Many Physicists Prefer Design Explanation of Cosmic Fine-Tuning

"The cosmological constant must be tuned to 120 decimal places and there are also many mysterious ‘coincidences’ involving the physical constants that appear to be necessary for life, or any form of information processing, to exist....Fred Hoyle first pointed out, the beryllium would decay before interacting with another alpha particle were it not for the existence of a remarkably finely-tuned resonance in this interaction. Heinz Oberhummer has studied this resonance in detail and showed how the amount of oxygen and carbon produced in red giant stars varies with the strength and range of the nucleon interactions. His work indicates that these must be tuned to at least 0.5% if one is to produce both these elements to the extent required for life."  -- Physicists B.J. Carr and M.J. Rees, "Fine-Tuning in Living Systems." 

 Prior to Darwin, William Paley made a famous analogy in his book Natural Theology, the analogy of a someone walking along a beach and finding a watch. Paley argued that it would be unreasonable for any such person to deny that such a thing (with so purposeful an arrangement of so many parts) was a product of design; and that it is just as unreasonable to deny that the purposeful arrangement of parts we see so abundantly in biological organisms is the product of design. The untrue legend arose that Darwin answered Paley's argument; but he did not. Darwin never mentioned Paley's famous analogy in any of his chief writings. Darwin never credibly explained how some fine-tuned arrangement of very many parts to meet a particular functional end could be naturally achieved. Darwin paid almost no attention to the huge fine-tuned complexity and component interdependence in organisms. 

In the twentieth century, the evidence for what looks like purposeful design in organisms increased enormously, as scientists discovered the enormous organization and component interdependence of hundreds of types of human cells and thousands of types of protein molecules, very high levels of functional complexity Darwin knew nothing about. In the late twentieth century, it began to become clear that there was a second gigantic basis for believing in design in nature: the fine-tuning of the universe's fundamental constants and laws. It turns out that the universe must be very specially arranged for there to be any possibility of there being creatures such as human beings and civilizations such as our civilization. The table below helps to show some of the requirements. The color coding helps to show how the same things recur as requirements for multiple things. 

In 2024 a poll was taken at the Black Holes Inside and Out conference in Copenhagen. 85 physicist attendees filled out a survey, with the results described in the "Copenhagen Survey on Black Holes and Fundamental Physics" paper here. One of the questions was framed as follows: "In your opinion, what explains the values of physical constants of nature and the claimed anthropic coincidences?"  The wording of the questioning was biased, with the phrase "anthropic coincidences" tending to suggest a "just chance" explanation. Despite the wording, a small but significant fraction of the physicist respondents expressed support for an "intelligent designer" answer. 

The results were these:

About 3% of the physicist respondents preferred an explanation of "an intelligent designer." The most popular explanation was the non-explanation of "brute facts." Someone appealing to brute facts is someone basically saying, "There is no explanation."

The authors of this survey have since done a more recent survey, asking some of the same questions, but polling a much larger group of physicists. They give their results in the paper "Big Mysteries Survey: Physicists’ Views on Cosmology, Black Holes, Quantum Mechanics, and Quantum Gravity," which you can read here. The authors of the paper start out by stating this:

"In the summer of 2024, a survey was conducted at the Black Hole Inside Out Conference in Copenhagen to assess physicists’ views on a range of ongoing controversies. Eighty-five scientists responded. One year later, the authors collaborated with the American Physical Society’s Physics Magazine on a substantially larger follow-up survey, which polled 1,675 participants from the magazine’s readership and the members of the American Physical Society. The Physics Magazine survey therefore provides a broader view of attitudes within the physics community and allows comparisons with the more focused conference-based Copenhagen sample."

Figure 1 of the paper tells us that 70% of the respondents identified themselves as researchers, with only 21% identifying themselves as "a science enthusiast" or "other."

Question 6 of the survey was framed as below

Question 6: Anthropic Coincidences

Question. The values for nature’s physical constants—from the strength of nuclear forces to the mass of the electron—are not determined by current theories, It has been suggested that if these values had been slightly different, the universe would likely not have formed complex structures and—eventually—life. This idea has led some to call for other physical or even metaphysical hypotheses to explain the apparent 'coincidence' that these constants are tuned to life-permitting values. Others have however questioned if such arguments are on sound footing. In your opinion what explains the values of physical constants and these so-called anthropic coincidences?

