Now, where to begin...

I'm not good at coming up with names.  I think I have some evidence that my genes are to blame for this, since all my parents could think of when they had me was to name me after my dad.  Finding a name for the blog has therefore been difficult for me.  The ones I could think that would actually reflect the main theme of the blog were not available.  The one I ended up with only reflects the painfully obvious fact that English is my second language.  It is the name students at Yale gave to Lars Onsager's course on statistical mechanics (another name they gave it was Sadistical Mechanics).  I don't blame you if you don't know who Onsager was, but he is famous among physicists for finding the exact solution of the two-dimensional Ising model, a simplified model of a ferromagnet.  He was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1968 for his theoretical work on the effect of temperature gradients on diffusion processes.  

The main purpose of this blog is to examine the claim that the laws of physics are fine-tuned for life, and even more specifically human life.  This is a claim you will find being made in religious apologetic writings and even in seemingly serious books and papers on physics and cosmology.  In religious circles the fine tuning is used to derive the existence of a deity.  Physicists try to explain why it is so, or use so-called anthropic reasoning to predict certain properties of the Universe.  My main contention is that both apologists and physicists make the mistake of not distinguishing between the laws of physics and the reality they are only an approximate description of.  The laws of physics are models made up by humans.  They are not arbitrary human constructions since we judge their quality by how well they describe observations and experiments, but they are still, unlike the external world, things we have made up.  If they appear to be fine-tuned for anything it does not follow that the universe is so, too.  And if we want to find the fine-tuner of these laws we only have to look in the mirror.  

In my posts I will try to explain my take on fine-tuning in more detail, but also review a selection of the literature on the topic.  I hope they will be at least partly understandable and moderately interesting.