Fine tuning argument assessed

[houseofcantor]

In other news, I was just scrolling up through this thread; and there was this epic novel of a post and I'm like, "WTF? Did EK show up?" And sho' nuff.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

You're making the classic mistake of appealing to authority instead of thinking for yourself. Such things as dark matter, black holes, and the Big Bang are pure BS. If you actually think about them you will see that they make zero sense. They are comparable to belief in some cosmic deity who is only concerned with a small group of people on a small plot of land on a small planet in the whole universe.

If we still lived in a Newtonian Universe I would agree with you. The problem is that physics is now beyond our pay grade. Appeals to logic are no longer valid - and ceased to be so when Einstein showed that time changes with speed (which makes no sense).

Since that moment physics has gone off on routes that are so alien to our in-built logic its mind boggling.

Whilst I have argued before on these forums that science is heading in the direction of religion in that we're told we can't understand it and we have to accept it that is not quite true.

Firstly there is the process of science and peer review. We take physics (particularly Quantum Physics these days) on the basis that it offers the best explanation we have and appears to have widescale support amongst the relevant science community.

It is, however, not treated as the gospel. Should science move on - and new predictions, models and explanation are made which replace those we currently hold then we go with those until such time as those in turn are replaced.

It is dangerous ground to simply surmise that Black holes, the big bang and so on are nonsense merely as they don't match your logic.

They may turn out to be ultimately wrong but right now the general consensus is that they are the best explanations we have.

There is nothing religious in this.

The Big Bang is a Catholic priest's explanation for the creation of the universe. A normal person will realize that it's pure BS if he thinks about it objectively. The fact that most people don't and won't simply indicates how brain-washed they are. But they are free to believe in it since it has no relevance to anything.

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If black holes did exist then they should have been able to have consumed all of the stellar material in their respective galaxies. The fact that galaxies exist disproves the idea of black holes.

Actually, it disproves the fact that you understand basic physics and motion.
A black hole won't consume it's galaxy any more than a star will consume all its orbiting planets.

So the black hole theory states that the black hole will suck up anything that gets into its critical gravitational field. That makes the black hole even more powerful. So it keeps growing and its critical gravitational area gets larger and larger. So at some point the black hole will consume everything in its galaxy.

[LostLocke]

So the black hole theory states that the black hole will suck up anything that gets into its critical gravitational field. That makes the black hole even more powerful. So it keeps growing and its critical gravitational area gets larger and larger. So at some point the black hole will consume everything in its galaxy.

Nope.
There are dormant black holes around. They "ate" everything within their field. No matter how strong they get, they can run out of stuff to "eat".
Plus, no matter how close something gets, as long as it doesn't drop past the event horizon (which can happen do to the enormous amount of energy something has while orbiting close to a black hole), it won't get "eaten".

[Wyrd of Gawd]

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So the black hole theory states that the black hole will suck up anything that gets into its critical gravitational field. That makes the black hole even more powerful. So it keeps growing and its critical gravitational area gets larger and larger. So at some point the black hole will consume everything in its galaxy.

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Nope.
There are dormant black holes around. They "ate" everything within their field. No matter how strong they get, they can run out of stuff to "eat".
Plus, no matter how close something gets, as long as it doesn't drop past the event horizon (which can happen do to the enormous amount of energy something has while orbiting close to a black hole), it won't get "eaten".

Black holes are imaginary, just like angels, demons, ghosts, gods, and spirits. If Hawking hadn't imagined black holes would you even be talking about them?

Maybe some black holes will show up when that 1,500 mile-sided gaudy bejeweled golden cube New Jerusalem makes its appearance.

[LostLocke]

Black holes are imaginary, just like angels, demons, ghosts, gods, and spirits. If Hawking hadn't imagined black holes would you even be talking about them?

OK.. wow.
First, it wasn't Hawking who "invented" black holes. The concept was around before he came on the scene.

And second, if we never found planets orbiting other suns we wouldn't be talking about them therefore they would be imaginary?
That's not how this works.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

Black holes are imaginary, just like angels, demons, ghosts, gods, and spirits. If Hawking hadn't imagined black holes would you even be talking about them?

OK.. wow.
First, it wasn't Hawking who "invented" black holes. The concept was around before he came on the scene.

And second, if we never found planets orbiting other suns we wouldn't be talking about them therefore they would be imaginary?
That's not how this works.

