(March 10, 2016 at 1:57 am)Alex K Wrote:(March 8, 2016 at 9:09 pm)Jehanne Wrote: Has been pointed out, physicists do not know that the constants of nature are free to vary. Just because one can construct a mathematical model does not mean that Nature confirms itself to such a model; alternative models of gravitation exist to General Relativity that do not predict the anomalous precession of Mercury's orbit. And, of course, Newtonian mechanics is mathematically complete yet fundamental flawed. Ultimately, GR will likely give way to something more deeper, as a "singularity" (infinite curvature) just does not make sense, physically.
And, even if the constants can vary, we still do not know the sample space that we are dealing with, and so, cannot possibly compute any objective probabilities. As Mark Twain said, "There are lies, damned lies, and then there's statistics." Christian theism was wrong about the orbits of the planets ("perfect circles") and it took Kepler nearly a decade and hundreds of pages of manuscripts to overcome that bias.
What you say is all true. Still, the alternative to having the possibility that the constants might in principle vary would be that they can only be one way exactly, and that this one and only way the universe can be happens to support life. Is that any less astonishing, nay, wouldn't that be even more astonishing than having different possibilities and being able to say - of course we live in one where life can exist - how it came about, who knows!
The first ones to think the orbits should be neat geometrical shapes were the old Greek philosophers, can't blame the Christians for inventing that one, they just stole the idea.
They defended it also; it was completely compatible with scholastic theology. Yes, the multiverse probably exists; it is, IMO, an error of physicists, such as Paul Davies, to say that just because you can't observe or test something that somehow means that "something" is outside the realm of Science. Plenty of phenomenon were predicted by GR and QM, which, only later on, were verified experimentally, and it stands to reason that ideas such as eternal inflation are likely true, as they are simply extensions of existing theory. In this respect, it is sufficient to calculate something as opposed to experimentally verifying it.
