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Grand Design: If you changed just one value of one physical law...

Occam's Razor

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Grand Design: If you changed just one value of one physical law...

... the universe would cease to exist as we know it.

Bupkis!

Assuming the big bang theory, everything in the universe was, for one very brief moment, one. A whole.

Each elemental physical law is a subset of that whole. If you change it's value, you change the value of all other elemental laws as a result.

If you have a pie and slice it into equal portions, yet you decide you'd like a few extra bites, you must take those bites from the other portions of the pie.

Example: As you approach the speed of light, you gain mass and time slows, yet your perceptions don't really change.

So regardless of what the values of these elemental laws are, the universe would likely look and work just the same as the one we know.
 
I believe humans think they know far more then they really do. We are limited in our intellectual abilities and strive to do the best that we can but sadly we are very lacking. Im not trying to derail this into a science vs religious thread but I would like to point out a clear bias that the scientific community largely suffers. This isnt about god or the bible per say but that many that believe wholeheartedly in science suffer the same shortfalls they claim that the religious establishments suffer from and think they are somehow more enlightened. In my opinion its pot vs kettle. We like to believe that what we think we know is right but in reality we are probably far more wrong then right if we are right about anything at all. I imagine if a highly advanced alien being visited us we would look like total idiots to them.
 
I believe humans think they know far more then they really do. We are limited in our intellectual abilities and strive to do the best that we can but sadly we are very lacking. Im not trying to derail this into a science vs religious thread but I would like to point out a clear bias that the scientific community largely suffers. This isnt about god or the bible per say but that many that believe wholeheartedly in science suffer the same shortfalls they claim that the religious establishments suffer from and think they are somehow more enlightened. In my opinion its pot vs kettle. We like to believe that what we think we know is right but in reality we are probably far more wrong then right if we are right about anything at all. I imagine if a highly advanced alien being visited us we would look like total idiots to them.

Wrong, Scientists don't put absolute faith in a book written by stone-age sheep herders, the best of which might have had a grade four equivalent education. Add to that the fact that the first few centuries they were handed down by oral tradition... one fallible sinner to the next before being written down.

Science is the constant testing, observation, correction, question, test, observe, etc. There is no comparison between centuries of proofs on which some very complex technology is based upon and throwing up your hands and saying, "God did it". I hear this argument everywhere, so it must be coming from some central source... you're being duped. If you don't understand what we DO know, or how we came to know it, declaring that we don't know as much as we think is downright arrogance of opinion in the face of historical fact.

So... back to the OP... the values of the physical laws (which God devised, happy?), will more often than not, produce a habitable universe... or one similar to the one we see now.
 
Grand Design: If you changed just one value of one physical law...

... the universe would cease to exist as we know it.

Bupkis!

There are certain dimensionless constants in physics whose values if changed even slightly would drastically alter the nature of the universe. Like particles of matter wouldn't even be able to form, stuff like that.

There are several proposed explanations as to why the constants have the values they do (that don't have anything to do with Intelligent Design), but they're all quite speculative. The bottom line is we simply don't know why.

Fine-tuned Universe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
There are certain dimensionless constants in physics whose values if changed even slightly would drastically alter the nature of the universe. Like particles of matter wouldn't even be able to form, stuff like that.

There are several proposed explanations as to why the constants have the values they do (that don't have anything to do with Intelligent Design), but they're all quite speculative. The bottom line is we simply don't know why.

Fine-tuned Universe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is exactly the HYPOTHESIS I'm railing against. I'm not one to just stop at "we simply don't know". I'm proposing a new hypothesis, or at least promoting a different one.

No matter what the values are, they must always be in balance with all other forces since they are part of the same whole. The values for these physical laws describes how they interact with other forces and elements of the universe. If you add to one value, any forces, dimensions or elements associated with it will have their values lowered and vice versa. Our perspective as observers would not be able to detect any difference, just as one does not notice changes in the speed of time.

What I'm saying is, if you change a value, the universe automatically "re-tunes" itself to accomodate the change. It has to, if you add to one piece of a whole pie, you must take from the other pieces of the whole pie.
 
