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Published online 28 July 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.985
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Stars may not be so fine-tuned after all
A change in nature’s fundamental constants could still allow star formation.
Would stars light up the sky in other universes? It's often claimed that the fundamental constants of physics in our own Universe are exquisitely tuned to permit stars – and therefore life - to exist. But Fred Adams, an astrophysicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, now suggests otherwise.
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All things in nature - from atoms and molecules, to stars and galaxies, and so on - are CRITICALLY fine tuned as at triple point. The constancy of the proton-electron mass ratio attests to this fact at base. And it is simply the absolute pressure of the vacuum energy field that maintains this ‘specialty’ (1) in a given environment. Please see also (2). A crank concept? Perhaps, but first answer the seemingly simple yet potentially profound question for the entire realm of theoretical physics: DOES THE MOVING BODY CONTRACT TRANSVERSE TO MOTION? The (substantiated) answer will decide the future course of mainstream physics (3). Cheers! (1) www.sittampalam.net/MassEnergy.htm (2) www.sittampalam.net/StarFormation.htm (3) www.sittampalam.net/DOE.pdf
(#1) The problem is that neither you , Philip, nor Fred Adams, the author of this new, “anti-fine-tuning†result explain, or even mention, why and how it can happen that another "well-established", highly "mysterious" and therefore "exciting" truth of the official science machine becomes suddenly so much wrong and should apparently be replaced (if the described result is at least basically correct) by something quite opposite, the idea that there is no mysterious tuning at all, but rather a vast probability distribution for a structure-forming universe emergence. In his article Fred only hints at a difference between previous "global" approaches and his "concrete" analysis, but it clarifies nothing at all: if a universe cannot appear even "globally", then what is the sense to study any its particular structure evolution (that could have no chance to start)? Besides, all widely distributed "fine-tuning" ideas certainly included "impossibility" of star and actually any ordinary matter existence under very small changes of the known constants values, in sheer contradiction with this new study results. What's going on, people?! Poor tax-payers are duped again by so-called "scientists"? (but this time it's a too evident abuse!) We actually have a whole flourishing, multi-million industry of "fine-tuning paradoxes", "Goldilocks enigmas" and all the related, pseudo-religious mystifications in the official science establishment (remunerated, by the way, by the most generous and prestigious prizes and honours). And now it seems that at least a big part of it can simply be replaced by the opposite, equally "scientific" and "rigorously derived" result, without any clear explanation for the origin of the evident, “infinitely big" contradiction involved! Oh dear, the smell of bullshit around the official science establishment becomes ever stronger... (and if you want to get a scientific explanation for this growing "effect", you can have a look at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1599429934/ref=nosim/dissertationcomd ). Any progressive change can certainly be only welcome in science development, but how can one just silently replace a SO much advertised and venerated result by the opposite one without any clear explanation at all of the proposed change?! Why were the officially greatest sages of the official science establishment, provided with all possible and impossible luxurious conditions of work and life, able to impose their fine-tuning mystification for decades, if it's so plain wrong that it can be refuted just by another, quite ordinary "model" containing no particular "paradigm shift", no fundamental novelty beyond maybe a more detailed analysis?! Either sages have been totally incompetent all this time (thus together with the whole feeding establishment!), or this new research is totally wrong (or else it's but a bad dream altogether, those official science games!). (#2) Of course, the canonical fine-tuning mystification imposed without fair discussion in the usual style of unitary science establishment is very far from even elementary logical consistency (with that level of "professionalism", one should not ask for much more than this, really!). A mechanistic doctrine, provably devoid of any explicit, dynamic structure-creation (emergence) mechanism and based instead on a number of postulated supernatural "mysteries" (!) has been stating for decades, with the maximum possible authority (and related self-glorification), that any small deviation from the known constant values was incompatible with a viable universe existence. But it doesn't have the slightest idea about the genuine, physical origin and meaning of either those constants, or related matter properties (mass, charge, forces, etc.), or even the underlying basic entities themselves (space, time, particle, field)! And therefore all the "fine-tuning enigmas" can well be the artefacts of its severely limited "models", rather than a "great mystery of the universe" of a not less than "divine" scale (with the corresponding god-like remuneration for only having stated the mystery!). Maybe it's time now to return to at least elementary, common-sense logic and honesty in science, let alone the actually needed quasi-complete consistency and wholeness of the picture of reality we propagate under the label of "objective" and "advanced" knowledge of our technically omnipotent civilisation?! If one tries to move in that direction, then one may discover that the intrinsically realistic and complete kind of knowledge is not impossible and doesn't even contain the unitary "fine-tuning" (or "anthropic") group of problems, simply because any natural structure formation always involves a well-specified multitude of dynamic adjustment processes of respective structure parameters within wide enough rages of possible values (see e.g. http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0510240 , http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0601140 for more details). Both constants themselves (now realistically, dynamically understood!) and the resulting universe structure can and should vary (in a non-arbitrary, well-defined way!) in the process of any real universe structure emergence, where the "mysterious fine-tuning" of the mechanistic doctrine is replaced by natural, complex-dynamic self-organisation processes (actually equivalent to the causally extended self-organised criticality, with its "automatically" maintained, "just-fine" balance between any local creation and destruction tendencies). So it's time to pass to a qualitatively greater balance and wisdom in our scientific preferences and practices too, in this particular part of the so fine-tuned universe!