Sean Carroll

I have thought about it, and I do not have the theory of everything that is a comprehensive answer there.

But I do have this feeling that what we're trying to do as scientists in these cases is attach credences within the space of theories we haven't thought of yet.

Right?

And that's especially hard to do.

But I was trying to use the example in that solo podcast of like, if we had measured that the mass of the muon was exactly pi times the mass of the electron, right?

And okay, yeah, that's a real number.

It could have been a different real number.

Should we notice anything about that?

And I want to make the case that yes, because that increases our feeling that there is some reason why that's true that we haven't yet thought of.

So I think it is a matter of scientific practice that we think that certain possibilities are suggestive of certain future truths we haven't yet discovered.

And it's okay to take that into consideration when we're judging things to be finely tuned or natural or otherwise.

The pie example is especially contrived, but the cosmological constant, the vacuum energy, which we know to be small but not zero, or we think it is small but not zero with respect to what we would have thought was the natural range.

Again, that's a number.

Why should we be more surprised at that number than anything else?

But somehow in our brains as scientists, we're doing an implicit coarse-graining over the possibilities and not assigning them uniform probability.

And that's because we're being scientists.

I think it's okay.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah, I think that's perfectly fair, too.