Like the corresponding question in the previous survey, this question is biased. Its heading of "Anthropic Coincidences" rather seems designed to suggest in respondents the idea of mere chance or coincidence being involved. Nonetheless, a substantial fraction (9%) of the respondents selected "explained by an intelligent designer" as their answer to the question posed above. The responses are given below:

I may note that the paper documenting this poll makes no claim that it was a secret ballot poll, and makes no mention that the respondents were guaranteed that their responses would be kept confidential. In polls such as this, we can assume that any controversial answer would get a much higher response under circumstances in which the secrecy of a person's response would be guaranteed. 

None of the answers other than "explained by an intelligent designer" have high credibility. Specifically: 

• The first answer in the list above is the mangled claim that "the values of the constants are set by a principle (such as the 'naturalness' principle forbidding a theory to have independent, fine-tuned parameters)." The offered example makes no sense. The issue is why our universe has fine-tuned constants. You don't explain that by appealing to some principle involving theories. 
• The most popular answer ("they are brute facts that need no further explanation") is just an "I have no explanation" answer. 
• The "explained by anthropic selection in a multiverse" answer is witless. There is no evidence and can never be any evidence for any such thing as a "multiverse," some vast collection of other universes. The only universe we can ever observe is our own universe. There is no credibility in the idea of "anthropic selection." If a multiverse existed, it would not do any such thing as "anthropic selection" in the sense of selecting creatures like us, living in civilizations and enjoying long lives and having the ability to speak languages. It would be true that only observers could observe, but it would be almost infinitely more likely that chance would produce low-intelligence observers with very short lifespans not enjoying all of the conveniences we enjoy such as a pleasant planet, long lives, and metal abundances allowing long-lasting civilizations. And a multiverse would do nothing to explain why our universe was so lucky (as opposed to some universe). For a full discussion of the fallacies in trying to evoke a multiverse to explain our universe's fine-tuned features, see my posts here and here. 
• The "explained by a Darwinian process occurring in the cosmos (e.g. baby universes inside black holes)" answer is a reference to Lee Smolin's very silly, groundless and extremely speculative theory he called "cosmological natural selection." In a 2004 paper (page 38) Smolin said that the theory made a prediction, the prediction that "the upper mass limit of neutron stars is less than 1.6 solar masses." This prediction failed. The most massive known neutron star is PSR J0952-0607, which has a mass of approximately 2.35 times of the mass of the sun. 

The word "beachhead" is a military term referring to an initial position on an enemy-dominated territory, a position serving as a foothold for further expansion. We can describe the situation in regard to belief in intelligent design among physicists like this: the idea of an intelligent designer behind cosmic fine-tuning is an idea that now has a foothold or beachhead among physicists. We should not be surprised at all if this foothold is followed by a much greater expansion. The beachhead may turn into a breakout, maybe even something like the breakout of Patron's Third Army in August, 1940, arising from the beachhead at Normandy.  Today's 9% physicist belief in intelligent design could easily expand to be 20% or 30% within a few decades. 

A similar poll questions was answered by academic philosophers. As discussed in my post here, in that poll, more philosophers said they believed in a "design" explanation for "cosmological fine-tuning" than the percentage believing in "multiverse" as an explanation. This was despite the fact that academic departments of philosophy have long been environments in which atheistic thinking is predominant. 

The idea of pondering only the fine-tuned physics of our universe when considering the explanation for such fine-tuning is an approach that is defective. The more sensible approach is to consider the collective weight of all the cases of fine-tuning that we observe in nature, which include things that are tangible (such as human bodies) and things that are intangible (such as fundamental constants of physics). 

We now have more than 50 years of work in modern physics establishing how the habitability of our universe depends on just-right characteristics of numerous laws and fundamental constants of the universe. I document in my post here some of the physics papers that documented this reality in the 1970's. Work of this type continues. A 2023 paper by a physicist states the following:

"The values of some fundamental physical constants are considered to be finely tuned and balanced to give our observable world. Examples include finely tuned balance between quark masses needed to produce protons and neutrons ...and production of heavy nuclei in stars, which depends on the finely tuned balance between the fine structure constant ...and the ratio of the proton mass ..and electron mass...These and other examples suggest a narrow 'habitable zone' in parameter space...where essential biochemical elements can form... For this reason, fundamental constants are referred to as 'biofriendly' or 'biophilic' ....We need to tune the same fundamental constants setting α and β (ℏ, e, c, me, mp) that, importantly, involves tuning, which is additional and different to tuning involved in fixing α and β....We can conjecture that multiple independent tunings were involved. This includes tuning fundamental constants to produce heavy nuclei and additional tunings needed for other observed sustainable structures to emerge." -- Kostya Trachenko, "Constraints on fundamental physical constants from bio-friendly viscosity and diffusion" (link).

