"Derek Potter" wrote in message
...
abracad gets an answer from

Anthropic Principle: Many people are aware of the weak and strong anthropic
principle. The weak one says, basically, that is was jolly amazing of the
universe to be constructed in such a way that humans could evolve to a point
where they make a linving in, for example, universities, while the strong one
says that, on the contrary, the whole point of the universe was that humans
should not only work in universities but also write for huge sums books with
words like 'Cosmic' and 'Chaos' in the titles.

The universe is also balanced in such a way to allow rocks to exist, so perhaps
we should call it a Lithic Principle.

If Scrabble is necessary, then so are players, and a universe to play in. Woozy
calls this the "Really Strong" or "Scrabble" Anthropic Principle. Humans (or at
least intelligent beings) are necessary, providing an order to biological
evolution which has been lacking since the failure of the Chain of Being. This
also suggests that if aliens exist, they may well play Scrabble.

Philosopher, physicist and mathematician see a black sheep.

'All sheeps are black' - immediately says philosopher.

'There are sheeps and some of them are black' - says physicist.

'There is at least one sheep, and at least half of it is black' - says
mathematician.

me...

The so-called anthropic principle points out how finely tuned the
universe is to support life. However, is there any reason to believe
this is the only universe that exists or ever existed? Or is it likely
or possible that there could be an infinite number of other (less
anthropic) universes that co-exist woth this one or have existed
throughout eternity?

The anthropic principle goes a little further than pointing out that
the universe is habitable, it also points out that were it not
habitable we would not be here to inhabit it. However, Barrow and
Tipler explicitly state that it is a principle that has been noted in
widely different cultures and contexts, so its boundaries are, to say
the least, a little fuzzy.

Science contributes information as to exactly how finely-tuned the
universe is. Under present-day *known* physics it's pretty
finely-tuned.

Under the wish-fulfillment science of n hundred years hence, it will
all be proved to be inevitable: by a miracle of logic alone it will
turn out that the universe could be no other way. Needless to say this
is a pure pipe-dream - the universe appears to have a whole bunch of
"constants" hand-picked to let us exist.

Cosmology is still in the melting pot so it's premature to say how
much flexibility the universe has/had in choosing its constants. At
present the basic physical laws are still being chucked around. If a
firm favourite Theory of Everything ever emerges, it will still
(probably) have a number of arbitrary constants - so there will still
be some fine-tuning.

However, many speculative cosmologies allow the universe as we know it
to be just a small region in a vastly bigger hyper-universe.

Terminology gets confusing here. In the mid-20th century it was common
to refer to our galaxy as "the universe"; as knowledge increased the
term was used for the *visible* universe, as if anything over the
horizon was of no interest to us - a sort of magical metaphysical
make-believe land that we could know nothing about. These days we tend
to mean the local region, a lot of which may be out of reach but which
is a continuous region with much the same physics throughout. We
therefore need a new word for *all* of physical reality, allowing for
the possibility of huge numbers of regions like our universe.

One picture is of countless "universes" bubbling out of a primordial
space-time foam. Another is of a tree structure with "universes"
budding off. No doubt the entire thing will eventually get to be
called "the universe" and we will call our local region "the local
region", d'oh!

(The process may continue for ever, with more and more layers of
hyper-universe to consider, but, maybe not. Maybe a final structure
will emerge.)

Thus the answer to your question is, as far as we know, physics allows
our universe to be but one of many, each with different physical
constants. There may not even be any limit to the number of universes.
This would make our universe inevitable *somewhere*, indeed there
would be an infinite number of indentical regions, plus all
variations. making for the intriguing possibility that there are an
infinite number of "Abracads" typing identical posts to Usenet.
Perhaps in some of the similar universes, Windows won't crash and
Jenifer Aniston will be crazy about me. Unfortunately, in an infinite
number of other universes, my eyeballs have just exploded in a mass of
maggots which are now dribbling down my monitor...

However, it may also be that the number of universes is not infinite
but just very big - so the most unlikely scenarios don't happen. That
still leaves the maggots...