So I've been doing a lot of reading/research on my own, trying to soak up as much as I can about the current state of physics and philosophy. One of the major(and reccuring) topics of contention between the two disciplines is the so-called Fine Tuning Problem.

it seems that we cannot easily provide an explanation for the "values" of many naturally occuring ratios in nature...some of which seem to be either very very very large or small when compared to what our best theories predict.

so my question is pretty simple and obviously deeply flawed in some way since the people debating this are much smarter than me....but how can these ratios have any sort of meaning or magnitude that could even be perceived as large or small in the first place???

what am i missing here?

I'm not sure I get the question, but maybe we can talk about an example, like the lightness of the Higgs. When you imagine a theory that can calculate the mass of the Higgs, there are individual terms that are 10^17 or so times larger than its measured mass. So those terms provide the scale that allows people to ask "why is the Higgs so light?"

The only things I can think of for "big" and "small" for a fine-tuning argument are relative terms for comparing different things, like how at the scale of atoms the strong/weak nuclear forces are "big" relative to gravity (so that we can basically ignore gravity at that scale). But I'm not familiar with anything like that which is tied to a fine-tuning argument. Unless someone has made some argument about the ratio of the sizes of those forces? Maybe that if gravity were very strong over short distances that complex molecules couldn't form?

"Why gravity is so much weaker than the weak force" is another way of asking "why is the Higgs so light".

The difference (I think) is that your presentation assumes the existence of a theory to calculate the parameter, whereas mine allows for the mere empirical measurement of the ratio of a couple parameters.

Sure, but I don't think these are purely experiment based questions. If you ask "why is gravity so weak compared to the weak force", I can just answer "why would you expect them to be similar in the first place?".

And I don't think you can answer that without resorting to loop corrections to the Higgs mass and other theoretical constructions that would go into a calculation of the Higgs mass if we could do it (but which we actually can't)

Whatever the physical world is really like, dimension is a fundamental concept in geometry, which is fundamental to understanding the physical world.

Sure. I'm not saying anything in advance about a reason why one "should" be big or small or whatever.

But one can take the models of gravity (knowing the values of the appropriate constant) and the models of other forces (knowing the values of the appropriate constants) and try to create toy universes in which both models hold and try to discern something about how that universe would behave. If that universe would seem to implode on itself or something like that, it would create ranges of values that would need to be the case in order for the universe to exist (or at least one that resembles our current one in certain ways).

There may be no reason to "expect" that this is the case, simply the observation that the models we have of our universe seem to suggest that this would need to be "bigger" than that in order for the universe to exist. (This still doesn't deny universes existing in which this isn't the case. It's a statement about the models we have.)

But one can work through the thought processes above without knowledge of the Higgs boson. Fine-tuning arguments of some type (regardless of whether you accept them) predate the prediction of the Higgs boson. So the logic is not fundamentally about the Higgs boson even though the physics might be.

Fair enough. I was trying to leave anthropics out of it, but thats just personal preference.

AFAIK, there actually no reason for the Higgs mass to be so low. If it was somewhere around the Planck scale, we'd still have molecules, galaxies and even humans. We just wouldn't know about the weak force, that the vacuum spontaneously breaks electroweak symmetry.....maybe we wouldn't even get (perhaps incorrectly?) that gauge theory is the best way to write down the standard model.


Yeah, I had to look it up. But according to wiki the physics fine tuning arguments predate the Higgs mechanism by a few years. I think alot of the sensational "fine tuned ones for life!" ones don't make any sense, but people were (and are) making them.

Working through a not so sophisticated astro physics the Copernican revolution began as Copernicus placed the sun at the center of the solar system and the planets/earth revolved around in an elliptical manner. Easy, breezy, keep the sun fixed and do the math/geometry.

Further study revealed that the sun moves through space and in this aspect the "elliptical' picture became tenuous for what appears to happen is more of rotating ellipses as the planets follow the sun in its progression.

The picture becomes more intriguing when it is noticed that the movement of the planets/earth are not pure ellipses but that the figure may condense to a more circular form only to stretch out to a more elliptical form.

The point is that as one progresses with the mathematics, in this case geometry, of the situation the answers become imcommensurable. the mathematics fails the further one deals with the realities of spatial movement.

Previous to the Copernican view there was the Ptolemaic which effectively placed the "zero point" a the center of the earth. this view displayed ;picture of the movements of the planets in a helical motion but the none the less these astrophysics were able to predict the movements of the planets/etc.. with a certain accuracy.

Contrary to common belief there was a heliocentric view of the solar system during the Greek civilization which turned into the Ptolemaic. they too, were able to predict planetary movements/etc...

Back to the original presentation this does not deny the use of mathematics but to understand that our present mathematicians have come to a point in which there has to be a "jump' to the qualitative understanding of the cosmos which includes man.

This last is vague, I know, but in some of the formulas used to ascertain planetary/solar movement the constants have to be included in a particular variability. Variable constants would bring the events into focus.

I only state this as the idea of "fine tuning" in which the theory is adjusted to fit the findings is a direct result of the imcommersability of the cosmos . Speaking strictly from an insight to the matter it should be noted that if ever the formula, mathematically speaking, could define the cosmos as truth, the cosmos itself would crash into a degenaritive welter of forsaken trash. All machines break , in speaking to the mechanistic minded. LOL

"incommensurable"; "in" ;