There are some, Lawrence Krauss in his Universe from Nothing lecture and book, who are beginning to suspect (fear) that particle physics may be nothing more than an environmental science, that all the fundamentals (the fine tuning if you will) just randomly coalesced and physicists are basically just collecting stamps. That the universe is capable of supporting intelligent life just means that we are we here to marvel at it. Had it not been capable of intelligent life then we wouldn't be here to complain about it.
47:39 – 47:43 Because all it's saying if it's true is that it's not too surprising
47:44 – 47:47 that we find ourselves living in a universe that allows life!
47:48 – 47:51 Because in the universes that don't allow life, we wouldn't be here!
47:53 – 47:54 It's just that simple!
47:54 – 47:56 So if you wish it's a kind of cosmic evolution,
47:57 – 47:59 or cosmic natural selection is a better way of thinking about it.
47:59 – 48:02 Now as pretty as that is, I think it's wrong!
48:03 – 48:04 It's ugly!
48:04 – 48:07 And it goes against everything I think about, and I know about science!
48:08 – 48:09 Science has told us the last 400 years
48:10 – 48:12 why the universe must be the way it is,
48:12 – 48:14 not why it has to be something different.
48:15 – 48:18 In fact Einstein once asked a question, he said it the wrong way.
48:18 – 48:20 I put it here because, well I wanted to quote him.
48:21 – 48:24 He said: "What really interests me is whether God [and by "God" he didn't mean God]"
48:25 – 48:27 "had any choice in the creation of the universe."
48:28 – 48:31 What he really meant is are the laws of physics fixed
48:31 – 48:33 so that if you changed one parameter, the whole...
48:33 – 48:35 you couln't have a universe?
48:35 – 48:39 or can you have an infinite number of laws of physics that all work,
48:39 – 48:42 and it just happens to be the way it is.
48:42 – 48:45 If this anthropic picture is right, then physics
48:46 – 48:48 is really an environmental science!
48:48 – 48:51 We're... There's no fundamental laws necessarily.
48:51 – 48:53 We're just here by an accident!
48:53 – 48:55 And the laws of physics are the way they are
48:55 – 48:57 not because there's some beautiful mathematical theory
48:57 – 48:58 that tells us they have to be, just because
48:58 – 49:01 if they were different we wouldn't be here.
49:02 – 49:05 Now that I find repugnant although it may be true,
= new reply since forum marked as read