of us and we wouldn't be here. What should one make of this? Religion has a quick explanation, that God set things up so that we can exist. 'Intelligent Design' is the currently popular name for explanations of physics or biology that invoke a higher intelligence that chose to make the world the way it is. This explanation suffers from the lack of any way to ever test it.
Davies spends much of the first half of the book providing an introduction to the modern scientific view of physical laws and cosmology, working up to the latest and trendiest of these. For more than 20 years now, theoretical physics has been dominated by a very speculative idea known as 'string theory'. Very roughly, this involves replacing elementary particles with objects more like loops, and it crucially requires six extra dimensions beyond the three space and one time dimension we're familiar with.
One must do something like wrap up the six dimensions to make them unobservably small, but then the properties of particles and thus our physical laws depend on how this is done. Initially there was much optimism that there would be only a small number of consistent choices for how to handle the six dimensions, and one of these choices would agree with what we observe. Recent results in string theory appear to show that this isn't the case; instead an unimaginably large number of possibilities exist. Indications are that if one can get our observed universe this way, one can also get just about any variation of it, and legitimate scientific predictions are not possible.
Instead of abandoning string theory as a hopeless cause since it can't predict anything, some string theorists have chosen to promote the idea that our universe is just part of a 'multiverse' of all the nearly infinite possibilities allowed by string theory. One of the few things one can then predict is that we must be in a part of the multiverse that is 'just right' to allow our existence. Debate rages amongst physicists over whether or not this idea is really testable and thus scientific.
Davies provides a careful description of this currently popular multiverse scenario and its explanation for why things are the way they are, including some mind-boggling implications involving infinite numbers of copies of ourselves, and the possiblity that the universe is a simulation. He contrasts it with the common belief among many physicists that there is a simple unique mathematical structure underlying the physical laws that describe the universe. The problem he sees with this belief is that there's no reason to expect that such a mathematical structure should pick out exactly the parameters that are 'just right' for life. But then again, does it really make sense to have any expectations about this? It's not clear that a sufficient answer to the question 'Why is the universe just right for life?' isn't simply: because otherwise we wouldn't be asking the question.
The last chapter of the book moves away from points of view conventional among physicists to some much more speculative answers to the 'why is the world the way it is?' question that Davies finds appealing. These involve some version of the idea that life itself is in some way or other built into the laws of the universe, that they inherently lead to the evolution of life. He looks to information theory and quantum mechanics for hints of how this might come about. Like the multiverse, this kind of speculation tends to suffer from a lack of any known way to test it. The hallmark of the scientific method is the insistence that theories have the property that one can confront them with experiment in a way that allows one to decide whether they work or not. One's answer to the 'why is the world the way it is?' question should be a theory of this kind.
Davies concludes with the admission that, in the end, he finds all the different answers he has examined wanting. He notes that we're the evolutionary products of the pressures of a specific environment, and only recently beginning to be liberated from these. Our minds may still be far too crude and our knowledge of the universe too fragmentary to allow us to perceive the correct answers to these existential questions. In the meantime, Davies has provided an engaging and very readable account of the range of answers we have come up with so far.Last Updated: Monday, 9 October 2006, 17:05 GMT 18:05 UK E-mail this to a friend Printable versionThe Goldilocks Enigma Watch the interviewProfessor Paul Davies' The Goldilocks Enigma tackles fundamental questions about the nature of the universe and our attempts to understand it. Scientific breakthroughs, he argues, have brought us to the brink of comprehending the underlying structure of nature or "a final 'theory of everything'".In doing so, he suggests, an overarching explanation of existence may be about to replace all previous models - both theological and scientific. And central to finding this solution, he says, is answering the Goldilocks Enigma - why is it that "the universe seems 'just right' for life"?THE GOLDILOCKS ENIGMA is published by ALLEN LANE, an imprint of Penguin Books.Click here to post your comments and reviewsRead extracts from other