Wikipedia Changes

I was getting really sick and tired of dumb arguments being used out of context concerning the anthropic principle and "selection bias" from people that get their information from the number-one popularized reference for the anthropic principle, so I fixed it. My changes were only slightly revised before being approved by the wiki-guard-dog.

Before I fixed it:

In cosmology, the anthropic principle in its most basic form asserts the truism that any valid theory of the must be consistent with the existence of human beings and of organic chemistry, here and now in the universe.

In simple terms, the anthropic principle says, if a billion universes existed, with a multitude of laws of nature, then humans would only be aware of those in which humans could emerge, and (no matter how many versions of laws of nature existed) the laws of nature ''humans'' saw would only be the laws of nature of those universes in which humans as we know them could emerge. In other words, "If something must be true for us (as humans) to exist, then since we exist, it is true." This is an effect known as selection bias.

Attempts to apply this principle to develop scientific explanations in cosmology have led to a little confusion and controversy.

After:

The Anthropic Principle represents an effort by physicists to explain the structure of the universe from the fact that the forces are coincidentally balanced in a manner that constrains it to evolve to a point that it produces carbon-based-life at a specific time and location in history the universe, in dramatic contrast to what is indicated by any practical model of turbulance driven structuring that should result from our big bang.

It is necessarily a truism, since any valid cosmology must be consistent with the existence of human beings and organic chemistry, but it is the coincidentally balanced nature of the evolutionary physics that stands-out to define anthropic significance in the forces, since all of the many anthropic coincidences are similarly balanced between extreme opposing runaway tendencies that occur over a spectrum that ranges from our local ecosystem, all the way up to the near-perfect balance that is observed to exist between gravity and the cosmolgical constant.

Attempts to apply this principle to develop scientific explanations have led to a little confusion and much controversy.


Before:

Origins

The first known occurrence of the phrase "anthropic principle" appears to have been by the theoretical astrophysicist Brandon Carter, in his contribution to a 1973 symposium titled "Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data" honouring Copernicus's 500th birthday. His article articulated the anthropic principle as the contrary of what has come to be called the Copernican principle (which Copernicus did not articulate), which denies that the situation of humans in the cosmological order is in any way privileged. (Just as Copernicus argued that the Earth is not the centre of the universe, we now know that the sun is a typical star located in a typical galaxy.) Carter's symposium paper, "Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology," included the statement: "Although our situation is not necessarily ''central'', it is inevitably privileged to some extent" (IAUS 63 (1974) 291).

After:

Origins Reasoning and Evidence for the weak anthropic principle

The first known occurrence of the phrase "anthropic principle" appears to have been by the theoretical astrophysicist Brandon Carter, in his contribution to a 1973 symposium titled "Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data" honouring Copernicus's 500th birthday. His article articulated the anthropic principle as the contrary of what has come to be called the Copernican Cosmological Principle, which extends the General Principle of Relativity to require that all observers experience the same laws of physics uniformly throughout the universe, so at any given time, the universe will be both homogeneous and isotropic, (in 3-D space). This essentially denies that the situation of humans in the cosmological order is in any way privileged. Copernicus argued that the Earth is not the centre of the solar system, but Carter noted that pure cosmological extensions of this idea are what he called the anticentrist dogma, that led to cosmological forumlations like the Perfect Cosmological Principle, which does not result from the evolutionary physics that derives the cosmic coincidences and the otherwise unexplained large scale structuring of the universe that becomes absurdly apparent with the cosmological constant problem. This vexing problem is still the reason why the Antropic Principle is growing more popular among String Theorists that are trying to choose the correct vacuum solution from the landscape, since nobody has been able to come up with another practical stability mechanism that explains why this is. Carter's symposium paper, "Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology," included the statement: "Although our situation is not necessarily central, it is inevitably privileged to some extent" (IAUS 63 (1974) 291). Direct observational evidence in support of at least some anthropic significance in the structuring of the universe includes the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation data whose anthropic relevance has only been partially "explained-away":

CERN Courier "Does the motion of the solar system affect the microwave sky?" VOLUME 44 | NUMBER 10 | DECEMBER 2004
"On the large-angle anomalies of the microwave sky" astro-ph/0508047
The Energy of Space That Isn't Zero "These observations were also recently discussed in this context after an extended working-vacation with many of the world's leading physicists by Lawrence Krauss [1]
Carter was not the first to invoke some form of the anthropic principle: [2]







Go me... ;)