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Thread ID: 8752 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2003-08-04
2003-08-04 10:37 | User Profile
The following is from [url=http://reason.com/9907/fe.ks.is.shtml]http://reason.com/9907/fe.ks.is.shtml[/url]
REASON * July 1999
Is God in the Details? From cosmic coincidence to conservative cosmopolitics.
By Kenneth Silber
Victor J. Stenger has created new universes. Lots of them. In some, the stars shine for only a fraction of a second. In others, atoms are the size of tennis balls and a typical day lasts trillions of hours. Stenger achieves these wildly disparate results by altering a few of the underlying "constants" of nature--the mass of a proton, for example, or the strength of the electromagnetic force. He ends up with worlds that look radically different from our own.
Stenger is a theoretical physicist at the University of Hawaii and author of a book titled The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology. His "universes" are computer simulations, the output of a program that he wrote and has named--a bit provocatively--"Monkey God." Stenger does not plan out the universes that he creates; he has allowed particle masses and force strengths to vary randomly, many orders of magnitude different from the levels observed in nature. A lot of the resulting universes, says Stenger, "look pretty funny but still had long-lived stars."
Complete article is at [url=http://reason.com/9907/fe.ks.is.shtml]http://reason.com/9907/fe.ks.is.shtml[/url]