James Le Fanu: Why Us? (The limitations of science)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Thursday, July 23, 2009, 03:17 (5601 days ago) @ David Turell


> Matt: You need to read some lay books on the standard cosmologic theory. There are 20 major parameters that must be finely tuned for life and 100 minor parameters tuned the same way. This is why the Anthropic Principal is so revered by some folks and they start talking about mutlverses. All the cosmologists accept that this universe allows life. Fred Hoyle called it "A put up job". In the same breath I am not saying someone 'tuned' it. - Well, I'm reading "The Comprehensible Cosmos" after Adler's book. I will assume that it should take enough of cosmology into account that I'll get a good overview since it derives all of the physical equations in a really nice 200 page supplement. (That I can understand the derivations is itself amazing... something got built in me somewhere saying that physics was only comprehensible to an elite class...) - If not I could always borrow Hawking's book again. I grabbed it in high school but never really *read* it, to my detriment. All the same, physical theories are a model that *hopes* to create a 1:1 correspondence to reality... that said I have hard time accepting a model when some of the inferences... (here I go again) move beyond the realm of the testable. Which is what I mean when I say "safely" say. - We both agree that there's things we can know and things we can't--and I deign to bring exactly this kind of skepticism to anything I study.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"