The Anthropic Principle Is Testable And Appears Weak

TL;DR

This paper argues that the Anthropic Principle, often considered untestable, can be empirically tested and appears to have weak explanatory power due to false predictions about atomic stability.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the Anthropic Principle is testable and reveals its limitations in accurately predicting atomic stability.

Findings

The Principle makes testably false predictions about Earth's atomic composition.

It cannot account for the existence of 98 stable atoms with only 19 needed for life.

The Principle's explanatory power is weaker than commonly assumed.

Abstract

The Anthropic Principle has been with us since the 1970s. This Principle is advanced to account for the "fine tuning" of the 25 constants of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Were these constants very different, life could not exist. The Anthropic Principle conditions on the existence of life and concludes that the value of the 25 constants must be within a range that allows life. The most common further step is to postulate the existence of a vast multiverse with vastly many combinations of the values of the 25 constants. By conditioning on our own life, we must be in a universe whose values allow life. The Anthropic Principle is commonly held to be untestable because we cannot be in contact with other universes. I aim here to show the Anthropic Principle is testable and that its explanatory power is weak: The Principle seems to make testably false predictions about planet Earth and the life on it. The Anthropic Principle seems unable to predict the existence of 98 stable atoms, when only 19 small atoms are needed for life.