Talk:Fecund universes

message: I just did some checking into the history of the article, the bulk of it was written in a 3-hour period in October 2005 by an anonymous editor under the (since merged) title Cosmological natural selection. Nobody since has shown the slightest interest in providing citations. I am therefore reducing it down to a lead/stub & transfering the bulk of the article here. If you want any of this stuff back on main space then SOURCE IT! 17:12, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: So tag the article, don't delete the entire thing.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.184.170.5 (talk) 15:43, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It was tagged for being completely unreferenced for more than two months before I turned it into a redirect (a month ago). HrafnTalkStalk 16:01, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lack of any interest in [[WP:V]] 

message: Lee Smolin's hypothesis of cosmological natural selection makes the assumption that each universe developed in such a way possesses slightly modified versions of the mass fields of its "parent" universe. This concept is of course borrowed from Darwin, and is analogous to mutation of genes in modern evolutionary theory. There is some conjectural support for this in both string theory and quantum gravity. The change in the mass fields would be due to the intense energies and small scales reached within a black hole. By a simple extrapolation it is easy to see that universes which generate more "offspring" will ultimately become more numerous. A universe with no stars and consisting entirely of hydrogen gas can produce only one offspring because it can produce no black holes. All it can do is collapse back in on itself in a "big crunch", a reverse big bang, to generate a singularity. 
====Some universes produce more offspring====
Given enough universes, some would by chance possess the matter fields necessary to generate stars and thus black holes. Since these would produce far more offspring, they would become far more numerous than universes without stars. (There is no known mechanism that "kills off" universes and so there is no actual parallel to "natural selection" in the theory of cosmological natural selection. It is for this reason that it is now technically referred to as fecund universes.)
====Our universe may optimize black hole production====
What Lee Smolin proposes is that a universe which produces more black holes than any other would in fact possess the laws of physics our universe does. He argues that cosmological natural selection is superior to the anthropic principle because it is falsifiable. That is, if we discover anything in our universe suggesting our universe is not ideal for producing black holes, the theory is disproven. The falsifiability in this case depends strongly on a principle of mediocrity, however. Even if universes amenable to black hole production spawn far more universes than those that are not, there is still an anthropic landscape of possibilities. If there is an alignment of the parameters necessary for intelligent life and for black hole formation, then the fact of our existence has little effect on the prior probability part of a Bayesian calculation, but we can never neglect the possibility that we may live in a universe far from the peak of the distribution of parameters. At best, then, the principle of mediocrity provides probabilistic falsifiability. The scientific validity of such reasoning is the subject of much philosophical debate.
In addition, a thorough calculation of what exact values of the mass fields would generate a universe with the largest possible number of black holes may lead to predictions of so far unobserved elementary particles or other attributes of our universe. Unfortunately, this is not possible today.
[End of transfered material HrafnTalkStalk 17:12, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Evolving universes

message: What Lee Smolin proposes is that a universe which produces more black holes than any other would in fact possess the laws of physics our universe does. He argues that cosmological natural selection is superior to the anthropic principle because it is falsifiable. That is, if we discover anything in our universe suggesting our universe is not ideal for producing black holes, the theory is disproven. The falsifiability in this case depends strongly on a principle of mediocrity, however. Even if universes amenable to black hole production spawn far more universes than those that are not, there is still an anthropic landscape of possibilities. If there is an alignment of the parameters necessary for intelligent life and for black hole formation, then the fact of our existence has little effect on the prior probability part of a Bayesian calculation, but we can never neglect the possibility that we may live in a universe far from the peak of the distribution of parameters. At best, then, the principle of mediocrity provides probabilistic falsifiability. The scientific validity of such reasoning is the subject of much philosophical debate.
In addition, a thorough calculation of what exact values of the mass fields would generate a universe with the largest possible number of black holes may lead to predictions of so far unobserved elementary particles or other attributes of our universe. Unfortunately, this is not possible today.
[End of transfered material HrafnTalkStalk 17:12, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Our universe may optimize black hole production