Timeline for Mathematics of the Anthropic Principle [closed]
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 21, 2010 at 7:47 | history | closed |
Robin Chapman Steve Huntsman S. Carnahan♦ José Figueroa-O'Farrill Andrew Stacey |
not a real question | |
| Jun 21, 2010 at 7:20 | comment | added | Gerry Myerson | "half of all the people that have ever been born have been born"??? Maybe you mean "half of all the people that have ever been born are now alive"? or, "half the people that will ever have been born have already been born"? I've always taken the "half ... are now alive" statement, in the form, "only half the people born so far have died" as evidence that there's a 50% chance that I'm immortal. | |
| Jun 21, 2010 at 5:09 | answer | added | Zack M. Davis | timeline score: 2 | |
| Jun 20, 2010 at 17:49 | answer | added | Q.Q.J. | timeline score: 4 | |
| Jun 20, 2010 at 17:45 | comment | added | DoubleJay | It's probably reasonable to say that if such a meta-universe cannot be constructed in a way that the anthropic principle is not-totally-trivial, then that would show that it's a question of philosophy and not of math. | |
| Jun 20, 2010 at 17:44 | comment | added | DoubleJay | @Pete: That's a fair way of looking at it. It may seem perverse, but to narrow the scope of the problem we could try to construct and extremely small, discrete "meta-universe" which is a set of very simple universes in which each universe, along with its construction, includes sets of inhabitants who have access to some amount of knowledge about their own universe and perhaps other universes (a further simplifying assumption could be that this knowledge is incomplete but correct), and see what they can understand about the rules of the meta-universe on this basis. | |
| Jun 20, 2010 at 17:35 | history | edited | DoubleJay | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
added 622 characters in body
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| Jun 20, 2010 at 17:15 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | In my opinion, the question is either not mathematical or needs clarification. The Anthropic Principle is not a mathematical statement, but rather (charitably, perhaps?) a statement about the physical world. How therefore could it have a mathematical consequence? Am I right in thinking that your question is more like "How can we convert the Anthropic Principle into a statement that has some mathematical language and content?" | |
| Jun 20, 2010 at 16:51 | comment | added | Robin Chapman | You say it's a real question; I say it's not a mathematical question - I expect we'll have to agree to differ :-) | |
| Jun 20, 2010 at 16:48 | comment | added | DoubleJay | This absolutely is a real question. I've seen claims like "the anthropic principle indicates that we most likely live at a time such that half of all people that have ever been born have been born". I want to know if a statement like this is at all reasonable or not. | |
| Jun 20, 2010 at 16:45 | comment | added | Robin Chapman | I can't see a concrete mathematical question here. It's another question of the form: "is there a connection between topic A and topic B?". There's no real answer to these, just scope for lots of discussion and argument. | |
| Jun 20, 2010 at 16:39 | history | asked | DoubleJay | CC BY-SA 2.5 |