Wrong, Scientists don't put absolute faith in a book written by stone-age sheep herders, the best of which might have had a grade four equivalent education. Add to that the fact that the first few centuries they were handed down by oral tradition... one fallible sinner to the next before being written down.

Science is the constant testing, observation, correction, question, test, observe, etc. There is no comparison between centuries of proofs on which some very complex technology is based upon and throwing up your hands and saying, "God did it". I hear this argument everywhere, so it must be coming from some central source... you're being duped. If you don't understand what we DO know, or how we came to know it, declaring that we don't know as much as we think is downright arrogance of opinion in the face of historical fact.

So... back to the OP... the values of the physical laws (which God devised, happy?), will more often than not, produce a habitable universe... or one similar to the one we see now.

I think perhaps you misunderstood where I was going with my post as I am not a religious person and do not believe in the bible. I apologize as I am not very good at trying to convey my thoughts. However I think your reply demonstrated my point. You seem to hold faith in scientific knowledge, knowledge I feel is probably mostly wrong while you seem to hold peoples faith in religion in a negative or obsolete manner.

Consider this, if you were to ask a caterpillar its opinion on the universe and its surrounding environment it could probably only provide a very elementary view. Its perceived world is so tiny in comparison to our own that it would probably have a much different opinion of things. We would probably think many of its (facts) beliefs as wrong because we would know better, we are able to see well beyond its limited self. Now the smartest person to be recorded was believed to have and IQ roughly in the mid to upper 200's. Now imagine a being that had intelligence a thousands of times higher then the smartest of humans. They would probably view us much like we do the caterpillar, limited and wrong. Perhaps even they would be wrong about a lot of things, perhaps true fact is impossible to grasp by anything out their from sheer lack of ability. Who could say?

My whole point is I do not hold faith in science any more then religious or spiritual views because we are to dumb to have it right. We just have to go with the best that we can come up with and hope we are closer to being right then we are wrong.
 
I think perhaps you misunderstood where I was going with my post as I am not a religious person and do not believe in the bible. I apologize as I am not very good at trying to convey my thoughts. However I think your reply demonstrated my point. You seem to hold faith in scientific knowledge, knowledge I feel is probably mostly wrong while you seem to hold peoples faith in religion in a negative or obsolete manner.

Consider this, if you were to ask a caterpillar its opinion on the universe and its surrounding environment it could probably only provide a very elementary view. Its perceived world is so tiny in comparison to our own that it would probably have a much different opinion of things. We would probably think many of its (facts) beliefs as wrong because we would know better, we are able to see well beyond its limited self. Now the smartest person to be recorded was believed to have and IQ roughly in the mid to upper 200's. Now imagine a being that had intelligence a thousands of times higher then the smartest of humans. They would probably view us much like we do the caterpillar, limited and wrong. Perhaps even they would be wrong about a lot of things, perhaps true fact is impossible to grasp by anything out their from sheer lack of ability. Who could say?

My whole point is I do not hold faith in science any more then religious or spiritual views because we are to dumb to have it right. We just have to go with the best that we can come up with and hope we are closer to being right then we are wrong.

I get what you're saying... and I'm sorry, but you are wrong, yet entitled to your opinion. Allow me to explain, first off...

Caterpillars, aside from having a nerve cluster for a brain, have no choice but to perceive the world as it arrives to it's senses. Humans can build devices to detect things far beyond our senses.

Now then, science is most often wrong... which is why science works. See, you can't really "prove" anything is something... but you can prove something isn't something. You can prove it false. When you rule out everything it isn't what you are left with is what is right. The process is observation, hypothesis, test, observe, refine the hypothesis, test, observe, etc. It's how we have come to know for certain the various physical laws we know.

For example, science knows the speed of light quite precisely. Religion, has said that asking such deep and probing questions is trespassing on God's turf, end of discussion. We know that time slows as velocity increases and gravity decreases, we've measured it. How do we know we aren't wrong, because it's been tested again, and again, and again, and so on. Most scientific disciplines are at least a few centuries old now, and still we are testing them to attempt to prove them wrong. When the bible, or any other religion is tested, it almost always fails... but does NOT refine it's hypothesis and continues in ignorant faith.

