Anthropic reason for the relationship of apparent size of the moon and the sun from earth?

It's pretty striking that the moon to a very large degree covers the sun when seen from earth during a solar eclipse. From what I understand earth is the only planet that even has solar eclipses where the apparent size of the moon matches so exactly the apparent size of the sun.

I find it a bit hard to think that it's only "luck", but then again I can't see any reason why the diameter would have any bearing on anything, rather it would be the mass that "counts" physically, so if we make the moon as large as the earth, keeping the moon density as it is, would it have the same mass as the earth then? That could be a clue, if so. But even so, we still have the other planets with their moons which could have the same ratio without them being in such a distance as to cover the sun that way. Which pretty much leaves us with a anthropic reason as we happen to be the only planet with life that can observe it, but for it to be a anthropic reason it would have to be necessary for life in some way (necessary for observers), but I can't really find any such reason. Do you have any ideas of such a reason? Is the scientific community basically attributing it to chance?

 

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Pure and simply coincedence.
When the Moon first formed, it was probably less then half the distance from Earth, to what it is now, and a day on Earth was much shorter.
Tidal gravitational effects and friction though are at work.
It works like this.....
The Moon is the major player in Earth's tides. But due to the Earth's rotation, those tides are slightly ahead of the overhead Moon.
The tides themselves causes friction on the Earth's crust, slowing it down ever so slightly, and being slightly ahead of the overhead Moon, has the effects of pulling the Moon into a higher orbit.
These changes in distance and time amount to only a cm or so per year and a couple of seconds.
In fact in around 3 billion years?? The Earth will have slowed to such a rate that it will have the same side facing the Moon continually, and a day will be equal to a lunar month.
So in essence we are just plain lucky to be able to see total eclipses.
In the further all eclipses will be annular.

At this present epoch in time, the Sun is 400 times further from Earth than our Moon is, and also 400 times bigger.

 

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Anthropic reason means we only consider it significant because we are here to observe it, not that it's necessary for life in some way.

 

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Of course.

 

It is most assuredly chance, but it's also strangely convenient for a number of purely scientific reasons;

1) The moon is a great place from which to launch expeditions to other planetary bodies in our solar system, and large enough to accommodate colonizations from all political areas of the Earth, if we ever learn to get along with each other, that is.
2) Evidently human gestational physiology has synchronized to the phases of the moon (how romantic is that?)
3) You can verify the shape of the Earth from the way the moon appears when traveling between Northern, Southern hemispheres.
4) It allows you to verify things like the perihelion of Mercury and gravitational lensing.
5) It is close enough to afford a quick evacuation of at least a tiny portion of Earh's population in the event of an extreme collision similar to the one that created the moon in the first place, and is also a great place from which to assess any damage.
6) It provides us with several Earth-Moon Lagrange points which are useful for all sorts of science, as well as to stabilize the positions of geostationary satellites in inclined orbits. The degree to which this affords us extended life for communications satellites is difficult to place a dollar figure on, but it would be a lot. Short of something along the lines of Clarke's space elevator, the moon is a pretty hard act to follow in terms of facilitating space exploration.

Elevating something as vague as the Anthropic Principle to the level of science doesn't really make much sense. A large portion of the 20 or so "free parameters" were deliberately adjusted to be "Anthro friendly" based on observations of the way things are in the universe today, without regard to how very unfriendly to life and anthropomorphic life forms in the earlier stages of the universe right after the Big Bang actually were. We could not have survived easily on the Earth when it was formed 4 billion years ago. Life itself must adjust and adapt to environmental conditions to survive. That's one reason why the Origin of Species is such an important scientific principle; much more than something like the Anthropic principle, to which this thread indirectly refers in relation to the size and position of the moon.

 

or just another coincidence.

 

The Anthropic principle isn't vague, it can explain things that have no direct correlation to eachother, like what does life have to do with a physical law being (more or less) exactly as it is? There's no causual relation, instead we would attribute it to the Anthropic Principle, if it weren't that way then we wouldn't exist to see it. Let's face it; unless we find a reason why physical laws are the way they are, they could be just about anything, and most other values of the laws would not support observers at all - in any form that we can comprehend. The interesting thing is that the fine-tuning is to such a narrow extent, which should (in the absence of other facts, and taking into account the infinite number of possible worlds) tell us that we are pretty darn special!

