Cosmologic philosophy: fine tuning naturalness concept (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, September 24, 2015, 15:13 (3348 days ago) @ David Turell

Do the particles in the standard model follow a logical pattern or not? Currently no, and only an appeal to multiverse bails out the problem:-https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150922-nima-arkani-hamed-collider-physics/-"Arkani-Hamed's mission — simple to state, but so all-consuming that he barely sleeps — is to understand the universe. “I don't feel I have any time to lollygag, at all,” he said this summer in Princeton. This obsession takes him in several directions, but in recent years one question about the universe has come to preoccupy him, along with the field as a whole. Particle physicists seek to know whether the properties of the universe are inevitable, predictable, “natural,” as they say, locking together into a sensible pattern, or whether the universe is extremely unnatural, a peculiar permutation among countless other, more mundane possibilities, observed for no other reason than that its special conditions allow life to arise. A natural universe is, in principle, a knowable one. But if the universe is unnatural and fine-tuned for life, the lucky outcome of a cosmic roulette wheel, then it stands to reason that a vast and diverse “multiverse” of universes must exist beyond our reach — the lifeless products of less serendipitous spins. This multiverse renders our universe impossible to fully understand on its own terms.-"As things stand, the known elementary particles, codified in a 40-year-old set of equations called the “Standard Model,” lack a sensible pattern and seem astonishingly fine-tuned for life. Arkani-Hamed and other particle physicists, guided by their belief in naturalness, have spent decades devising clever ways to fit the Standard Model into a larger, natural pattern. But time and again, ever-more-powerful particle colliders have failed to turn up proof of their proposals in the form of new particles and phenomena, increasingly pointing toward the bleak and radical prospect that naturalness is dead."-Comment: Despite Stenger's book, fine tuning is alive and well.