Busted Boondoggle: Weep No Tears Over the Recently Axed CMB-S4 Project

Many scientific undertakings are highly fruitful, producing important scientific results. A good example is the James Webb Space Telescope launched not long ago.  Besides taking photos of many things in our galaxy at unprecedented resolution, the James Webb Space Telescope has made important observations showing that galaxies formed relatively quickly after the Big Bang, at a rate much faster than predicted by cosmologists.  The James Webb Space Telescope has observed a galaxy with carbon existing only 350 million years after the Big Bang. According to existing theories, no such galaxy should have been possible before about 1 billion years after the Big Bang. 

We seem to see a mysterious organization principle at work in the early Universe, something beyond the understanding of scientists. Similarly, in the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the birth of a baby nine months later, we see a miracle of organization utterly beyond the understanding of mechanistic science. 

While projects such as the James Webb Space Telescope are highly productive, there are other big expensive scientific projects that are what we may call examples of "hamster-wheel science."  Hamster-wheel science is science that keeps churning and churning year after year, but never gets anywhere, and never makes any progress.  Perhaps the worst example of hamster-wheel science is the search for what are called primordial b-modes. 

Around about 1978, cosmologists (the scientists who study the universe as a whole) were puzzled by a problem of fine-tuning. They had figured out that the expansion rate of the very early universe (at the time of the Big Bang) seems to have been incredibly fine-tuned, apparently to about one part in ten to the fiftieth power. This dilemma was known as the flatness problem.

Around 1980 Alan Guth (an MIT professor) proposed a way to solve the flatness problem. Guth proposed that for a tiny fraction of its first second (for less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second), the universe expanded at an exponential rate. The universe is not expanding at any such rate, but Guth proposed that after a very brief instant of exponential expansion, the universe switched back to the normal, linear expansion that it now has. This was the cosmic inflation theory (not to be confused with the more general Big Bang theory), a theory which has since taken on hundreds of different forms.  

The theory was devised to get rid of some fine-tuning, but it turned out that the theory required fine-tuning of its own in multiple places. So we had a kind of "rob Peter to pay Paul" situation in which it was unclear that the need for fine-tuning had been reduced. A scientific paper says this: "It actually requires much more fine-tuning for the Universe to have inflated than for it to have been placed in some low-entropy initial state (Carroll & Chen 2004)." The paper also refers to "the highly fine-tuned initial conditions required for inflation to work."

 For many decades cosmologists have been lost in a strange little world of fantasy whenever they dealt with this cosmic inflation theory. As different versions of the theory have kept failing, cosmologists have kept producing new versions of the theory; and by now there are hundreds of versions of it, making predictions all over the map.  All attempts to provide some empirical support for cosmic inflation theory have failed.  

The main prediction of cosmic inflation theories have been that there would be observed something called primordial gravitational waves, gravitational waves coming from the very early history of the universe, possibly something that would have a feature called "b-modes." Although non-primordial gravitational waves have been detected (arising from times when the universe was already billions of years old), nothing has come from decades of searches for primordial gravitational waves, which have gone on for years with ever-more-fancy and ever-more-expensive equipment.  A 2019 article states, "Models such as natural and quadratic inflation that were popular several years ago no longer seem tenable, says theorist Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University."  A late 2021 article (based on this paper) is entitled "Primordial Gravitational Waves Continue to Elude Astronomers." But rather than discarding a theoretical approach that isn't working, our  cosmologists keep tying themselves into knots by spinning out more and more speculative ornate versions of the cosmic inflation theory (which already has many hundreds of different versions).  This has all been a giant waste of time and money, without any real success. 