books in the Newsnight book clubTHE GOLDILOCKS ENIGMA: WHY IS THE UNIVERSE JUST RIGHT FOR LIFE?By Paul DaviesExtract one:From CONFRONTING THE MYSTERY OF EXISTENCEFor thousands of years, human beings have contemplated the world about them and asked the great questions of existence: Why are we here? How did the universe begin? How will it end? How is the world put together? Why is it the way it is? For all of recorded human history, people have sought answers to such 'ultimate' questions in religion and philosophy, or declared them to be completely beyond human comprehension. Today, however, many of these big questions are part of science, and some scientists claim that they may be on the verge of providing answers.Two major developments have bolstered scientists' confidence that the answers lie within their grasp. The first is the enormous progress made in cosmology - the study of the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe. Observations made using satellites, the Hubble Space Telescope, and sophisticated ground-based instruments have combined to transform our view of the universe and the place of human beings within it. The second development is the growing understanding of the microscopic world within the atom - the subject known as high-energy particle physics. It is mostly carried out with giant particle accelerator machines (what were once called 'atom smashers') of the sort found at Fermilab near Chicago and the CERN Laboratory just outside Geneva. Combining these two subjects - the science of the very large and the science of the very small - provides tantalizing clues that deep and previously unsuspected linkages bind the micro-world to the macro-world. Cosmologists are fond of saying that the big bang, which gave birth to the universe billions of years ago, was the greatest ever particle physics experiment. These spectacular advances hint at a much grander synthesis: nothing less than a complete and unified description of nature, a final 'theory of everything' in which a flawless account of the entire physical world is encompassed within a single explanatory scheme....If almost any of the basic features of the universe, from the properties of atoms to the distribution of the galaxies, were different, life would very probably be impossible. Now, it happens that to meet these various requirements, certain stringent conditions must be satisfied in the underlying laws of physics that regulate the universe, so stringent in fact that a biofriendly universe looks like a fix - or 'a put-up job', to use the pithy description of the late British cosmologist Fred Hoyle. It appeared to Hoyle as if a super-intellect had been 'monkeying' with the laws of physics. He was right in his impression. On the face of it, the universe does look as if it has been designed by an intelligent creator expressly for the purpose of spawning sentient beings. Like the porridge in the tale of Goldilocks and the three bears, the universe seems to be 'just right' for life, in many intriguing ways. No scientific explanation for the universe can be deemed complete unless it accounts for this appearance of judicious design. Until recently, 'the Goldilocks factor' was almost completely ignored by scientists. Now, that is changing fast. As I shall discuss in the following chapters, science is at last coming to grips with the enigma of why the universe is so uncannily fit for life. The explanation entails understanding how the universe began and evolved into its present form, and knowing what matter is made of and how it is shaped and structured by the different forces of nature. Above all, it requires us to probe the very nature of physical laws.Extract two:From A UNIVERSE FIT FOR LIFEI want to run through some other 'coincidences' of a similar nature. Hoyle's 'put-up job' turned out to be the first of many instances in which seemingly small changes in some basic parameters of physics would prove lethal. A good way to think about this is to imagine playing God and setting out to design a universe. Suppose you had already settled on the basic laws of physics but you still had some free parameters at your disposal. The values of these parameters could be set by twiddling the knobs of a Designer Machine. Turn one knob and the electron gets a bit heavier, turn another and the strong force becomes a bit weaker, and so on. You could do this and see what happened to the universe. When would it make a big difference, and when would it scarcely matter? Although physicists can't actually carry out the experiment (at least not yet!), they can perform simple calculations to see what - all else being equal - such changes would do to the prospects for life. The qualification 'all else being equal' is important here, because we have no idea whether the various parameters of interest are actually free and independent, or whether they will turn out to be linked by a more comprehensive theory, or possibly even determined completely by such a theory. Maybe you can't raise the mass of the electron and lower the strength of the strong nuclear force together because these two properties of nature are connected in some deep way that forbids it. From our present