Anthropic Principle

Physicist and popular science writer Paul Davies asks his readers a fair amount of deep questions… But are his questions deep? Perhaps Davies’s questions only seem to be deep. In any case, many people are very good at asking deep questions about life, the Universe and everything. Some people also…

The following essay is a response to Paul Davies’s op-ed article ‘Taking Science on Faith’, which was published by the New York Times. The word “faith” (at least in this context) seems to have become almost (to use a word which Davies uses) meaningless. Indeed, it’s often used as a…

A Pathway to Understand the World Around Us — “It seems plausible that the landscape is unimaginably large and diverse. Whether we like it or not, this is the kind of behavior that gives credence to the Anthropic Principle.” — Leonard Susskind The anthropic principle is a philosophical idea that attempts to explain the apparent fine-tuning of the physical…

The anthropic principle has fascinating scientific uses, where the simple fact of our existence holds deep physical lessons. Don’t abuse it! — For thousands of years, humans have pondered the meaning of our existence. From philosophers who debated whether their minds could be trusted to provide accurate interpretations of our reality to physicists who’ve attempted to interpret the weirder aspects of quantum physics and relativity, we’ve learned that some aspects of our…

The Anthropic Argument against the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. — The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, began as a scientific discipline about 60 years ago; despite decades of searching, we still don’t have any hard scientific evidence for the existence of alien civilizations. There are many hypotheses SETI scientists have come up with to explain the “Great Silence”. Maybe…

Anthropic means ‘of or relating to human beings or the period of their existence.’ This relationship between man and the cosmos is said to be through intelligent design. …