Bernard Carr

Background

Bernard Carr (b. 1949) is a British cosmologist and mathematician at Queen Mary University of London, known for foundational work on the anthropic principle. His 1979 Nature paper with Martin Rees, "The Anthropic Principle and the Structure of the Physical World," is a locus classicus of the observation that the large-scale structure of the cosmos — and the possibility of life within it — depends sensitively on the values of the fundamental constants, especially those governing gravity.

Carr's work is cited in this wiki as part of the scientific pedigree of the multiverse response to fine-tuning: the same anthropic reasoning that documents the sensitivity of the constants can, read the other way, be marshaled to argue that observer-selection over an ensemble dissolves the appearance of design. His writings are not in the corpus; the position is represented via the Stanford Encyclopedia.

Positions held in this wiki

• The Fine-Tuning Argument — cited alongside Martin Rees as an anthropic cosmologist in the fine-tuning literature; the sensitivity of cosmic structure to the constants is catalogued at SEP 'Fine-Tuning' §1.1.1. The article notes the corpus "does not contain Rees, Carr, Tegmark, or Susskind directly."

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: Carr & Rees (1979) and Carr's later anthropic-cosmology essays are not ingested. The fine-tuning of the physical constants they document is surveyed at SEP 'Fine-Tuning' §1.1.1. See meta/ingestion-queue.md.

Principal critics

• Robin Collins — argues the multiverse does not escape design: any constant-varying ensemble requires its own finely-tuned generating mechanism.
• William Lane Craig — challenges the empirical and probabilistic credentials of an unobservable ensemble invoked to defuse the fine-tuning data.

See also

• Martin Rees — co-author and the popular voice of the same anthropic-multiverse program.
• Alan Guth — inflationary cosmology, a candidate mechanism for generating an ensemble.