knowledge, however, that wouldn't seem to be the case.Extract three:From HOW COME EXISTENCE?So, how come existence? At the end of the day, all the approaches I have discussed are likely to prove unsatisfactory. In fact, in reviewing them they all seem to me to be either ridiculous or hopelessly inadequate: a unique universe which just happens to permit life by a fluke; a stupendous number of alternative parallel universes which exist for no reason; a pre-existing God who is somehow self-explanatory; or a self-creating, self-explaining, self-understanding universe-with observers, entailing backward causation and teleology. Perhaps we have reached a fundamental impasse dictated by the limitations of the human intellect. I began this book by saying that religion was the first great systematic attempt to explain all of existence and that science is the next great attempt. Both religion and science draw their methodology from ancient modes of thought honed by many millennia of evolutionary and cultural pressures. Our minds are the products of genes and memes. Now we are free of Darwinian evolution and able to create our own real and virtual worlds, and our information processing technology can take us to intellectual arenas that no human mind has ever before visited, those age-old questions of existence may evaporate away, exposed as nothing more than the befuddled musings of biological beings trapped in a mental straightjacket inherited from evolutionary happenstance. The whole paraphernalia of gods and laws, of space, time and matter, of purpose and design, rationality and absurdity, meaning and mystery, may yet be swept away and replaced by revelations as yet undreamt of.
Anthropic principle, many worlds, Intelligent design
The Goldilocks Zone
For years scientists thought that Earth was the only planet in the Solar System that fit the requirements needed for life to exist. Our planet has liquidwater, a breathable atmosphere and a suitable amount of sunshine. If Earth were a little closer to the sun it might be like hot choking Venus; a little farther, like cold arid Mars. In the 1970's scientists dubbed Earth's perfect placement about the Sun as "the Goldilocks Zone."
The Goldilocks Zone seemed a remarkably small region of space. It didn't even include the whole Earth. All life known in those days was confined to certain limits: no colder than Antarctica and no hotter than scalding water, for instance. Today, however, scientists have discovered organisms living in environments that were previously thought to be too extreme for life. Now we know that some microbes can survive in nuclear reactors, boiling-hot water and even highly acidic environments. This month NASA researchers have announced a new species of extreme-loving microorganism, Tindallia californiensis, found in California's highly salty and alkaline Mono Lake.
By studying life in extreme environments on Earth, scientists hope to understand how life could survive in similar locations on other worlds like Marsand Europa. In fact, Mono Lake resembles a place on Mars named Gusev Crater where NASA's Mars rover Spirit will land in 2004. It's unlikely that Gusev Crater has water today, but it may contain fossil evidence of past life. Studying Mono Lake and the extremophiles it harbors may help scientists understand how to identify such fossils.
Establishing the limits for life in environments that provide analogues for conditions on other worlds is a primary goal of astrobiology. Determining how to recognize the signature of life on other worlds is also vital to astrobiology.
aul Davies goes a long way towards suggesting that he believes the creation of life to be somehow the 'goal' of the universe without suggesting that it is the work of a higher intelligence or God. That is to say he tends towards the belief that the principle of life 'builds purpose into the workings of the cosmos at a fundamental (rather than an incidental) level, without positing an unexplained pre-existing purposive agent to inject purpose miraculously.' This belief is his tentative solution to the 'Goldilocks Enigma', the 'reason' why planets such as our own are 'not too hot and not too cold but just right'.
The evolutionary physics that defines the "just-right" conditions for the goldilocks constraint applies to other systems that are similarly developed, time and location-wise, as ours is:
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~imamura/209/mar31/anthropic.html
The goldilocks enigma constrains the parameters to a balance of extremes... so it only applies to galaxies that formed on the same evolutionary time/location "plane" as we did. Planets orbiting stars in galaxies that are too old or too new, too large or too small, do not fit the "coincidentally balanced" nature as the average of extremes... etc... etc... ect... all the way down to the local ecobalances of the ones that do:
http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/spr/2006-02/msg0073181.html
This also resolves the alleged, Fermi "Paradox", as well, since we should not YET expect to hear from similarly developed intelligent life, because their radio transmissions have not had time to reach us... YET... either.
