Of course now, the obvious question is, given the CC can be anything from 0-500% of it's measured value, why do experts say it is fine tuned in the first place? What they mean is that when you try to calculate the CC based on quantum field theory, you get alot of numbers that are ~ 10^120 times the measured value of the cc that have to be delicately canceled out by other terms. So it is really requires alot of fine tuning from the terms we cannot calculate to cancel out in such a precise way with the ones we can.

People for a long time just thought that the cc was 0 and there was some deep reason for that. An overly simplified example would be something like the cc being equal to (1.8^100+2^50+....) but having the whole equation multiplied by 0 for some unknown reason. But since the cc is not zero, this is no longer possible.

Thank you so much for your dismissive tone when you didn't even comprehend my point. You are claiming that the universe appears to be fine tuned based on science which is theoretical and incomplete. You are choosing to insert a fine tuning mythology to explain that which is still theoretical and incomplete. Everyone else here is choosing to say, "There is insufficient knowledge at this point to make any conclusions."

So 2 years later do you now get why your notion of fine tuning is arbitrary?

Weinberg assumes the CC is not totally arbitrary. He is basically saying "If you take away explaination 3 then you are left with 1 and 2.....which is obvious.

Parts per notation is used to express porportional phenomena. If you broke the value of the CC into equal parts, how many equal parts would you have to break it down to such that adding or subtracting one part would not have a deleterious effect on the fruitfullness of the universe? The answer you get is not arbitrary as you suggest.

Wat? You don't have to break it down into any parts. You can add the entire cc to the cc and not have a "deleterious effect on the fruitfullness of the universe". In fact you can add it around 4 times and have close to no change on anything observable in the universe.


Again, read what I already wrote.

You are simply doing what i describe in the last paragraph and claiming it is fine tuning. You cannot even hope to say something non-stupid about the cc if you do not understand these basic properties of real numbers.

wow this is still going on?

Yeah, I'm tempted to PM Sklansky and ask him to come explain it as he claims he is world class at teaching simple math.

I went ahead and PM'd Sklansky(sent a copy to you too Max). I'm curious as to what he has to say about your claim that part per notation can be used to make any number look fine tuned.

Yeah, I think I'll just make an SMP thread. If David wasn't following this thread (which I think he isn't) the PM might not have had enough information.

Rofl, how is it even possible to be so suspicious of simple arithmetic?!?!

Do you regularly give pop quizzes over obscure family trivia to your wife and children, just to make sure they've not been replaced by body doubles?

As a matter of fact I do.....I also keep a vigilant watch for any open pods.

Design is strong evidence that there's no creator. Or if there is, he's not very bright.

A great example is the vagus nerve in giraffes. There is the the vagus nerve, in mammals, most animals have one, you have one, fish, frogs, birds, snakes exc all own this nerve. Basically its anerve that goes from your brain down around your aoritc loop (this is a loop of a main artery above your heart) and to your throat. The point of this nerve is to essentially connect your throat to your brain.

In fish, that makes it a short journey from brain to throat, in fish and sharks it’s often a straight line. As amphibians, reptiles and then mammals evolved, the nerve kept running through that loop, but the path from the brain to the throat now has to run down to the heart first (aortic loop, remember?).

So in humans, the nerve is more than twice as long as it would need to be if efficiently engineered, or if it hadn’t been moved by evolution.

Now here's the main thing, in giraffes, the vagus nerve is more than 15 feet long, typically, running from brain, down the neck, through the aortic loop (where it connects to nothing, of course), back up the neck, to the larynx. (I’m making a quick sketch here — it’s much more complex than that.)

The question for anti-evolutionists is why that nerve, connecting the brain to the throat, must run down to the heart. And the only answer is, it doesn’t, except that evolution has not found a way to stop it from looping through that artery in development. So the embryo develops the way ancestral embryoes did, right through that loop; and as some creatures grow to stand upright, on fours or twos, the looping becomes more loopy; it’s a vestige of our fishy ancestry.

Theres a million and one more reasons to support evolution, another would be that girraffs have 7 neck bones, which is the exact number all mammals have (as well as humans), the massive size of these bones causes all kinds of problems for the animal, including drinking and mating, of course more bones would be much much more efficent, but thats not how they evolved.