What to Read: The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent life

I’ve spent a lot of time critiquing articles on the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. I should really give the other side of the story. Below are some of the good ones, ranging from popular level books to technical articles. I’ve given my recommendations for popular cosmology books here.

Books – Popular-level

• Just Six Numbers, Martin Rees – Highly recommended, with a strong focus on cosmology and astrophysics, as you’d expect from the Astronomer Royal. Rees gives a clear exposition of modern cosmology, including inflation, and ends up giving a cogent defence of the multiverse.
• The Goldilocks Enigma, Paul Davies – Davies is an excellent writer and has long been an important contributor to this field. His discussion of the physics is very good, and includes a description of the Higgs mechanism. When he strays into metaphysics, he is thorough and thoughtful, even when he is defending conclusions that I don’t agree with.
• The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, Leonard Susskind – I’ve reviewed this book in detail in a previous blog posts. Highly recommended. I can also recommend his many lectures on YouTube.
• Constants of Nature, John Barrow – A discussion of the physics behind the constants of nature. An excellent presentation of modern physics, cosmology and their relationship to mathematics, which includes a chapter on the anthropic principle and a discussion of the multiverse.
• Cosmology: The Science of the Universe, Edward Harrison – My favourite cosmology introduction. The entire book is worth reading, not least the sections on life in the universe and the multiverse.
• At Home in the Universe, John Wheeler – A thoughtful and wonderfully written collection of essays, some of which touch on matters anthropic.

I haven’t read Brian Greene’s book on the multiverse but I’ve read his other books and they’re excellent. Stephen Hawking discusses fine-tuning in A Brief History of Time and the Grand Design. As usual, read anything by Sean Carroll, Frank Wilczek, and Alex Vilenkin.

Books – Advanced

• The Cosmological Anthropic Principle, Barrow and Tipler – still the standard in the field. Even if you can’t follow the equations in the middle chapters, it’s still worth a read as the discussion is quite clear. Gets a bit speculative in the final chapters, but its fairly obvious where to apply your grain of salt.
• Universe or Multiverse (Edited by Bernard Carr) – the new standard. A great collection of papers by most of the experts in the field. Special mention goes to the papers by Weinberg, Wilczek, Aguirre, and Hogan.

Scientific Review Articles

The field of fine-tuning grew out of the so-called “Large numbers hypothesis” of Paul Dirac, which is owes a lot to Weyl and is further discussed by Eddington, Gamow and others. These discussions evolve into fine-tuning when Dicke explains them using the anthropic principle. Dicke’s method is examined and expanded in these classic papers of the field:

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Feser on Krauss

Having had my appetite for the Middle Ages whetted by Edward Grant’s excellent book A History of Natural Philosophy: From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century, I recently read Edward Feser’s Aquinas (A Beginner’s Guide). And, on the back of that, his book The Last Superstition. If I ever work out what a formal cause is, I might post a review.

In the meantime, I’ve quite enjoyed some of his blog posts about the philosophical claims of Lawrence Krauss. This is something I’ve blogged about a few times. His most recent post on Krauss contains this marvellous passage.

Krauss asserts:

“[N]othing is a physical concept because it’s the absence of something, and something is a physical concept.”

The trouble with this, of course, is that “something” is not a physical concept. “Something” is what Scholastic philosophers call a transcendental, a notion that applies to every kind of being whatsoever, whether physical or non-physical — to tables and chairs, rocks and trees, animals and people, substances and accidents, numbers, universals, and other abstract objects, souls, angels, and God. Of course, Krauss doesn’t believe in some of these things, but that’s not to the point. Whether or not numbers, universals, souls, angels or God actually exist, none of them would be physical if they existed. But each would still be a “something” if it existed. So the concept of “something” is broader than the concept “physical,” and would remain so even if it turned out that the only things that actually exist are physical.

No atheist philosopher would disagree with me about that much, because it’s really just an obvious conceptual point. But since Krauss and his fans have an extremely tenuous grasp of philosophy — or, indeed, of the obvious — I suppose it is worth adding that even if it were a matter of controversy whether “something” is a physical concept, Krauss’s “argument” here would simply have begged the question against one side of that controversy, rather than refuted it. For obviously, Krauss’s critics would not agree that “something is a physical concept.” Hence, confidently to assert this as a premise intended to convince someone who doesn’t already agree with him is just to commit a textbook fallacy of circular reasoning.

The wood floor guy analogy is pretty awesome, so be sure to have a read.

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