Stenger 1 : God 0

Today I am continuing (and completing) my commentary on contents of Victor Stenger's challenging but excellent book The Fallacy of Fine Tuning.  You can find the first two posts here and here.  He referred to the list of 34 quantities that he plans to refute.  (You can see them at this link.)

You might be surprised that the universe's ability to support life may have been affected by the way that stars produce carbon in just the right quantities.  Carbon atoms are produced by combining the particles from the nuclei of three helium atoms.  This is done in the nuclear furnaces of the stars, but therein lies a problem.  Two helium-4 nuclei might collide and fuse to create a beryllium-8 nucleus quite often but it is very unlikely indeed that three heliums will collide at exactly the same moment to make carbon-12 in one step.  In fact the process goes in two steps, with the second step being the fusion of beryllium and helium ions to make carbon.

The problem is that beryllium-8 is VERY unstable, (lasting for only for a thousand million millionth of a second), so it is surprising that it lasts long enough to combine with another helium.  The fine tuners claim that the existence of a particular excited state of carbon makes the reaction very much easier because of a phenomenon known as a resonance, and physicists agree.  However, they say that the energy of this resonance has to be exactly the value that we find, or else it will not work.  There is no need to understand the details because Stenger explains that it is not true to claim that the numbers have to be so accurately defined.  Going through detailed mathematical explanations he shows that the energy of the excited carbon could have been anywhere in quite a wide range - including the value that is observed.

One of the interesting aspects of the whole saga is that carbon combines further with helium, and that in doing so it creates oxygen-16, which is also critical for life of the form that we know.  It is just as well that this reaction doesn't happen too easily or there would be no carbon left.  But this brings us to another point.

Who can say that in an alternate universe with different physical constants it might not be possible for life to be based on a different chemistry.   The claim that it can only be based on the chemistry that we have in our universe is sometimes known as carbon chauvinism!   Life might flourish with a different form of tuning. 

I should also say that Stenger took care not to rely on the concept of a multiverse in order to refute fine tuning arguments.  He managed it quite well enough by using evidence from the one universe that we know about.

I'm not going to cover any of the other interesting aspects of the book in any detail here, but he mentions the poor arguments using probability, and spends a lot of time on the first instants of the universe.  Fine tuners often take a sample sentence from Steven Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time out of context, rather than reading the full explanation about how it would lead inevitably to much of the claimed fine tuning of the universe's expansion rate.  

Stenger also mentions the good reasons for some of the other fine tuning claims, such as why we should not expect there to be different numbers of protons and electrons (to a very high accuracy). 

In conclusion I would say that he covered the subject very thoroughly, sometimes using more mathematics than I wanted to see, but that it is easy to get a lot out of the book without a full understanding of the maths.

As he points out, in order to refute claims of fine tuning arguments he does not actually have to give any reasons for his claims, but only to show that a wide range of parameters could lead to a universe that supports life.

I think he succeeds!

Stenger 1 : God 0!

Exposing finely tuned fallacies

Yesterday I started to describe the contents of Victor Stenger's challenging book The Fallacy of Fine Tuning and referred to the list of 34 quantities that he plans to refute.  (You can see them at this link.)

Stenger starts out with several excellent lines of reasoning.

First he points out that all the models produced by physicists are man-made and that they do not necessarily claim to contain any ultimate truths about the universe.  They are just the best efforts available at the moment to explain the observations that are made by experimentalists, and the best test of their value is to see whether they are able to predict things that have not been tested yet.  All the best theories can claim to do this, and the ones that are shown to be wrong are not forgotten but generally they are discarded when better models are developed which approximate to reality a bit better.

All today's physics models are based on principles that are used throughout the science.  He spends some time explaining that conservation of momentum, angular momentum (or spin) and electrical charge are three of the underlying assumptions in physics.  He spend several pages show in mathematics how the special relativity can be applied a lower speeds, deriving familiar classical physics from the more complex models of the last century.  He also describes how physics requires that the same answer is reached, whatever the point of view of the observer.

I did mention that his reasoning gets complicated didn't I?  Still - with a little persistence I succeeded in skipping over the mathematics and got back to the words without feeling too depressed at my own inadequacy and I think you could do the same if you are equally allergic to maths.

Stenger then goes on to explain that many of the 'fine tuned' quantities are not independent of each other.  Proponents of claims of 'fine tuning' seem to think that they can vary one quantity but leave all the others unchanged, even though they might be co-dependent.

Then he describes some of the quantities that are defined arbitrarily on the basis of the scales of units that we have chosen.  As such, if we preferred to make the units for the constants simpler, we could set some of them arbitrarily to a value of 1.  For example, physics will still work as well if you set the speed of light to be 1, the Gravitational Constant to be 1 and Planck's Constant to be 1. If you do this, the answers you get by solving the equations will not be in units that we recognise, but they will still be correct and meaningful.

