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R. N. Mohapatra
as it exists today must have influenced those laws and parameters of nature.
One can argue that a physical law is a law of nature and humankind should
have nothing to do with it. Therefore, is the anthropic principle really a
necessary principle in science or just a desperate move to postpone theoretical
understanding of the universe as we see it? If it is the latter, this almost makes
the anthropic principle sound unscientific since that would leave nothing
for physicists to explore and understand. In that case, everything becomes a
postulate of convenience for humans with the sole goal of making themselves
exist. No objective reasoning or basis behind the physical laws and parameters
needs to be sought. This raises the question, are all laws anthropic in nature
or simply the ones that we do not understand? If that was the case, it would
make it even more artificial as a part of human reasoning.
Extending this line of reasoning a bit further, one could even ask, does the
anthropic principle imply the existence of God, with God deciding what the
laws of nature should be and what the field strengths should be, what kind of
matter should exist, and even how the universe began? As Stephen Hawking
in his book “Brief answers to big questions” put it “If you like, you can always
say that the laws are the work of God but that is more definition of God rather
than a proof of his existence”.
So why and how did the anthropic principle gain so much traction in
science? Is there really a need for this in current scientific discourse? To see
this, let us examine what the physical laws really involve. Take the case of
the standard model, which involves the weak, nuclear, and electromagnetic
force. The basic nature of the forces is determined by a principle, called
the gauge invariance, that leads to particles that generate the force and then
there is a parameter that determines the strength of the force. The question
one can ask is how matter (quarks and leptons, which are the fundamental
constituents of matter) couples to this force. How all this happened involves
legitimate scientific questions that we need to answer before we can claim a
fuller understanding of the standard model. The properties of the forces are
determined by the scientific principle, but what about the coupling strength?
Where did that number come from and is there a scientific way to determine
it from the first principles? One reasoning track that scientists have used is to
reduce the number of gauge couplings to one value, so that what we have to
explain is not three couplings values but just one (not including gravity). The
principle used is called the grand unification of forces, postulated in the early
1970s [80] and briefly alluded to in Chap. 22.
R. N. Mohapatra
as it exists today must have influenced those laws and parameters of nature.
One can argue that a physical law is a law of nature and humankind should
have nothing to do with it. Therefore, is the anthropic principle really a
necessary principle in science or just a desperate move to postpone theoretical
understanding of the universe as we see it? If it is the latter, this almost makes
the anthropic principle sound unscientific since that would leave nothing
for physicists to explore and understand. In that case, everything becomes a
postulate of convenience for humans with the sole goal of making themselves
exist. No objective reasoning or basis behind the physical laws and parameters
needs to be sought. This raises the question, are all laws anthropic in nature
or simply the ones that we do not understand? If that was the case, it would
make it even more artificial as a part of human reasoning.
Extending this line of reasoning a bit further, one could even ask, does the
anthropic principle imply the existence of God, with God deciding what the
laws of nature should be and what the field strengths should be, what kind of
matter should exist, and even how the universe began? As Stephen Hawking
in his book “Brief answers to big questions” put it “If you like, you can always
say that the laws are the work of God but that is more definition of God rather
than a proof of his existence”.
So why and how did the anthropic principle gain so much traction in
science? Is there really a need for this in current scientific discourse? To see
this, let us examine what the physical laws really involve. Take the case of
the standard model, which involves the weak, nuclear, and electromagnetic
force. The basic nature of the forces is determined by a principle, called
the gauge invariance, that leads to particles that generate the force and then
there is a parameter that determines the strength of the force. The question
one can ask is how matter (quarks and leptons, which are the fundamental
constituents of matter) couples to this force. How all this happened involves
legitimate scientific questions that we need to answer before we can claim a
fuller understanding of the standard model. The properties of the forces are
determined by the scientific principle, but what about the coupling strength?
Where did that number come from and is there a scientific way to determine
it from the first principles? One reasoning track that scientists have used is to
reduce the number of gauge couplings to one value, so that what we have to
explain is not three couplings values but just one (not including gravity). The
principle used is called the grand unification of forces, postulated in the early
1970s [80] and briefly alluded to in Chap. 22.