Um... just an FYI, but that's a testable prediction about where and when life will most likely be found elsewhere in the universe.
This paper by A. Feoli, and S. Rampone, further discusses this in context with similarly developed systems, but they fail to take the balance of extremes that defines the "Goldilocks Enigma" into account here, because they apply the mediocrity principle, instead, so their formula and anthropic statement are not quite accurately inserted into the Drake Equation, as would be the case if they'd considered the entire set of anthropic balance points that evolve, (time and location-wise), from the observed, nearly-balanced stucture of the universe itself, all the way down to our own local ecobalance... so their solution and anthropic statement are dramatically generalized and overstated, rather than being specific and pointed toward a fine layer of similarly evolved galaxies, stars, and planets:
"Is the Strong Anthropic Principle Too Weak?"
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9812093
We discuss the Carter's formula about the mankind evolution probability following the derivation proposed by Barrow and Tipler. We stress the relation between the existence of billions of galaxies and the evolution of at least one intelligent life, whose living time is not trivial, all over the Universe. We show that the existence probability and the lifetime of a civilization depend not only on the evolutionary critical steps, but also on the number of places where the life can arise. In the light of these results, we propose a stronger version of Anthropic Principle.
... and uh... when you apply the Goldilocks Enigma, rather than the mediocrity principle, to the Drake Equation, then a much more accurate and testable formula falls-out along with a more accurate statement about a strong biocentric principle... just in case nobody noticed.
UPDATE:
Peter Woit made the following statement in the comments section of his "rewiew" of Davies' book, and it is important as it applies to this thread, so I'm bringing it in now:
The “principle of mediocrity”, or more generally, the use of a multiverse model that gives an a priori statistical distribution of values of observables, combined with the anthropic principle as a selection effect, can in certain cases give predictions.
As this applies to our obseverd universe.
The "cosmological principle" gives a "mediocre" multiverse-"like" priori statistical distribution of values of observables, but this is not what is observed and is the reason for the anthropic physics that defines the "Goldilocks Enigma", so the combined effect of the Cosmological Principle with the Goldilocks Constraint... defines a Biocentric Cosmological Principle.
The average of extreme opposing runaway tendencies that are common to the anthropic coincidences make many testable predictions about the observed universe.
Like, life will not be found on Mars or Venus, but it will be found in other systems that meet the goldilocks criterion.
'Read em, and weep'... where "weep" is like a code-word to anticentrists to willfully ignore the hard evidence.The biggest question: why did he leave us?Stephen Cauchi
September 17, 2006
Paul Davies: scientist and author.
Photo: Andrew Quilty
AdvertisementAdvertisementINTERNATIONALLY acclaimed scientist and writer Paul Davies has left Australia after 16 years and moved to the United States.
British-born Professor Davies, 60, the author of more than 20 popular science books including Superforce,Other Worlds and How to Build a Time Machine, was professor of natural philosophy at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology (ACA), which he helped establish, at Macquarie University. He has moved to Arizona State University where he will establish and head a space science centre.
Professor Davies' move will leave a gaping hole in Australian science, where his talent has been recognised with an Advance Australia Award and two Eureka prizes. He has also won a number of international prizes, including the Templeton Prize in 1995.
ACA director Malcolm Walter said Professor Davies would be sorely missed. "It was very sad. He's been a tremendous asset here and a very stimulating person to have around. We're all very disappointed."
Professor Walter said the move "had been in the wind for quite a while. They've been wooing him for quite some time. He was made an offer that he couldn't refuse. They really wanted him and they made sure they got him."