The CMB-S4 project was a long-standing proposal to spend almost  a billion dollars more on the huge fruitless money-wasting rathole that is cosmic inflation theory.  Having failed in numerous previous attempts to detect primordial gravitational waves, using ever-more-expensive equipment, our physicists proposed that we spend 800 million dollars on a new project to detect these primordial gravitational waves.  An analogy might be some billionaire who had this conversation:

Project Leader: I'm sorry, your 500 million dollar project to look for the Loch Ness monster has failed. 

Billionaire: Well, there's only one thing to do. Let's spend a billion dollars on an even fancier project to look for the Loch Ness monster. 

The Executive Summary of the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel falsely describes the CMB-S4 project as one that "looks back at the earliest moments of the universe." An important fact of nature that will never change is that it forever will be physically impossible for any technology to ever "look back at the earliest moments of the universe." In its  first 100,000 years the universe was so dense that every type of radiation coming from such a time must have hopelessly scattered, with all of its information as mangled as a top secret document passed through 1000 different paper shredders, and all of the resulting paper scraps being passed through 1000 paper scrap shredders.  It will therefore be forever impossible to ever "look back at the earliest moments of the universe." Such an impossibility is one reason why cosmic inflation theory seems like pseudo-science. Cosmic inflation theory makes claims about what went on in the first instants of the universe, but it will forever be physically impossible to verify such claims. 

What the CMB-S4 would have actually looked at is something called the cosmic background radiation, which dates from a time when the universe was about 300,000 years old.  That was when the density of the universe dropped to a low enough level to let radiation freely pass around without every ray or particle being scattered by all that density.  This cosmic background radiation has already been exhaustively analyzed by previous scientific instruments such as COBE. No evidence was found for the primordial gravitational waves predicted by cosmic inflation theory. 

We have extremely strong reasons for thinking that scientists will never be able to find primordial gravitational waves that provide any evidence for the theory of primordial cosmic inflation. One reason is the failure of all previous searches to find such a thing. Another reason is that there are two very strong "signal confounders" which will always preclude scientists from being able to reliably say some faint trace of gravitational waves comes from primordial cosmic inflation. Those "signal confounders" are dust and gravitational waves produced by black holes, both stellar black holes and primordial black holes. 

The failure to find the primordial gravitational waves predicted by cosmic inflation theory is like someone searching all of Loch Ness underwater, and failing to see the Loch Ness monster. The CMB-S4 project can be compared to someone saying, "Well, if we can't photograph the Loch Ness monster underwater, let's look for footprints on the lake bottom that the monster may have left long ago." The problem with that is you could never get convincing evidence from such a method. You might be able to claim some funny little thing seen on a lake bottom was a foot print of the Loch Ness monster, but it would never be convincing evidence. And so it is for the current search for primordial gravitational waves. If they are found, the signal would be so weak (and so capable of being explained by alternate explanations) that you would never have convincing evidence of primordial cosmic inflation. 

Therefore, the  proposed CMB-S4 project was a boondoggle. It cannot ever produce a compelling scientific result establishing a likelihood that primordial cosmic inflation occurred. All it can ever produce with the best of luck is some hazy, ambiguous,  very debatable, hard-to-interpret result that will be no clear evidence of anything.  It's like feeding the fuzzy Zapruder film into some artificial intelligence program.  You won't learn anything new about the assassination of John Kennedy by doing that.  At best you'll get some weak talking point that you might enjoy using in some debate. 

A paper last year on the topic of the detection of primordial gravitational waves has the very misleading title "Using gravitational waves to see the first second of the universe." Because of reasons discussed above, it will forever be physically impossible to view the first 300,000 years of the universe's history, under the assumptions of Big Bang cosmology, because of photon scattering caused by the extreme density.  The paper (for example on page 28 and page 60) discusses countless possible theoretical causes of primordial gravitational waves, reminding us of the impossibility of ever detecting the source of such waves if they were ever found.  On page 94 we are told that there can be "many other sources" of such waves.  

Any project to look for such primordial gravitational waves that have not been found after so much money has already been spent looking for such waves is like some project scanning the mud at the bottom of Loch Ness, looking for the faintest traces of monster footprints left long ago. No important and reliable science will come from such activities, which almost certainly will be a waste of time.  The most that will ever come is some hopelessly murky results and some talking point for some eager theorist, or some busy work for scientists who can't figure out more productive things to do. 

