Well now, this is rather interesting…

“Many scientists never liked it anyway, and now Glenn Starkman from Oxford/Case Western and Roberto Trotta from Oxford show that too many details—and too many unknowns—mean that anthropic reasoning gives inconsistent values of the cosmological constant, some that are far from current estimates. In their recent paper, ‘Why Anthropic Reasoning Cannot Predict Lambda’ (Physical Review Letters), Starkman and Trotta find that different ways of defining the probability of observers in different universes leads to vastly different predictions of the cosmological constant.”

If you read the rest of the article at the link, you see that what’s actually at question here is the scientific attempt to explain the number of apparently extraordinary coincidences that exist in the fundamental structure of the Universe. Without these coincidences, the large and small scale ordering of the Universe would be highly unlikely if not impossible.

People looking to find evidence that creation has a plan or design have pointed to this observation as a particularly interesting if one is looking for evidence of a creator. The standard response to that search is the Anthropic principle (in both the strong and weak versions.) Basically it argues that we can question why Universe is the way it is because if it wasn’t we wouldn’t be here to ask the question…

The research quoted in the article points out that the argument is somewhat less useful than folks have imagined and that any use of it as a tool to make specific predictions is rather unreliable…

So maybe the coincidental fine tuning of the Universe is a pointer to something greater. I’m just saying… ‘ya know?

Read the rest here: Cosmologists expose flaws in anthropic reasoning

(Via Physics Org.)