Via email, Professor Davies told The Sunday Age he was still "reeling from the shock of transition".
The new centre at Arizona State University, he said, would be a "cosmic think tank" designed to "address all the Really Big Questions, such as how the universe came to exist, why it is so uncannily suited for life, are we alone, what is the destiny of mankind, etc … as far as I know, this is the first time that a university centre has been dedicated to such an agenda.
"The specifics have not yet been worked out, but I expect in the first instance to develop an 'origins' theme: origin of the universe, origin of life, origin of consciousness, origin of the laws of physics."
Professor Davies said he did not move because he was disillusioned with Australian science policy or the ACA, which, he said, had been an "enormous success". "I am now ready to take on another challenge and one has been presented to me … of course it is exciting to be working for the largest university in the United States."
Professor Davies, who was born in London, came to Australia in 1990 after working at the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and was at the University of Adelaide before moving to Macquarie University. "I came to Australia as a refugee from British science, which was at that time in bad disarray," he said.
"I have always been enormously impressed by the enthusiasm with which my presence in Australia has been received — from the public, from the media, from politicians and from academia.
"Naturally Australia is a small player on the scientific stage, but it certainly punches above its weight.
"I think the ACA is a world-class centre and very highly regarded here in the US. I plan to make frequent return visits and to strengthen the already good links between the ACA and Arizona State University."
Professor Davies said he would be releasing a book next month called The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe just right for life?
The book examines various theories on why the universe is suitable for life, including multiverse theory, anthropic selection and string theory landscapes.The Goldilocks EnigmaPosted on September 22, 2006 by woitPaul Davies is an author of many popular science books, often dealing with topics in cosmology and particle physics. He has been based in Australia for the last sixteen years, but is now moving to the US, taking up a new position at Arizona State University, where he will establish a new center he describes as a “cosmic think tank”.He also has a new book coming out, entitled The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right For Life?, and a major concern of this one is the multiverse and anthropic reasoning. I was asked to write a review of the book for the British Magazine New Humanist, and the review has appeared in their September/October issue. One reason I agreed to do the review (besides the fee in the upper two figures) was that I thought I might write about the book here anyway. Here’s the text of the review. It’s somewhat different than my other postings here, since it’s written for a much wider audience and constrained by space limitations to be rather short. As a result, it unfortunately doesn’t go as deeply as I would have liked into discussing some of the issues raised in the book.Review for New HumanistPaul Davies’ new book The Goldilocks Enigma wrestles with some of the deepest philosophical issues around, but concentrates on one in particular: “why is the world the way it is?” He approaches this question through a discussion of a hot topic in theoretical physics that most scientists refer to as the “Anthropic Principle”, but which Davies chooses to label the “Goldilocks Enigma”. This refers to the fact that the physical laws that govern the universe are “just right” for the development of life. Relatively small changes in certain parameters would make it uninhabitable by the likes of us and we wouldn’t be here.What should one make of this? Religion has a quick explanation, that God set things up so that we can exist. “Intelligent Design” is the currently popular name for explanations of physics or biology that invoke a higher intelligence that chose to make the world the way it is. This explanation suffers from the lack of any way to ever test it.Davies spends much of the first half of the book providing an introduction to the modern scientific view of physical laws and cosmology, working up to the latest and trendiest of these. For more than twenty years now, theoretical physics has been dominated by a very speculative idea known as “string theory”. Very roughly, this involves replacing elementary particles with objects more like loops, and it crucially requires six extra dimensions beyond the three space and one time dimension we’re familiar with.One must do something like wrap up the six dimensions to make them unobservably small, but then the properties of particles and thus our physical laws depend on how this is done. Initially there was much optimism that there would be only a small number of consistent choices for how to handle the six dimensions, and one of these choices would agree with what we observe. Recent results in string theory appear to show that this isn’t the case; instead an unimaginably large number of possibilities exist. Indications are that if one can get our observed universe this way, one can also get just about any variation of it, and legitimate scientific predictions