Homocentric Universe

IT’S BRANCH RICKEY’S UNIVERSE…:

On the Unlikeliness of Life: Why We’re Still Lucky to Be Alive Today (Simon Boas, July 23, 2025, LitHub)

I think, whether you believe in divine creation or solely in physics (though the two are really not incompatible), there can be no dispute about how fortuitous it is that we are here today as free, conscious entities, able to think and experience and love. Whether it is because some loving, omnipotent, unoriginated Being consciously decided to make the particular farting, mewling, grasping masterpiece that is you, or because a set of cosmic coincidences aligned so perfectly and yet so improbably that Simon Boas resulted, being alive at all is something we don’t appreciate nearly enough.

There can be no dispute about how fortuitous it is that we are here today as free, conscious entities, able to think and experience and love.

I’ve always approached this issue much more from the empirical, scientific side, and yet the conclusion is the same. Any physicist can explain the origins of the universe from a description of big bangs and space­time and matter, but will also attest to two things: that none of this would have existed but for some pretty spectacular ‘Goldilocks’ coincidences (not too hot and not too cold); and that there are myriad things which not only can’t be explained now, but which may never be.

The universe is fine-­tuned for us to exist.

…”Luck is the residue of design.”

IT NEVER RECOVERED FROM HEISENBERG/SCHROEDINGER:

REVIEW: of Escape from Shadow Physics By Adam Forrest Kay (Reviewed by Stephen Case, July 20, 2025, Washington Independent Review of Books)

The “best summary of quantum physics,” writes Kay, “[is these] five words: ‘Don’t look: wave. Look: particle.’” The phrase refers to the cryptic double-slit experiment used to determine whether electrons are waves or particles. The shocker? When humans are not observing, this experiment reveals electrons to be waves. But when they are observing? Electrons are particles. (For a clever and convincing demo, see Jim Al-Khalili’s video on YouTube.)

Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynmann said the two-slit experiment is “impossible…to explain in any classical way,” yet many physicists couldn’t care less about such quantum puzzles. When newbie students ask skeptical questions, in fact, some professors in the field allegedly bark, “Shut up and calculate!” Their reasoning? “[W]e cannot do better than the probabilities…even in theory,” Kay says. “The…hidden variables that would [explain what is happening] do not even exist.”

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN:

Wolfgang Smith’s Legacy: Smith observed that while the sciences’ blind adherence to a flat material reality permits a certain utility, it does not account for the multidimensional world in which we actually live. (Scott Ventureyra, 7/18/25, Crisis)

One of Smith’s most profound distinctions was between the corporeal and the physical, not merely as empirical categories but as ontological realities. The corporeal refers to the fully realized world of lived experience, rich with quality, meaning, and symbols of what we truly encounter as beings-in-the-world. The physical, by contrast, lacks intrinsic being; it is not a full level of existence but something ontologically deficient. Drawing from the metaphysical insight of St. Thomas Aquinas, Smith described the physical as akin to materia signata quantitate—matter designated by quantity, which is something that lies midway between being and non-being. It is not yet actualized by form and thus lacks full existence.

This “sub-existential” status explains why modern physics, which focuses solely on this domain, provides only a fragmented account of reality rather than a complete one, abstracted from the concrete and meaningful whole. In Smith’s view, this is precisely what makes quantum mechanics both fascinating and ontologically unstable, since it operates in a realm of semi-reality that permits technological utility but cannot account for the fullness of existence. Without the reintegration of the corporeal, modern science remains blind to the symbolic and spiritual dimension of the cosmos.
In Smith’s view, this is precisely what makes quantum mechanics both fascinating and ontologically unstable, since it operates in a realm of semi-reality that permits technological utility but cannot account for the fullness of existence.

For Smith, quantum theory itself hinted at a metaphysical order that science could not account for. The collapse of the wave function, for instance, required an ontology that distinguished between the corporeal and physical domains

Physics depends on the Observer and then denying one existed.

NO ONE EVER BELIEVED IN ENTROPY:

Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex: A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution. (Philip Ball, April 2, 2025, Quanta)

In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of intelligent alien life with his colleagues. If alien civilizations exist, he said, some should surely have had enough time to expand throughout the cosmos. So where are they?

Many answers to Fermi’s “paradox” have been proposed: Maybe alien civilizations burn out or destroy themselves before they can become interstellar wanderers. But perhaps the simplest answer is that such civilizations don’t appear in the first place: Intelligent life is extremely unlikely, and we pose the question only because we are the supremely rare exception.

A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics — the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder.

We are all designist.