Cosmology From Anthropic Principle to Irreducible Complexity And Beyond

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Alternative to the Big Bang theory (Image: Courtesy Micki Pistorius Deriv)

Cosmology From Anthropic Principle to Irreducible Complexity And Beyond

Who Did It? Did God Do It? The very idea that the universe had a beginning was so troubling to Sir Fred Hoyle that when he was promoted to Lecturer in Mathematics at Cambridge in 1948, he published two papers on steady-state cosmology, in which he presented a serious alternative to the Big Bang theory. That led him to speculate about human life on Planet Earth. Eventually he proposed what is now called the Anthropic Principle. His theory is based more on philosophy than science, but modern quantum physics seems to follow a similar tendency. Its basic tenant is that the universe cannot exist without a consciousness to observe it.

Sir Fred Hoyle 1915 - 2001 (Free Use)

The Anthropic Principle

How could the universe be so well balanced as to fall within such a very narrow band of laws that just happen to define the boundaries of human beings and their thought processes? It seems very unlikely. Therefore, Hoyle proposed that human beings originated and evolved within the universe because this is the kind of universe in which they could originate and evolve. It seems like circular reasoning, but it makes sense, in a philosophical kind of way. This kind of theorizing had a profound influence on Sir Hoyle. When he first began to think along these lines, he was an atheist, but he eventually came to believe that the guiding hand of God was behind the whole thing. To Hoyle, the statistical improbability of carbon-based life forms such as humans was too much to overcome. He could not imagine such an event without help from outside.


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