Science does not condone ignorance of any kind. It takes no faith to believe that light travels at 300,000 km/s... we know for a fact it does, not just here, but everywhere. It takes no faith to believe in the periodic table, or that an object in motion will remain in motion and an object at rest will remain at rest. No faith is required... these laws exist whether we, or the caterpillar is there to observe them or not.

Observation is not a matter of faith, it's a matter of fact. Religions thrive on non-observation, on the absence of a physical deity, on faith.

Tell me, what do you base your "belief" that most science is wrong? Remember, until it has gone from hypothesis to theory and from theory to law, it isn't considered right (correct).

I understand and appreciate your super intelligent being/caterpillar analogy... however, high IQs have diminishing returns. The gap between the intelligence of a caterpillar and a human of average intelligence is, say, a factor of a million. Using that scale, the gap between a genius and an average person is a factor of 2 that is, they are half again as intelligent. Yet both are capable of understanding the physics of light, momentum, the chemistry of atoms and molecules, etc.

The super intelligent being is going to know the same speed of light, it will know the same E=MC[SUP]2[/SUP], etc... but, it may know the answers to some questions we havent figured out yet, but it's very unlikely to overturn what we already know of the physical macro universe.
 
This is exactly the HYPOTHESIS I'm railing against. I'm not one to just stop at "we simply don't know". I'm proposing a new hypothesis, or at least promoting a different one.

Ok. But I see no reason to believe your hypothesis and plenty of reasons to believe physicists when they say that if X was slightly different, our theories predict Y would happen.

No matter what the values are, they must always be in balance with all other forces since they are part of the same whole. The values for these physical laws describes how they interact with other forces and elements of the universe. If you add to one value, any forces, dimensions or elements associated with it will have their values lowered and vice versa. Our perspective as observers would not be able to detect any difference, just as one does not notice changes in the speed of time.

Again, there is no reason to believe this.

What I'm saying is, if you change a value, the universe automatically "re-tunes" itself to accomodate the change. It has to, if you add to one piece of a whole pie, you must take from the other pieces of the whole pie.

Word salad. You're misinterpreting the 1st law of thermodynamics and twisting it to imply something that it does not imply.
 
This is how the four laws of thermodynamics work.


But if, say, you were to change one law...for instance, strike the zeroth out...everything else would unravel...unless there is some cosmic force accounting and adjusting for that changed.


And even if there was, everything would be dramatically changed.
 
How about this. We make a simple change. When water freezes, the density increases, instead of decreases. Aply that to this planet. We'd be unmade, dead by the end of the month.

But that one change only affects places with water, and temps below freezing.

Making a change to an entire laws affects the entire universe, because the known universe is governed by those laws.
 
How about this. We make a simple change. When water freezes, the density increases, instead of decreases. Aply that to this planet. We'd be unmade, dead by the end of the month.

But that one change only affects places with water, and temps below freezing.

Making a change to an entire laws affects the entire universe, because the known universe is governed by those laws.

Water becoming less dense is not a physical law of the universe, those are properties of molecules, it's the expression of more fundamental laws. It's crystal structure is dictated by it's molecular shape, which is dictated by electron configuration.. and that is where the change would need to made.

Now, it's generally accepted that everything in the universe is some form of expression of energy. Since energy cannot be created nor destroyed, if you change a value you either have to take away from another or add to something else. So if you change the values that govern the electrons that give rise to the molecules that give rise to properties that govern water... not just it's ice phase. However, those changes will affect all elements. In addition, other natural forces related to matter, like gravity may be changed. Again, you can't arbitrarily change one force/value/constant without affecting others... which will always balance out as part of a whole.
 
This is exactly the HYPOTHESIS I'm railing against. I'm not one to just stop at "we simply don't know". I'm proposing a new hypothesis, or at least promoting a different one.

No matter what the values are, they must always be in balance with all other forces since they are part of the same whole. The values for these physical laws describes how they interact with other forces and elements of the universe. If you add to one value, any forces, dimensions or elements associated with it will have their values lowered and vice versa. Our perspective as observers would not be able to detect any difference, just as one does not notice changes in the speed of time.

