Life in a random universe: Sciama's argument reconsidered
@inproceedings{Wang2021LifeIA, title={Life in a random universe: Sciama's argument reconsidered}, author={Zhi-Wei Wang and Samuel L. Braunstein}, year={2021} }
Random sampling in high dimensions has successfully been applied to phenomena as diverse as nuclear resonances, neural networks and black hole evaporation. Here we revisit an elegant argument by the British physicist Dennis Sciama, which demonstrated that were our universe random, it would almost certainly have a negligible chance for life. Under plausible assumptions, we show that a random universe can masquerade as ‘intelligently designed,’ with the fundamental constants instead appearing to…
References
SHOWING 1-10 OF 16 REFERENCES
Cosmic Explosions, Life in the Universe, and the Cosmological Constant.
- PhysicsPhysical review letters
- 2016
It is found that the authors seem to live in a favorable point in this parameter space that minimizes the exposure to cosmic explosions, yet maximizes the number of main sequence (hydrogen-burning) stars around which advanced life forms can exist.
Anthropic bound on the cosmological constant.
- PhysicsPhysical review letters
- 1987
It is argued here that in universes that do not recollapse, the only bound on the cosmological constantlambda is that it should not be so large as to prevent the formation of gravitationally bound states, and it turns out that the bound is quite large.
Fermi's Paradox Is a Daunting Problem-Under Whatever Label.
- PhilosophyAstrobiology
- 2016
It is suggested that the Fermi paradox is not a real problem or research subject and should not be used in debates about SETI projects, and it makes no sense either theoretically or empirically to separate the two.
Dirac's Cosmology and Mach's Principle
- Physics, PhilosophyNature
- 1961
DICKE discusses the three cosmological numbers: (1) which determines the gravitational constant, (2) which determines the Hubble age of the universe, and (3) the number of particles in the universe.…
“The Philosophy of Physical Science”
- PhilosophyNature
- 1941
THE correspondence on this subject provides a most enlightening example of the present transition in scientific philosophy from the view that science is a description of an objective external world…
On likely values of the cosmological constant
- Mathematics, Materials Science
- 2000
We discuss models in which the smallness of the effective vacuum energy density ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ and the coincidence of the time of its dominance…
A central limit theorem for convex sets
- Mathematics
- 2007
We show that there exists a sequence $\varepsilon_n\searrow0$ for which the following holds: Let K⊂ℝn be a compact, convex set with a non-empty interior. Let X be a random vector that is distributed…
On Nuclear Reactions Occuring in Very Hot STARS.I. the Synthesis of Elements from Carbon to Nickel.
- Chemistry
- 1954
The heritage of P. Lévy in geometrical functional analysis
- 2019
© Société mathématique de France, 1988, tous droits réservés. L’accès aux archives de la collection « Astérisque » (http://smf4.emath.fr/ Publications/Asterisque/) implique l’accord avec les…