Life in a random universe: Sciama's argument reconsidered
This addresses the fine-tuning problem in cosmology and philosophy of science, offering a mechanism to explain apparent design without invoking intelligence, which is incremental as it builds on existing arguments.
The paper revisits Dennis Sciama's argument that a random universe would likely be inhospitable to life, and shows that under plausible assumptions, a random universe can appear intelligently designed, with fundamental constants seemingly fine-tuned to maximize the probability of life, potentially requiring only around a dozen unknown constants.
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 be fined tuned to be achieve the highest probability for life to occur. For our universe, this mechanism may only require there to be around a dozen currently unknown fundamental constants. We speculate on broader applications for the mechanism we uncover.