are not possible.Instead of abandoning string theory as a hopeless cause since it can’t predict anything, some string theorists have chosen to promote the idea that our universe is just part of a “multiverse” of all the nearly infinite possibilities allowed by string theory. One of the few thingsone can then predict is that we must be in a part of the multiverse that is “just right” to allow our existence. Debate rages amongst physicists over whether or not this idea is really testable and thus scientific.Davies provides a careful description of this currently popular multiverse scenario and its explanation for why things are the way they are, including some mind-boggling implications involving infinite numbers of copies of ourselves, and the possiblity that the universe is a simulation. He contrasts it with the common belief among many physicists that there is a simple unique mathematical structure underlying the physical laws that describe the universe. The problem he sees with this belief is that there’s no reason to expect that such a mathematical structure should pick out exactly the parameters that are “just right” for life. But then again, does it really make sense to have any expectations about this? It’s not clear that a sufficient answer to the question “Why is the universe just right for life?” isn’t simply: because otherwise we wouldn’t be asking the question.The last chapter of the book moves away from conventional points of view among physicists to some much more speculative answers to the “why is the world the way it is?” question that Davies finds appealing. These involve some version of the idea that life itself is in some way or other built into the laws of the universe, that they inherently lead to the evolution of life. He looks to information theory and quantum mechanics for hints of how this might come about. Like the multiverse, this kind of speculation tends to suffer from a lack of any known way to test it. The hallmark ofthe scientific method is the insistence that theories have the property that one can confront them with experiment in a way that allows one to decide whether they work or not. One’s answer to the “why is the world the way it is?” question should be a theory of this kind.Davies concludes with the admission that, in the end, he finds all the different answers he has examined to be wanting. He notes that we’re the evolutionary products of the pressures of a specific environment, and only recently beginning to be liberated from these. Our minds may still be far too crude and our knowledge of the universe too fragmentary to allow us to perceive the correct answers to these existential questions. In the meantime, Davies has provided an engaging and very readable account of the range of answers we have come up with so far.Peter WoitPaul Davies's new book The Goldilocks Enigma wrestles with some of the deepest philosophical issues around, but concentrates on one in particular: 'why is the world the way it is?'He approaches this question through a discussion of a hot topic in theoretical physics that most scientists refer to as the 'Anthropic Principle', but which Davies chooses to label the 'Goldilocks Enigma'. This refers to the fact that the physical laws that govern the universe are 'just right' for the development of life. Relatively small changes in certain parameters would make it uninhabitable by the likes of us and we wouldn't be here. What should one make of this? Religion has a quick explanation, that God set things up so that we can exist. 'Intelligent Design' is the currently popular name for explanations of physics or biology that invoke a higher intelligence that chose to make the world the way it is. This explanation suffers from the lack of any way to ever test it.
Davies spends much of the first half of the book providing an introduction to the modern scientific view of physical laws and cosmology, working up to the latest and trendiest of these. For more than 20 years now, theoretical physics has been dominated by a very speculative idea known as 'string theory'. Very roughly, this involves replacing elementary particles with objects more like loops, and it crucially requires six extra dimensions beyond the three space and one time dimension we're familiar with.
One must do something like wrap up the six dimensions to make them unobservably small, but then the properties of particles and thus our physical laws depend on how this is done. Initially there was much optimism that there would be only a small number of consistent choices for how to handle the six dimensions, and one of these choices would agree with what we observe. Recent results in string theory appear to show that this isn't the case; instead an unimaginably large number of possibilities exist. Indications are that if one can get our observed universe this way, one can also get just about any variation of it, and legitimate scientific predictions are not possible.
Instead of abandoning string theory as a hopeless cause since it can't predict anything, some string theorists have chosen to promote the idea that our universe is just part of a 'multiverse' of all the nearly infinite possibilities allowed by string theory. One of the few things one can then predict is that we must be in a part of the multiverse that is 'just right' to allow our existence. Debate rages amongst physicists over whether or not this idea is really testable and thus scientific.
