Fine-Tuning for Life: UCSC Summer School on Philosophy of Cosmology

I’ve given my talk on the Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life at the UCSC Summer School on Philosophy of Cosmology. The talk is already up on YouTube – see below. The quality isn’t great, but put some headphones on, play with the bass and treble and enjoy.

I’ve given versions of that talk plenty of times, but never with so many of the people whose work I’m discussing in the audience. The questions are always the best part, and this talk was no different.

The other talks I’ve seen have been very good. Fred Adams was engaging and wide-ranging, and Sean Carroll was his usual combination of clarity and insight. Check them out here.

Edit [11/7/2013]: The link to my slides is broken, so while I try to get that fixed, I’ve uploaded the slides on SpeakerDeck here. (WordPress doesn’t seem to allow me to embed the slides in this post.)

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Philosophy of Cosmology Summer School

I’m currently at the Philosophy of Cosmology Summer School at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I’ve been invited to speak for an afternoon on the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. I’ve given such talks a number of times, but never with so many of the people whose work I am discussing actually sitting in the room. The line-up is very impressive:

Anthony Aguirre (UCSC), Craig Callender (UCSD), Sean Carroll (Cal Tech), Shelly Goldstein (Rutgers), Anna Ijjas (Harvard/Rutgers), Tim Maudlin (NYU), Priya Natarajan (Yale), Ward Struyve (Rutgers), Tiziana Vistarini, (Rutgers), David Wallace (Oxford), Alex Pruss, Chris Smeenk, Fred Adams, Leonard Susskind, Matt Johnson …

At the moment, Sean Carroll is holding forth on cosmology, time, initial conditions and such. The talks are being placed on YouTube fairly quickly, and I encourage you to have a look through the list of talks.

I’ll try to tweet some highlights – so follow me or watch the hashtag #PhilosophyCosmology.

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