What is YOUR take on Louis Crane's idea of "meduso-anthropic principle"?

Answer 1

Assuming that you would appreciate someone to answer your question with more than a cut and paste from a Crane paper, I'm going to add my two cents to the plagiarism above, hopefully to salvage an ever-so-slight modicum of respectability to the Y!Answers forum.

My take on the tongue-twisting theory in question is: it's super-cool but highly unlikely. There are so many assumptions involved and questionable physics going on to back up its possibility that it would be extremely unreasonable to grant it a high probability of being correct.

Crane references Lee Smolin's idea of evolving universes, which is another brain-bustingly neat thought, however Crane strikes me as taking his conjecture far more seriously than does Smolin. I got the impression that Smolin knew very well that what he was hypothesizing was just wild fun, and he didn't take it as gospel, while Crane struck me as holding a higher level of belief in the possibility of his meduso-anthropic principle, than is warranted by current evidence.

First of all, I'm not convinced that we know enough about black holes in the first place to be able to not only speak of what happens "behind" them, but to consider that industrial societies will be cranking them off the assembly line someday. Also, I have a difficult time trusting anyone who is too enthralled by current quantum physics, as nobody really knows what is going on down there, and it clashes with some philosophical principles that I don't want to drop unless I have to.

I do buy the idea that IF the conjectures were true, new universes could go through a process of evolution and "fine-tuning" the physical constants. I think that evolution and information processing are both fundamental facts of matter (and energy?) and will take place wherever and whenever they get a chance. Reproduction with variation means evolution, whether in universes or DNA.

In short, I like the theory, but I don't believe it yet. I think that something similar might be true, but not by the means which Crane suggests, and I love this question, I wish there were more good ones out there! Thanks for asking.

Answer 2

Well, weak- anthropic beats the hell out of strong- anthropic. One cannot, in good conscience, postulate God from the improbability of a good primordial soup kitchen, when beating the odds is the prerequisite for anything evolving sufficiently to be amazed.

Life, however, plays hell with probability, because it’s possible for an improbably complex thing to create as many improbably complex things as energy allows.

Introduce evolution, crank out a tool user, it gets worse. One dedicated farmer can create a vast and profoundly improbable flourishing of life.

Now if we move out into the universe and find a vast and improbable flourishing, we will have cause to suspect the existence of cosmic farmers. This especially because it appears we are evolving towards that state ourselves.

Dressing up this concept in pseudo science though, strikes me as a bit pretentious.

Which is my take on Louis Crane's idea of "meduso-anthropic principle"

Answer 3

Well Im not into quantum physics much these days, but in his book "Life and Light" Lee Smolin proposes that if the "quantum theory of gravity" has two special features the universe would fine tune itself! If we perturb a Kerr-Newmann "black hole" so that the new universe will really form on the other side, and that the constants of nature might fluctuate in such a process so that the new universe would have sightly different physics than our own.
Its well over my head at this stage; cause Im just an N.Y.U.K. graduate! NYUK NYUK NYUK
Anyone wants to read up on it can go to the link below.