Fictions are now often employed by science apologists, and the question is no longer that of science as truth, but of science as the pursuit of agenda by story telling. The TV scientistic apologetics series, Cosmos, has aroused the historians due to its false presentation of science history as Atheistic and religion as scientific heresy. There is even a debate regarding the proper ethics of using useful lies to promote scientific "truth", in this case regarding Cosmos, but also in the past regarding the usefulness of Haekel's fraudulent embryo drawings in modern texts; the designation of evolution as "truth" by Jerry Coyne despite its non-falsifiability and the inability of selection to account for it; the fraudulent title and thrust of Laurence Krauss' book declaring knowledge of a "universe from nothing"; the entire field of "evo-devo" as it applies to the evolution of psychological and cultural features; the "settled truth" of climate computer models, and so on. The field of anthropology actually removed the term "scientific" from the description of its endeavors, in a fit of intellectual honesty rarely seen in science today.
But is this multiverse fiction even possible? Aczel walks through a quick demonstration of how infinities and probabilities collide, providing clear, logical evidence that a multiverse cannot be probable. I think Aczel is my new favorite mathematician.
After the proof (read it, it is clear, sharp and concise), Aczel concludes:
"What does it all mean? It means that if you create universes that are countably infinite then, yes, you could say that things will happen (maybe something like you and me will materialize in other universes--maybe), similarly to how a monkey might reproduce Hamlet after a really, really long time. But you can't really say anything about parameters and fine tuning. If you think that you can somehow "create" finely-tuned parameters for your universe, ones that live on the continuum of numbers (such as pi!), then you can forget about it: With probability one (that is, except for on a set of measure zero), this will never happen! Put another way, there is a zero probability that you could ever recreate finely-tuned parameters that would replicate those of our universe. What does this imply about our own universe?"Of course, the implication for our own universe is clear: it is uniquely outside of any mathematically possible multiverse.
5 comments:
Thank you so much for liking my article!! That proof took a while, but it's something that has obsessed me for a long time--ever since I first saw the "scientific atheists" rely on an infinte multiverse to claim anything they like and avoid the very troubling (for them!) fine-tuning problem. All the best, Amir D. Aczel
Awesome working bookmarking and sharing (:
Dr. Aczel,
We are honored that you visited us here; thanks for dropping in.
I have ordered your book on the Large Hadron discovery of the Higgs boson. I am currently skeptical not only of the finding itself, but of the entire subparticle scheme, based on similar reasoning to the skepticism of infinite universes: misuse of probability theory. I am very interested to read about your analysis of that event, since it is a statistical event, not a particularly separable discrete, automatically replicable, and falsifiable one.
As I understand it, the data shows some energy spikes occasionally in a mass of trials mostly without those spikes, and the results are said to indicate the probable existence of the boson.
But if I break 10,000 dinner plates looking for shards of a certain size, I would finally find some of that size, probably, in the wreckage of thousands of shards that are not that size. That would not justify stating that there exists a discrete sub-plate element that is that specific size.
That's what I hope to get cleared up by your view into the situation.
Thanks again for your message.
Part I:
There IS a God
Dr. Antony Flew
pp 75-78
"I was particularly impressed with Gerry Schroeder's point-by-point refutation of what I call the “monkey theorem.” This idea, which has been presented in a number of forms and variations, defends the possibility of life arising by chance using the analogy of a multitude of monkeys banging away on computer keyboards and eventually ending up writing a Shakespearean sonnet.
Schroeder first referred to an experiment conducted by the British National Council of Arts. A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys. After one month of hammering away at it (as well as using it as a bathroom), the monkeys produced fifty typed pages—but not a single word. Schroeder noted that this was the case even though the shortest word in the English language is one letter (a or I). A is a word only if there is a space on either side of it. If we take it that the keyboard has thirty characters (the twenty-six letters and other symbols), then the likelihood of getting a one-letter word is 30 times 30 times 30, which is 27,000. The likelihood of getting a one-letter word is one chance out of 27,000.
Schroeder then applied the probabilities to the sonnet analogy. “What’s the chance of getting a Shakespearean sonnet?” he asked. He continued:
“All the sonnets are the same length. They’re by definition fourteen lines long. I picked the one I knew the opening line for, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” I counted the number of letters; there are 488 letters in that sonnet. What’s the likelihood of hammering away and getting 488 letters in the exact sequence as in “Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day?” What you end up with is 26 multiplied by itself 488 times—or 26 to the 488th power. Or, in other words, in base 10, 10 to the 690th.
“[Now] the number of particles in the universe—not grains of sand, I’m talking about protons, electrons, and neutrons—is 10 to the 80th. Ten to the80th is 1 with 80 zeroes after it. Ten to the 690th is 1 with 690 zeroes after it. There are not enough particles in the universe to write down the trials; you’d be off by a factor of 10 to the 600th.
Part II:
“If you took the entire universe and converted it to computer chips—forget the monkeys—each one weighing a millionth of a gram and had each computer chip able to spin out 488 trials at , say, a million times a second; if you turn the entire universe into these microcomputer chips and these chips were spinning a million times per second [producing] random letters, the number of trials you would get since the beginning of time would be 10 to the 90th trials. It would again be off by a factor of 10 to the 600th. You will never get a sonnet by chance. The universe would have to be 10 to the 600th times larger. Yet the world just thinks the monkeys can do it every time.”
After hearing Schroeder’s presentation, I told him that he had very satisfactorily and decisively established that the “monkey theorem” was a load of rubbish, and that it was particularly good to do it with just a sonnet; the theorem is sometimes proposed using the works of Shakespeare, or a single play, such as Hamlet. If the theorem won’t work for a single sonnet, then of course it’s simply absurd to suggest that the more elaborate feat of the origin of life could have been achieved by chance.
I’ve always been struck by the typical “scientific” abstraction away of the myriad logistical issues in order to present this “computer model.”. How many monkeys must we breed continually? How do we grow enough food for the monkeys? What do we do with all the monkey feces? (I suspect the earth would be covered in monkey “business” long before we got close to an answer.)
More importantly, who is responsible for determining when the monkeys can stop typing? Does anyone (besides me) think that it is extremely improbable (perhaps a practical probability of zero) that any of the monkeys will recognize when the task has been successfully completed?!?
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