So just because cave men came up with the idea of black holes doesn't mean that they exist. After all, they gave us the idea of gods, devils, demons, spirits, ghosts, angels, and zombies. Have you seen any of them?

It's completely logical that there would be planets orbiting other stars because that's a natural result of star formation. If you had the ability to examine every star system in the visible universe it's doubtful if you would find any that don't have planetoids orbiting them unless they are red supergiants or hypergiants that consumed their solar systems.

[LostLocke]

So just because cave men came up with the idea of black holes doesn't mean that they exist. After all, they gave us the idea of gods, devils, demons, spirits, ghosts, angels, and zombies. Have you seen any of them?

It's completely logical that there would be planets orbiting other stars because that's a natural result of star formation. If you had the ability to examine every star system in the visible universe it's doubtful if you would find any that don't have planetoids orbiting them unless they are red supergiants or hypergiants that consumed their solar systems.

Newton came with the idea of gravity. He also believed in alchemy. So by your logic his concept of gravity is imaginary.

Whether it's logical or illogical for something to be has no bearing on whether it actually is.

[Heywood]

Yep. It's called the gunslinger fallacy. One has to state ones hypothesis BEFORE one gathers the data to support it. The pack of cards analogy Is a good one. I use a rubber chicken. I toss it into the audience and get them to throw it about, writing the names of the people who catch it. I then calculate the odds of that order happening by chance and conclude that since it is so high, I must have rigged the experiment. Of course as it's already happened, as you rightly say the odds are one in one.

When you write these names down, I presume you are writing them down in the order in which they were caught. Suppose you take your list of names and give it to Alice who isn't privy to any of the details of how the list was compiled. You then ask Alice to look at the list and give her the task of making a judgment about how it was compiled.

Alice looks at the list, notices there are 100 names on it. She studies it further and notices the names happen to be in a unusual order....they are alphabetized to first letter of each name.

From Alice's perspective, which is more likely?
A)the list was compiled purely by happenstance.
B)Some intellect made a choice about how to compile the list.

If Alice had to make a bet, should she bet on A or B?

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A fine tuned thing requires a goal to be fine tuned toward, and without demonstrating that there's a goal for the universe in which life constitutes a success state, then you can't go on to state that the multitude of possible failure states makes directed creation the most probable solution to the success state.

I would not say life is the success state of the universe. Emergent complexity is the success state. From my perspective the universe appears to be fined tuned to be emergent complex. Life is just an artifact of that emergent complexity.

[Chas]

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Nope.
There are dormant black holes around. They "ate" everything within their field. No matter how strong they get, they can run out of stuff to "eat".
Plus, no matter how close something gets, as long as it doesn't drop past the event horizon (which can happen do to the enormous amount of energy something has while orbiting close to a black hole), it won't get "eaten".

Black holes are imaginary, just like angels, demons, ghosts, gods, and spirits. If Hawking hadn't imagined black holes would you even be talking about them?

Maybe some black holes will show up when that 1,500 mile-sided gaudy bejeweled golden cube New Jerusalem makes its appearance.

No, not quite. The idea predates Hawking by nearly two centuries.

The idea of a body so massive that even light could not escape was first put forward by John Michell in a letter written to Henry Cavendish in 1783 of the Royal Society:

If the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density as the Sun were to exceed that of the Sun in the proportion of 500 to 1, a body falling from an infinite height towards it would have acquired at its surface greater velocity than that of light, and consequently supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its vis inertiae, with other bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it by its own proper gravity.
—John Michell

In 1796, mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace promoted the same idea in the first and second editions of his book Exposition du système du Monde (it was removed from later editions). Such "dark stars" were largely ignored in the nineteenth century, since it was not understood how a massless wave such as light could be influenced by gravity.

And you are asserting there is a basic flaw in General Relativity. Care to demonstrate what that flaw is?

[Rampant.A.I.]

Something will turn up.

Even the guy who came up with the idea of black holes no longer believes in them.

"Stephen Hawking Stopped Believing in Black Holes"
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/11644...dont-exist

If black holes did exist then they should have been able to have consumed all of the stellar material in their respective galaxies. The fact that galaxies exist disproves the idea of black holes.

Except that statement is a very poor summary of the article, and the article is a very poor description of what Hawking said.

He doesn't say that black holes don't exist. He says they aren't quite what we thought they were.

This is called science. Our understanding is improved by new data and new theory.

It's amazing how many people throw out that argument without having read more than a clickbait title.