Davies provides a careful description of this currently popular multiverse scenario and its explanation for why things are the way they are, including some mind-boggling implications involving infinite numbers of copies of ourselves, and the possiblity that the universe is a simulation. He contrasts it with the common belief among many physicists that there is a simple unique mathematical structure underlying the physical laws that describe the universe. The problem he sees with this belief is that there's no reason to expect that such a mathematical structure should pick out exactly the parameters that are 'just right' for life. But then again, does it really make sense to have any expectations about this? It's not clear that a sufficient answer to the question 'Why is the universe just right for life?' isn't simply: because otherwise we wouldn't be asking the question.
The last chapter of the book moves away from points of view conventional among physicists to some much more speculative answers to the 'why is the world the way it is?' question that Davies finds appealing. These involve some version of the idea that life itself is in some way or other built into the laws of the universe, that they inherently lead to the evolution of life. He looks to information theory and quantum mechanics for hints of how this might come about. Like the multiverse, this kind of speculation tends to suffer from a lack of any known way to test it. The hallmark of the scientific method is the insistence that theories have the property that one can confront them with experiment in a way that allows one to decide whether they work or not. One's answer to the 'why is the world the way it is?' question should be a theory of this kind.
Davies concludes with the admission that, in the end, he finds all the different answers he has examined wanting. He notes that we're the evolutionary products of the pressures of a specific environment, and only recently beginning to be liberated from these. Our minds may still be far too crude and our knowledge of the universe too fragmentary to allow us to perceive the correct answers to these existential questions. In the meantime, Davies has provided an engaging and very readable account of the range of answers we have come up with so far.Last Updated: Monday, 9 October 2006, 17:05 GMT 18:05 UK E-mail this to a friend Printable versionThe Goldilocks Enigma Watch the interviewProfessor Paul Davies' The Goldilocks Enigma tackles fundamental questions about the nature of the universe and our attempts to understand it. Scientific breakthroughs, he argues, have brought us to the brink of comprehending the underlying structure of nature or "a final 'theory of everything'".In doing so, he suggests, an overarching explanation of existence may be about to replace all previous models - both theological and scientific. And central to finding this solution, he says, is answering the Goldilocks Enigma - why is it that "the universe seems 'just right' for life"?THE GOLDILOCKS ENIGMA is published by ALLEN LANE, an imprint of Penguin Books.Click here to post your comments and reviewsRead extracts from other books in the Newsnight book clubTHE GOLDILOCKS ENIGMA: WHY IS THE UNIVERSE JUST RIGHT FOR LIFE?By Paul DaviesExtract one:From CONFRONTING THE MYSTERY OF EXISTENCEFor thousands of years, human beings have contemplated the world about them and asked the great questions of existence: Why are we here? How did the universe begin? How will it end? How is the world put together? Why is it the way it is? For all of recorded human history, people have sought answers to such 'ultimate' questions in religion and philosophy, or declared them to be completely beyond human comprehension. Today, however, many of these big questions are part of science, and some scientists claim that they may be on the verge of providing answers.Two major developments have bolstered scientists' confidence that the answers lie within their grasp. The first is the enormous progress made in cosmology - the study of the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe. Observations made using satellites, the Hubble Space Telescope, and sophisticated ground-based instruments have combined to transform our view of the universe and the place of human beings within it. The second development is the growing understanding of the microscopic world within the atom - the subject known as high-energy particle physics. It is mostly carried out with giant particle accelerator machines (what were once called 'atom smashers') of the sort found at Fermilab near Chicago and the CERN Laboratory just outside Geneva. Combining these two subjects - the science of the very large and the science of the very small - provides tantalizing clues that deep and previously unsuspected linkages bind the micro-world to the macro-world. Cosmologists are fond of saying that the big bang, which gave birth to the universe billions of years ago, was the greatest ever particle physics experiment. These spectacular