What I'm saying is, if you change a value, the universe automatically "re-tunes" itself to accomodate the change. It has to, if you add to one piece of a whole pie, you must take from the other pieces of the whole pie.

You can't change the values. While it's easy to assume that the laws of physics governed the creation of the universe, I think it's probably more correct to conceptualize it as the creation of the universe dictated the subsequent laws of physics that explain what happened (to one degree or another). The laws of physics reflect that the universe was created the way it was created because.... just because that's what the universe did and that established the laws of physics that are, essentially immutable. We can try to understand them, but we don't create them and we can't change them.
 
Water becoming less dense is not a physical law of the universe, those are properties of molecules, it's the expression of more fundamental laws. It's crystal structure is dictated by it's molecular shape, which is dictated by electron configuration.. and that is where the change would need to made.

Now, it's generally accepted that everything in the universe is some form of expression of energy. Since energy cannot be created nor destroyed, if you change a value you either have to take away from another or add to something else. So if you change the values that govern the electrons that give rise to the molecules that give rise to properties that govern water... not just it's ice phase. However, those changes will affect all elements. In addition, other natural forces related to matter, like gravity may be changed. Again, you can't arbitrarily change one force/value/constant without affecting others... which will always balance out as part of a whole.

It is fluid. Stick your finger in it (changing something) and the universe shifts and keeps right on doing what it was doing. Remove your finger and it's as though you never touched it.
 
You can't change the values. While it's easy to assume that the laws of physics governed the creation of the universe, I think it's probably more correct to conceptualize it as the creation of the universe dictated the subsequent laws of physics that explain what happened (to one degree or another). The laws of physics reflect that the universe was created the way it was created because.... just because that's what the universe did and that established the laws of physics that are, essentially immutable. We can try to understand them, but we don't create them and we can't change them.

Apparently the practice of thought experiment in not in your repertoire. Of course you can't actually change the values.

The point is, the fallacy that IF any of them were different, the universe couldn't support life.

So... at the big bang, when all the elementary forces and particles came into existence, just before the "condense out of the aether" and take final form, you could tweak one and change it... it would not be a change in isolation, all related elementals would be changed as well... keeping the balance of the whole.
 
Apparently the practice of thought experiment in not in your repertoire. Of course you can't actually change the values.

The point is, the fallacy that IF any of them were different, the universe couldn't support life.

So... at the big bang, when all the elementary forces and particles came into existence, just before the "condense out of the aether" and take final form, you could tweak one and change it... it would not be a change in isolation, all related elementals would be changed as well... keeping the balance of the whole.

I absolutely get "thought experiments". I think of them as "logical tests". In this case, you can't logically test the theory that the Universe couldn't support life if anything was different because you CAN'T change it. It's like a "thought experiment" about what would you think if you were never born.

It is entirely possible that if anything had happened differently that there would be no life as we know it. I see the universe as a kaleidoscope of possibilities and what we got was but one of those infinite possibilities because that's just the way it happened. Any other turn of the dial would have resulted in something different and that "something different" would likely have made the universe very different than the one we know.
 
If you changed one fundamental value and the universe as we know it didn't exist, then we wouldn't be here to talk about it, and some other intelligent race would be musing about how the universe was fine tuned for them.
 
Grand Design: If you changed just one value of one physical law...

... the universe would cease to exist as we know it.

Bupkis!

Assuming the big bang theory, everything in the universe was, for one very brief moment, one. A whole.

Each elemental physical law is a subset of that whole. If you change it's value, you change the value of all other elemental laws as a result.

If you have a pie and slice it into equal portions, yet you decide you'd like a few extra bites, you must take those bites from the other portions of the pie.

Example: As you approach the speed of light, you gain mass and time slows, yet your perceptions don't really change.

So regardless of what the values of these elemental laws are, the universe would likely look and work just the same as the one we know.

All true, which is the most inarguable proof there is, imo, of God.

The laws of physics and mathematics themselves do not allow for such a perfect system to exist without something extraordinary devising it from scratch and pushing over the first domino. Add to that the utter impossibiliy of life spawning from mere elements and for no otherwise good reason, and the continued amazing development of that life to the point that you and I are conversing about it in a medium existing basically in thin air.

It's infinity to the infinityth power.
 
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