The main reason why cosmologists supported projects such as the CMB-S4 project is that so many cosmologists have wasted most of their careers on futile speculations such as the endless varieties of the cosmic inflation theory. Such scientists will eagerly vote to fund any "grasping at straws" project with the slightest hope of lending a little prestige to these speculative efforts, to minimize the chance that such scientists will one day have to stare themselves in the mirror and say, "I wasted most of my career on extravagant speculations that never were backed up by solid evidence." 

The CMB-S4 project is a futile hamster-wheel project. The search for primordial b-modes is the epitome of futile hamster-wheel science that gets nowhere. 

I recently read that the boondoggle CMB-S4 project has been axed.   The CMB-S4 project was to be run in Antarctica. It seems that the National Science Foundation thinks that upgrading facilities in Antarctica is a higher priority than the CMB-S4.    Meanwhile cosmologists will continue to waste billions on other futile boondoggle projects, such as the environmentally reckless "Dirty Dune" project looking for dark matter that scientists have already spent billions looking for without success. The cosmic inflation theorists may well try to make it look like they did not get to look for their hoped-for primordial gravitational waves, ignoring the fact that very many millions of dollars have already been spent over many years on failed searches for such things, in projects such as BICEP1, BICEP2, POLARBEAR, Keck and BICEP3, and work at the Simons Observatory. 

Within the study of cosmology, cosmic inflation theory has been a money-draining "white elephant," a scheme allowing cosmologists to keep draining many millions of research dollars without ever producing any compelling observational results. The advocates of cosmic inflation theory have tried to justify their money-wasting and time-wasting activities by appealing to a bandwagon effect.  Such people keep telling us that pretty much all the cosmologists agree about the truth of cosmic inflation theory.  This is not true at all. In fact, according to a poll of cosmologists taken last year, not even half of cosmologists believe in the cosmic inflation theory. 

In the scientific paper, on page 9 we have the result of a 2024 poll of cosmologists attending a scientific conference. Here is the result of a question that does the equivalent of asking cosmologists: what percent of you believe in the cosmic inflation theory? The result is that only 44% of cosmologists endorse the theory. 

Page 8 of the paper (discussing the result above) says that the cosmic inflation theory "does not command majority support." We have no claim in the paper that this was a secret ballot survey. A secret ballot poll might have shown even smaller support. 

For 40 years cosmic inflation theorists have been making groundless boasts that almost all cosmologists believe in the cosmic inflation theory. An example is page 3 of the paper here, in which a zealous proponent of the theory assures us that a "vast majority" of cosmologists endorse such a theory, without offering any evidence to back up such a claim. The poll above indicates that not even a majority of cosmologists endorse such a theory. Never trust any proponent of a theory who claims that the theory is supported by the great majority of specialists in some scientific field, unless such a claim is backed up by a well-designed secret ballot poll of scientists, a poll substantiating such a claim.  Scientists routinely make groundless or unfounded assertions claiming or insinuating that some theory cherished by them is supported by an overwhelming majority of people in their field.  

The lesson of the cosmic inflation theory misadventure is exactly the same as the lesson of the supersymmetry misadventure.  A search on the Cornell Physics Preprint Server for physics papers with "inflation" in the title produces 7239 results, almost all papers on the cosmic inflation theory.  A search on the Cornell Physics Preprint Server for physics papers with "supersymmetry" in the title produces 4546 results.  Both the cosmic inflation theory and the supersymmetry theory involved elaborate speculative attempts to "sweep under the rug" dramatic cases of very precise fine-tuning that had been discovered in nature. All of these papers were wastes of time and exercises in futility. Neither of these theories was ever supported by observational evidence, although endless millions were spent trying to get evidence for both of them. The cosmic inflation theory misadventure and the supersymmetry misadventure both teach the same lesson: when nature presents some very dramatic case of fine-tuning, do not waste huge amounts of time trying to devise elaborate theories designed to explain away such fine-tuning, and trying to sweep such fine-tuning under the rug; but instead accept such examples of cosmic fine-tuning, look for other examples of fine-tuning both in the universe and in biology, and ponder the implications of such fine-tuning that can be found so very abundantly throughout nature. The point I discuss here is discussed more fully in my post here, which explains the type of fine-tuning that supersymmetry attempted to sweep under the rug and explain away. 

                        This "sweeping under the rug" never works