He further points out that gravity is not a real force in the same sense that a centrifugal force is not real.  It is useful to use it to describe the way the universe works from one point of view, but it is an emergent property of the distortion of space time rather that a force of the same type as magnetism or electro-static forces.  Then he moves on to attack one of the favorite fallacies of many scientific writers, who claim that gravity is a very weak force compared with electrostatics.  He does it like this.

'Fine tuners' take the example of a hydrogen atom to prove their point.  They say that the gravitational attraction between a proton and an electron is negligible compared with the force arising from their electrical charge.  For some reason they suggest that all natural forces really ought to be of comparable magnitude if they were the result of a natural origin, but in fact they are different by 39 orders of magnitude.  (Heaven alone knows why they think this!)

Stenger argues that they have no justification for choosing a system containing a proton and an electron.  A proton is not even a fundamental particle, after all.  He suggests that these particles have not been chosen arbitrarily but just to prove a fallacy, and that if you used a quantity known as the Planck mass as your starting point the whole argument would fall apart.  He argues that the Planck mass is the only non-arbitrary unit of mass.  Whether that is a reasonable claim or not, it does at least undermine the assertion that gravity is a weak force.

Next time you fall over, try telling yourself how weak gravity is!

So you see, the whole topic of fine tuning is a battle of words and equations.  There will be one more post on the subject soon.

Fine tuning explained . . . or is it?

I have been saving a book for holiday reading, and looking forward to understanding all about "The Fallacy of Fine Tuning".  I have always admired Victor Stenger's explanations of scientific (mainly physical) concepts.  To me, he generally uses accessible words and methods that I can learn from.  And so, having thoroughly enjoyed reading God: The Failed Hypothesis a few months ago I approached this book with some enthusiasm.

The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning by Victor Stenger

What I found was not at all what I expected.

Of course the topic is going to be complicated.  The basis is the claim by many religious apologists that the universe is fine tuned for human life.  Great debaters such as William Lane Craig use this rhetorical device to convince believers that their beliefs are firmly based in science.

One of the web sites referenced in the book is Evidence for God by Rich Deem.  Stenger refers to Deem's claims quite often.  In particular, the page of Evidence for the Fine Tuning of the Universe contains some of the outrageously plausible sounding rationale for the argument for fine tuning.  Deem lists 34 physical quantities that he claims to be critically tuned to allow life to exist.  (Craig sometimes claims that there are 50, but since he fails to list them at all we can tell with greater certainty than usual that he is talking out of his a**e!) 

Victor Stenger's job in the book is to convince us that these claims are only rhetoric and that they have no foundation in science at all.  He uses a mixture of logical reasoning in words, and fairly complex mathematical physics

In a couple of posts over the next few days (probably tomorrow and Monday) you will have to draw your own conclusion about whether he succeeded.  What I will say just now is that this book is absolutely not for the faint hearted!  Even though I have a degree in physics I found some parts of it incredibly challenging.  That is probably because I never was a very good physicist, and my maths is not nearly good enough. The book definitely fails the 'two equation test'.

However, all is not lost.  All the equations are neatly surrounded by boxes which allow the non-mathematician to skip over the mathematical reasoning and move on to the explanations.

So don't let the appearance put you off.  Read on.

Anthropocentric fine tuning

Is the universe designed for mankind or is mankind evolved to be fine-tuned to make the best of a rather hostile universe?  This is one of the old questions of life and the universe.

The evidence suggests to me that life has evolved to make the best of the rather hostile universe that existed already and that no creator was necessary.  Indeed, the existence of such a creator would require further explanation in itself.  Considering the difficulties that life has faced, I think it has fine tuned itself remarkably well to cling precariously to the edges of a safe environment, 'knowing' that at any time it could be totally wiped out.  (At least, humans know this even though the rest of life is innocently oblivious to the fact.)

A recent (almost entirely unrelated) post William Lane Craig to visit has attracted a lot of comments that have strayed off the topic of the original post.  So I take one of the comments from that post and present it here so that the discussion can continue in a more appropriate context.

My friend Derby Sceptic, author of "The Sceptical Curmudgeon" blog,  presented a paragraph from Douglas Adams which I had never seen before.

'... imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' 

This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.'

Comments are welcome, but . . .

Don't expect to be taught the basics of evolution or about the origins of life.  You can read that in a lot of worthy books and there is no point in anyone wasting their time trying to distill fascinating topics into easily digestible 'soundbites' for you here.  I'm happy to build up a reading list here for those who need a gentle but exciting scientific education.

Lets start off with Victor Stenger, who covers the topic of fine-tuning rather well: