String theory sophistry (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, January 22, 2014, 14:51 (3958 days ago)

Andrei Linde promotes string theory as the only way out of a dilemma, how to explain a fine-tuned univrse that supports life: -"In the context of the inflationary theory, this means that our world may consist of incredibly large number of exponentially large "universes" with 10500 different types of matter inside them.
 
A pessimist would argue that since we do not see other parts of the universe, we cannot prove that this picture is correct. An optimist, on the other hand, may counter that we can never disprove this picture either, because its main assumption is that other "universes" are far away from us. And since we know that the best of the theories developed so far allow about 10500 different universes, anybody who argues that the universe must have same properties everywhere would have to prove that only one of these 10500 universes is possible.
 
And then there is something else. There are many strange coincidences in our world. The mass of the electron is 2000 times smaller than the mass of the proton. Why? The only known reason is that if it would change few times, life as we know it would be impossible. The masses of the proton and neutron almost coincide. Why? If one of their masses would change just a little, life as we know it would be impossible. The energy of empty space in our part of the universe is not zero, but a tiny number, more than a hundred orders of magnitude below the naive theoretical expectations. Why? The only known explanation is that we would be unable to live in the world with a much larger energy of vacuum.
 
The relation between our properties and the properties of the world is called the anthropic principle. But if the universe were given to us in one copy, this relation would not help. We would need to speculate about the divine cause making the universe custom built for humans. Meanwhile, in the multiverse consisting of many different parts with different properties, the correlation between our properties and the properties of the part of the world where we can live makes perfect sense."-
http://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement-Infinity can cover many theoretical problems, allowing for anything