Thursday, September 28, 2006
next week...
I read island's latest post, and I thought the opening paragraph (quoted from http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1873989,00.html ) really DID take two or three times to read. Island's post mentions that extraterrestrial communications are indeed testable, although such communications have not YET reached earth. Certainly the discovery of extraterrestrial life would greatly enhance the anthropic principle. Some physicists, such as John Wheeler (at least according to http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0923868/bio ) think that sentient life only exists on earth. We don't know that, but we can test it; SETI has been trying to disprove that for quite some time. I wonder how many physicists favor a human-centered anthropic principle, or an anthropic principle for the existence of any life form.
Next week... is Mensa's "Revolution in Cosmology", held in Colonie, NY. I was glad I booked it four months in advance; it became full rather quickly. A LOT of big names will be there: http://colloq06.us.mensa.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Program1
And those are just the speakers. I think a lot of Nobelists, pro-string physicists, pro-LQG physicists (and hopefully other undergrads like myself) will show up. I may even meet my future thesis advisor (I intend to enter grad school in the fall of 2008). I'm extremely excited about this, and I will blog from the conference so everyone is posted. ¶ 8:26 PM
Next week... is Mensa's "Revolution in Cosmology", held in Colonie, NY. I was glad I booked it four months in advance; it became full rather quickly. A LOT of big names will be there: http://colloq06.us.mensa.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Program1
And those are just the speakers. I think a lot of Nobelists, pro-string physicists, pro-LQG physicists (and hopefully other undergrads like myself) will show up. I may even meet my future thesis advisor (I intend to enter grad school in the fall of 2008). I'm extremely excited about this, and I will blog from the conference so everyone is posted. ¶ 8:26 PM
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I updated my blog post with the following:
Update:
Peter Woit made the following statement in the comments section of his "rewiew" of Davies' book, and it is important as it applies to this thread, so I'm bringing it in now:
The “principle of mediocrity”, or more generally, the use of a multiverse model that gives an a priori statistical distribution of values of observables, combined with the anthropic principle as a selection effect, can in certain cases give predictions.
As this applies to our obseverd universe.
The "cosmological principle" gives a "mediocre" multiverse-"like" priori statistical distribution of values of observables, so with the combined effect of the Goldilocks constraint on the forces... defines an Anthropic Cosmological Principle that makes many testable predictions about the observed universe.
Like, life will not be found on Mars or Venus, but it will be found in other systems that meet the goldilocks criterion.
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Update:
Peter Woit made the following statement in the comments section of his "rewiew" of Davies' book, and it is important as it applies to this thread, so I'm bringing it in now:
The “principle of mediocrity”, or more generally, the use of a multiverse model that gives an a priori statistical distribution of values of observables, combined with the anthropic principle as a selection effect, can in certain cases give predictions.
As this applies to our obseverd universe.
The "cosmological principle" gives a "mediocre" multiverse-"like" priori statistical distribution of values of observables, so with the combined effect of the Goldilocks constraint on the forces... defines an Anthropic Cosmological Principle that makes many testable predictions about the observed universe.
Like, life will not be found on Mars or Venus, but it will be found in other systems that meet the goldilocks criterion.
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