Nice! Searching… I see that he has an articlefrom 1989 that is a trove of gems. He tosses this one off to get the idea started (which was also new to me):
In one very weak version, the anthropic principle amounts simply to the use of the fact that we are here as one more experimental datum. For instance, recall M. Goldhaber’s joke that “we know in our bones” that the lifetime of the proton must be greater than about 10^16 yr, because otherwise we would not survive the ionizing particles produced by proton decay in our own bodies. No one can argue with this version, but it does not help us to explain anything, such as why the proton lives so long. Nor does it give very useful experimental information; certainly experimental physicists (including Goldhaber) have provided us with better limits on the proton life-time.
The presentation has the tone of a survey, and floats many ideas, equations, and empirical results than I can wrap my head around swiftly, but it appears that the core idea is that too fast an expansion might have prevented the condensation of enough matter, via gravity, for some of the matter to become us. He self cites back to1987.
Steven Weinberg argued anthropically for a small nonzero cosmological constant, a few years before dark energy became part of standard cosmology.
Nice! Searching… I see that he has an article from 1989 that is a trove of gems. He tosses this one off to get the idea started (which was also new to me):
The presentation has the tone of a survey, and floats many ideas, equations, and empirical results than I can wrap my head around swiftly, but it appears that the core idea is that too fast an expansion might have prevented the condensation of enough matter, via gravity, for some of the matter to become us. He self cites back to 1987.