At 05:43 PM 11/9/98 -0800, Peter McCluskey wrote:
> My impression is that Smolin's theory implies that new universes are
>almost always rather similar to their parents (without inheritance,
>evolution doesn't work). This implies that life doesn't alter the parameters
>much.
I couldn't find any explanation in Smolin (although I haven't read his
technical papers) for why the gosh numbers are inherited with only minor
variation, which seemed to me the greatest weaknesss in his hypothesis.
I'd expect the fundamental values in new universes to be set
stochastically. If they are indeed random (unless they're tampered with
deliberately), Smolin's model might *only* work if carbon-originated life
*forces* new universes to adopt a narrow range of gosh values.
Damien Broderick
Received on Tue Nov 10 02:01:17 1998
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