Roger Penrose - Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life and Mind?

Roger the apparent fine-tuning of the universe is one of the hottest and indeed most controversial topics in our intellectual life today among physicists are argue about it among each other philosophers theologians and then philosophers theologians and physicists all together I want to get your sense first of all about the legitimacy of the question in terms of is the universe fine-tuned particularly the initial condition well the universe is certainly fine-tuned in the sense that the initial state of the universe was extraordinarily special now usually when people talk about this fine-tuning they're talking about something quite different they refer to the constants of nature which could conceivably have quite different values one of the most obvious ones is the relationship between the gravitational electromagnetic electric force they take the approach force between a proton and electron and hydrogen atom and there's another with about 40 zeroes but I'm not altogether convinced by these I mean it could well be that there is special fine-tuning in these numbers which is necessary for life it's certainly the case that if these numbers had different values and sometimes not very different values then life as we know it couldn't have happened but that doesn't mean that some kind of life or some kind of consciousness which is really what you need because of conscious being in these anthropic arguments you say well how could consciousness of arisen that's the key point and since we have such little understanding of what consciousness is and what's the necessary prerequisite for consciousness okay the argument is a genuine genuine one it's a genuine question but it's it's so far from being able to be answered that I really see it's almost unusable in most circumstances there are few cases where I think it's usefully usable but I the trouble is we so know we know so little about the circumstances which are necessary for life for other kinds of life yeah I mean other kinds of life yes our own kind we know that's what we know and we're biased to thinking about it so the the fine-tuning is fine-tuning for our life but that doesn't mean that other kinds of tunes can play other kinds of lives and in any case confident conscious or intelligent life is probably extremely rare I mean it's not all that well suited to it you see and in any case it could be that it could have come about in completely different ways now there's fine tuning in the origin of the universe which has to do with the second law of thermodynamics it has to have been extraordinarily precise and in fact it has to have been at least as precise as one part in 10 to the power 10 to the power 123 now that's very no it's a ridiculous number yes that's right and it's it's nothing like if people worried about the constants of nature so you want to fix those constants okay they're just a few numbers I have 20 numbers maybe and those have got to be fixed to I don't know just a certain amount of precision and that's nothing that comparison with this number the precision that we see in in the initial state of the universe completely dwarfed any of these other considerations now what does that really mean though that it that that precision it to be in the initial condition based on the the second law well what it means is that the anthropic my argument is useless for explaining it I mean in this context it may mean all sorts of other things yes but in this context it's telling us that the anthropic argument is absolutely useless for telling us why that number is so precise why the universe was so precise I mean if it was that number is is so the precision is so incredibly enormous because you have to do it for the whole universe if you just had to do it for our solar system or for our galaxy the number would be ridiculously smaller and that's all we need we don't need video new verses it keeps on going and keeps on going keeps on going but it's there we're giving it we don't need it for us so the anthropic argument is is no gets nowhere absolutely nowhere close to explaining that it has to be a completely different kind of explanation now maybe the anthropic argument has something Sisson useful to say about the constants of nature but it's so hard really to use it just because we don't have much understanding of what give what life is or what consciousness is but going back to the initial condition and the incredible specificity that the universe had to have I mean that's our universe yeah I mean that's the one we if we if we're going to explain existence which is we're here in this existence that's the one we got rights right absolutely so we got explain it absolutely how do we do it I completely agree but it's not the anthropic argument then what is it well it's you can make a hypothesis of a certain kind which is something I have put forward referred to as the viol curvature hypothesis which is saying that the the space-time curvature in the initial stages of the universe has to have been over a particular kind but that's just a hypothesis the usual view is that some form of quantum gravity or whatever it is has to explain why that comes out and that level of precision is is is so impossible to conceive of as from a some random point of view I mean that's not something that you can achieve in a random fashion under any I mean in infinity you can do anything but obviously but but that's a it's no I mean that's right I mean you can't say well there are lots of universes and out of that which which we happen to be in that number was that think what the note doesn't explain it we don't get anywhere close to that note what is the implication then in terms of the generation of such incredible precision can the argument of multiple universes achieve that well I don't think any of these are gonna it's such an improbable we're talking about the how special the Big Bang was yes now you could imagine other big bangs which weren't so special but I mean you can you you can have other big bangs not so special but but that's not what we got you see we're here in this one we're here in this one we could have been here equally well in zillions of the other ones you see which weren't so special you can have a universe which is special in our neighborhood our galaxy could be just as it is but the distant universe would be different they're not special out there and and that's much more likely if you're just talking about probabilities all these other alternatives are far more likely than the one we see is just all I'm saying is that the anthropic argument which is saying we're here and that's why the universe is special as we see it doesn't go anywhere to explaining the specialness of the Big Bang okay it might have something to say about these few constants of nature which we have trouble and explaining why they fit together in certain ways but that's chicken feed by comparison with this special nature of the Big Bang and the anthropic argument gets you nowhere it's just it gets you nowhere because we don't need the universe to be that special for us it's not used to us at all why the distant universe is incredibly special and why it came from a Big Bang which is just part of the Big Bang which just as special as the part we came from and you can't say another argument you can't say well okay there's you could have got lots more people by having a bigger universe that doesn't work either because you there's a lots of cheaper ways of making lots of lots more people you make lots of universes it's far cheaper in the sense of improbabilities versus say it's far more probable to make lots of universes with a few people in each one than to make one universe full of people and that's just a simple way of saying in a sense this is an even deeper mystery than the entropic people normally yes it is yes no it needs a scientific explanation it needs a good physical theory to say why the Big Bang had nature that it did and we have no theory which really explains that I mean people usually say it's quantum gravity no quantum gravity Theory I've ever seen incorporates the asymmetry in time which is necessary to explain why the Big Bang had this special nature and not the singular States which come from black holes collapses and so on there has to be something very symmetrical because the second law of thermodynamics is asymmetrical and any quantum gravity theory which is going to explain why the Big Bang has this special structure has got to have that in it and no theory I've ever seen has that character

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 62,320

Keywords: Roger Penrose, Closer to Truth, fine-tuning, universe, cosmos

Id: yDqny7UzyR4

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 20 2019