THE GOLDILOCKS UNIVERSE

SOUTH BEND, IND. (Oct. 10, 2006) - "The Goldilocks Universe: Not too hot, not too cold, but just right" will be the topic of a free public lecture Thursday, Nov. 2, from 7-8 p.m. in the CyberCafe at Ivy Tech Community College, 220 Dean Johnson Blvd., South Bend.

James Powell, Ph.D., chairperson of the General Education Division and professor of chemistry at Ivy Tech Community College-North Central, will discuss whether the universe was designed and fine-tuned for human habitation, one of the questions raised by proponents of the "Anthropic Principle" - a term coined by physicist Brandon Carter in 1973 which covers a series of topics in observational cosmology which include ideas about the origin of life in the universe.  Powell will show a collection of photographs from NASA space probes and the Hubble Space Telescope to help explain some of the key events in the formation of the universe, the Milky Way, and the solar system.

The lecture is non-technical and admission is free and open to the public.  The event is sponsored by the Ivy Tech Science and Math Club.

Comments

[island]

Here is some relevant information for anyone that wants to use it for questions:

The evolutionary physics that defines the "just-right" conditions for the "goldilocks enigma" unfolded for the duration of the entire universe and still apply all the way up the ladder, from our local ecosystem to the near perfectly balanced structure of the universe, itself.

The physics applies to other systems that are similarly developed, time and location-wise, as ours is:

http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~imamura/209/mar31/anthropic.html

The goldilocks enigma constrains the parameters to a balance of extremes... so it only applies to galaxies that formed on the same evolutionary time/location "plane" as we did. Planets orbiting stars in galaxies that are too old or too new, too large or too small, do not fit the "coincidentally balanced" nature as the average of extremes... etc... etc... ect... all the way down to the local ecobalances of the ones that do:

http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/spr/2006-02/msg0073181.html

This also resolves the alleged, Fermi "Paradox", as well, since we should not yet expect to hear from similarly developed intelligent life, because their radio transmissions have not had time to reach us... yet... either.

This defines a testable prediction about where and when life will most likely be found elsewhere in the universe.

This paper by A. Feoli, and S. Rampone, further discusses this in context with similarly developed systems, but they fail to take the balance of extremes that defines the "Goldilocks Enigma" into account here, because they apply the mediocrity principle, instead, so their formula and anthropic statement are not quite accurate... overstated:

"Is the Strong Anthropic Principle Too Weak?"
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9812093

"We discuss the Carter's formula about the mankind evolution probability following the derivation proposed by Barrow and Tipler. We stress the relation between the existence of billions of galaxies and the evolution of at least one intelligent life, whose living time is not trivial, all over the Universe. We show that the existence probability and the lifetime of a civilization depend not only on the evolutionary critical steps, but also on the number of places where the life can arise. In the light of these results, we propose a stronger version of Anthropic Principle."

When you apply the Goldilocks Enigma, rather than the mediocrity principle, then a more accurate and testable formula falls-out along with a more accurate statement about a strong biocentric principle.

The "cosmological principle" gives a "mediocre" multiverse-"like" priori statistical distribution of values of observables, but this is not what is observed, and this is the reason for the anthropic physics that defines the "Goldilocks Enigma", so the combined effect of the Cosmological Principle with the Goldilocks Constraint... defines a Biocentric Cosmological Principle that makes many testable predictions about the observed universe.

Like, life will not be found on Mars or Venus, but it will be found in other systems that meet the goldilocks criterion that exists as the average of extreme runaway tendencies.

Good luck.