advances hint at a much grander synthesis: nothing less than a complete and unified description of nature, a final 'theory of everything' in which a flawless account of the entire physical world is encompassed within a single explanatory scheme....If almost any of the basic features of the universe, from the properties of atoms to the distribution of the galaxies, were different, life would very probably be impossible. Now, it happens that to meet these various requirements, certain stringent conditions must be satisfied in the underlying laws of physics that regulate the universe, so stringent in fact that a biofriendly universe looks like a fix - or 'a put-up job', to use the pithy description of the late British cosmologist Fred Hoyle. It appeared to Hoyle as if a super-intellect had been 'monkeying' with the laws of physics. He was right in his impression. On the face of it, the universe does look as if it has been designed by an intelligent creator expressly for the purpose of spawning sentient beings. Like the porridge in the tale of Goldilocks and the three bears, the universe seems to be 'just right' for life, in many intriguing ways. No scientific explanation for the universe can be deemed complete unless it accounts for this appearance of judicious design. Until recently, 'the Goldilocks factor' was almost completely ignored by scientists. Now, that is changing fast. As I shall discuss in the following chapters, science is at last coming to grips with the enigma of why the universe is so uncannily fit for life. The explanation entails understanding how the universe began and evolved into its present form, and knowing what matter is made of and how it is shaped and structured by the different forces of nature. Above all, it requires us to probe the very nature of physical laws.Extract two:From A UNIVERSE FIT FOR LIFEI want to run through some other 'coincidences' of a similar nature. Hoyle's 'put-up job' turned out to be the first of many instances in which seemingly small changes in some basic parameters of physics would prove lethal. A good way to think about this is to imagine playing God and setting out to design a universe. Suppose you had already settled on the basic laws of physics but you still had some free parameters at your disposal. The values of these parameters could be set by twiddling the knobs of a Designer Machine. Turn one knob and the electron gets a bit heavier, turn another and the strong force becomes a bit weaker, and so on. You could do this and see what happened to the universe. When would it make a big difference, and when would it scarcely matter? Although physicists can't actually carry out the experiment (at least not yet!), they can perform simple calculations to see what - all else being equal - such changes would do to the prospects for life. The qualification 'all else being equal' is important here, because we have no idea whether the various parameters of interest are actually free and independent, or whether they will turn out to be linked by a more comprehensive theory, or possibly even determined completely by such a theory. Maybe you can't raise the mass of the electron and lower the strength of the strong nuclear force together because these two properties of nature are connected in some deep way that forbids it. From our present knowledge, however, that wouldn't seem to be the case.Extract three:From HOW COME EXISTENCE?So, how come existence? At the end of the day, all the approaches I have discussed are likely to prove unsatisfactory. In fact, in reviewing them they all seem to me to be either ridiculous or hopelessly inadequate: a unique universe which just happens to permit life by a fluke; a stupendous number of alternative parallel universes which exist for no reason; a pre-existing God who is somehow self-explanatory; or a self-creating, self-explaining, self-understanding universe-with observers, entailing backward causation and teleology. Perhaps we have reached a fundamental impasse dictated by the limitations of the human intellect. I began this book by saying that religion was the first great systematic attempt to explain all of existence and that science is the next great attempt. Both religion and science draw their methodology from ancient modes of thought honed by many millennia of evolutionary and cultural pressures. Our minds are the products of genes and memes. Now we are free of Darwinian evolution and able to create our own real and virtual worlds, and our information processing technology can take us to intellectual arenas that no human mind has ever before visited, those age-old questions of existence may evaporate away, exposed as nothing more than the befuddled musings of biological beings trapped in a mental straightjacket inherited from evolutionary happenstance. The whole paraphernalia of gods and laws, of space, time and matter, of purpose and design, rationality and absurdity, meaning and mystery, may yet be swept away and replaced by revelations as yet undreamt of.