Sam Harris

Check mate. That was fucking hysterical euk. and indeed, Kelvin IS “fucking cold.” I only went out with him once because of his iciness.

euk: Hey isocrat, could you expand on this? “he [Susskind] secularizes the anthropic principle.”

I probably should have worded that differently, he doesn’t secularize it so much as he adheres to the strong anthropic principle that Barrow and Tipler identified as “an ensemble of other different universes [being] necessary for the existence of our universe.”

So basically his interpretation of the anthropic principle props up his notion of a multi-verse, (but he prefers the term megaverse). In his words: “Even if X seems wildly unlikely, a rich enough [cosmic] Landscape with enough valleys may make up for it… the exploration of the Landscape has begun. As we will see, all signs point to an unimaginable diversity of valleys: perhaps more than 10 to the 500th power.”

He writes that some theoretical physicists react violently to the anthropic principle because it “threatens their paradigm.” But, he insists that just because the anthropic principle suggests that our universe appears to be “fine-tuned for life” doesn’t automatically lead to there being a grand cosmic divine hand of a god behind the cosmic curtain.

He also addresses what he calls a “more relevant objection” to it, in that it reduces scientist’s “predictive power[s].” He states that: “Requiring complete predictivity has an emotional basis that has nothing to do with hard facts of planetary science.” In other words, he thinks some physicists are too dogmatic in insisting that for science to be true to its methodology, it must be falsifiable.

And now, I better go work on what I’m supposed to be working on! Peace.

isocratic infidel - 04 May 2009 05:37 PM

As far as I can discern from my recent readings, the CBM observations back up the inflationary model of the universe, and give credence to there being a cosmological constant.

Well yes, but thats not what I’m looking for here. Inflation really does nothing in the way of offering falsification possibilities for string theory. I’ll try to eleborate on what I mean.

Basically since the components relevant to string theory are way way too small to be detected even in particle accelerators. (Except for the very slim chance of detecting gravitons perhaps.)
But the CMB could be a way around that, since the early universe was much hotter than could ever be replicated again it is possible that exotic physics and if string theory is correct specific physics relevant to strings taking place, could have been “recorded” in the CMB.

Since the universe has expanded for 13 billion years it is possible that the traces of such events could be found “magnified” in the cosmic microwave background.
Its sort of a shortcut to probing a realm that we will likely never be able to probe here and now.

One way to get around the problem of the non falsifiability of string theory is if the theory made a prediction regarding the CMB that is precise enough for us to say that if we do not find this in the CMB, string theory is wrong.

What I am asking for is if anyone that is a bit more up to date with the math than me knows if any such predictions actually exist.
I doubt that even Planck can scan the CMB accurately enough for it to yet be testable but I’m just after the existance of predictions, not actual experiments.