Cosmologic philosophy: multiverse/inflation theory (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, December 31, 2015, 13:22 (3039 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: A very long review article on the current state of cosmologic research:
https://aeon.co/essays/will-we-ever-understand-the-beginning-of-the-universe?utm_source...-QUOTE:"'But cosmology's hot streak has stalled. Cosmologists have looked deep into time, almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself, but they don't know what came before it. They don't know whether the Big Bang was the beginning, or merely one of many beginnings. Something entirely unimaginable might have preceded it. Cosmologists don't know if the world we see around us is spatially infinite, or if there are other kinds of worlds beyond our horizon, or in other dimensions. And then the big mystery, the one that keeps the priests and the physicists up at night: no cosmologist has a clue why there is something rather than nothing.”-Thank you for this very stimulating article, and for your selection of insightful quotes. I've left the above, because it is such a brilliant summary of our total ignorance on all these matters. There is just one other paragraph I would select, which I found quite surprising in its apparent certainty:
 
QUOTE: "There are other theories of nature that treat fine-tuning as evidence in this way. Proponents of these theories will often trot out aspects of the natural world that seem too good to be true, and use them as evidence for an entity that can't be sensed directly. Something as marvellous as the human eye could not have simply emerged from nature, they will say. It must have been crafted and honed by a mind like my own. Except it wasn't. Eyes evolved, independently, on more than 40 branches of life's tree. The eye looks designed to you because you do not understand the deeper properties of the world you inhabit. This is what usually happens to evidential fine-tuning. Science dissolves it into the clean, purring operations of nature's fundamental laws. Fine-tuning usually signals weakness in a theory, not strength. When fine-tuning is used as evidence for a grand metaphysical apparatus capable of making anything and everything, it usually means that something has gone amiss."-My agnostic self bridled at this. I am surprised that someone so deeply conscious of the vast gaps in our knowledge should claim to know the deeper properties of the world we inhabit, and feels able to explain the astonishing complexities of evolution simply as the purring operations of nature's fundamental laws. Does anyone know the fundamental law that produced life, reproduction, the ability to evolve, see, hear, think? A strange departure from the admirable open-mindedness that permeates the rest of the article.