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Do We Live In a Giant Cosmic Bubble?
Khemisty writes "Earth may be trapped in an abnormal bubble of space-time that is particularly void of matter. Scientists say this condition could account for the apparent acceleration of the universe's expansion, for which dark energy currently is the leading explanation.
Until now, there has been no good way to choose between dark energy or the void explanation, but a new study outlines a potential test of the bubble scenario.
If we were in an unusually sparse area of the universe, then things could look farther away than they really are and there would be no need to rely on dark energy as an explanation for certain astronomical observations.
'If we lived in a very large under-density, then the space-time itself wouldn't be accelerating,' said researcher Timothy Clifton of Oxford University in England. 'It would just be that the observations, if interpreted in the usual way, would look like they were.'"
Ok, I'll believe that there are regions of space that are more dense than others. I'll even believe that we are in one of them. ( This is no harder than believing in dark matter and dark energy, and it's before breakfast )
But what I find hard to believe is that we are in the exact center of such a region. So therefore, the universe should appear to have different properties in different directions. Has anybody seen that?
It's perfectly reasonable to think that, if sentient life requires unusual circumstances, then we will find ourselves in unusual circumstances.
It's already the case that we're in a rather odd location. Pick a random point in the universe. Does it happen to be on the surface of a planet? Of course not.
It's not really a cop out if you can actually give the statistically biasing action. It is a bit of a cop out to just say "specialties make our sentient life possible (or much more probable)" but if you can quantify this, then it would be possible to quantify the experimental bias. The anthropic principle is a lot more rigorous than people give it credit for. Of course rare events are always possible, too.
I may be wrong, but isn't the term anthropic principle essentially the opposite of what you're describing? IMHO the anthropic principle just states that there is nothing special about our particular environment beyond the fact that we happen to live here and there is not much else that we have experience with?
Sadly, religious nutjobs have completely turned around what was once an important scientific reasoning tool that existed to make sure our observations of nature are not biased towards human existence.
The anthropic principle is the mother of all cause-and-effect observations. The obvious cause here is that we live in a certain environment with a certain set of rules and random environmental factors, as a consequence of this, we have turned out the way we are now - including our way of interpreting the world around us. Now religious people, for whatever fucked-up reason, believe our environment was actually created by someone just for us to live in, and that the purpose of our universe is to support human life - thereby turning common sense on its head by confusing cause and effect.
Why does the first thing that comes to mind after reading just this headline, make me think of that one episode on Star Trek Voyager
Because you are a nerd.