Our Improbable Existence Is No Evidence for a Multiverse

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Our Improbable Existence Is No Evidence for a Multiverse

Experts in probability have spotted a logical flaw in theorists’ reasoning

We exist, and we are living creatures. It follows that the universe we
live in must be compatible with the existence of life. However, as
scientists have studied the fundamental principles that govern our
universe, they have discovered that the odds of a universe like ours
being compatible with life are astronomically low. We can model what the
universe would have looked like if its constants—the strength of
gravity, the mass of an electron, the cosmological constant—had been
slightly different. What has become clear is that, across a huge range
of these constants, they had to have pretty much exactly the values they
had in order for life to be possible. The physicist Lee Smolin has
calculated that the odds of life-compatible numbers coming up by chance
is 1 in 10^229.

Physicists refer to this discovery as the “fine-tuning” of physics for
life. What should we make of it? Some take this to be evidence of
nothing other than our good fortune. But many prominent
scientists—Martin Rees, Alan Guth, Max Tegmark—have taken it to be
evidence that we live in a multiverse: that our universe is just one of
a huge, perhaps infinite, ensemble of worlds. The hope is that this
allows us to give a “monkeys on typewriters” explanation of the
fine-tuning. If you have enough monkeys randomly jabbing away on
typewriters, it becomes not so improbable that one will happen to write
a bit of English. By analogy, if there are enough universes, with enough
variation in the numbers in their physics, then it becomes statistically
likely that one will happen to have the right numbers for life.

Read more here on scientific American:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-existence-is-no-evidence-for-a-multiverse/


Thank you,
Amine Moulay Ramdane.