A new finding is, for example, that most star systems have their largest planets closest to the star, they have, in fact, not found many other stars systems that look like ours (if even one) where the large planets are uttermost, which is pretty amazing when you think about it, there has been some extraordinary event to shuffle us to the positions we are at. I'll post a link to the fact when I find it (credible source). Anthropic Principle shouldn't be taken lightly, discovering indicators of anthropic principle have in some cases brought light to things we wouldn't have known otherwise.

Anthropic Principle isn't just about observers, or life, it could be specifically about you, if this is a multiverse then perhaps your ancestor wasn't killed because a solar eclipse happened on the day of execution? And that's why the moon is relative to our view the same size as the sun. Anthropic Principle could be far grander than you expect, you could have your life depending on it.

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My all-time favorite science teacher in junior high school was also my sixth grade teacher, and taught only part time, splitting his employment between teaching at local schools and working at the Goddard space flight center in the days before the Apollo moon landing.

One lesson he taught us was in sixth grade was that it was something of a miracle that water ice was less dense than the water it formed in and it floated and also expanded, so that ice on top of a lake would not sink to the bottom making it more difficult for fish and other submarine life to exist under such icy conditions. Although he never mentioned it, it's also something of a minor miracle that gasses like oxygen are more soluble in colder water.

I have read a great many science fact and fiction books since then, and only in the most recent ones has the Anthropic principle emerged to replace Sagan's old saw of Occam's Razor. Lee Smolin, one of my favorite authors, has suggested something akin to a cosmological theory of natural selection for the multiverse, suggesting that our entire universe must be "just so" in terms of 20 or so fundamental parameters some of which are depicted in the graphs you have provided. Smolin's ideas on multiverse cosmological evolution were largely ignored.

The second graph (Number of Large Time Dimensions vs. Number of Large Spatial Dimensions) is a good example of a bad example. We wouldn't know if there is an area where spatial and dimensions are greater than 1.5, because even in those scales, most events in the universe are unobservable. Once a photon has left the area, unless it strikes a mirror and bounces back, you literally never see it again, even if you chase it as fast as you can. Many of these WILL be completely unpredictable, and most events that are going on around you will never be observed by someone standing where you are. As an indication of how 'special' we are, this graph is so much nonsense.

The first graph is kind of a nice display of how atoms are sculpted from EM, electroweak and strong forces, but really it impresses me about as much as the lesson taught to us in 6th grade. It made us feel special until we got (much) older and more jaded and eventually realized that EVERYTHING we see or think about is a miracle, and there are no two ways about it. You didn't even mention the ozone layer, and that was nearly destroyed before we fully realized how we were destroying it. The fact that there is a nuclear fusion reactor in the sky that rains all the energy we could possibly want down on us and also on the plants that begin Earth's food chain for free is a miracle, particularly when you consider how much effort has gone into duplicating this energy resource down here with nothing like success for the last 50 or so years. If we survive this round of global warming, there's going to be a lot more desert, and you can take that to the reservoir. Who would argue that the global warming we are ourselves creating is for the benefit of our own comfort, or in accordance with the Anthropic Principle?

That we are special is great, but I don't see a divine hand in it anymore. We develop as we do because life developing any other way would mean we grew up in a toxic atmosphere, with a hostile chemical and thermal environment that we couldn't stand without undergoing physiological change or even with everything around us so radioactive that it sterilizes life before it can get started, like you showed us in the first graph.

Here's what's really wrong with the Anthropic Principle as science: Do you suppose the dinosaurs had a Dinothropic Principle 65 million years ago when an asteroid derailed their branch of evolution trying only to become bigger, hungrier, and more predatory? I promise that when the next mega supernova goes off in our corner of the galaxy with a blast of deadly radiation aimed directly at Earth, I'll try to remember that if it were not for the Anthropic Principle, no one would be here to observe our own demise at the hand dealt us of outrageous misfortune.

I think Occam's Razor was given up for the more romantic idea that if you systematically eliminate all other likely explanations, then whatever is left, however improbable, MUST be the truth. Oh, really? And who gets to decide what is likely and what is not? Not a scientist, these days. That's for sure.

 

What do you think the Anthropic Principle means? What do you think Occam's Razor means?

 

The Anthropic Principle says simply the universe we observe must be compatible with the life that is observing it (us).

The source of this principle: Captain Obvious, superhero of the cognitively challenged.
Pogo's "we have met the enemy and he is us." was a more inspired and insightful principle.

Occam's Razor says that the simplest answer is most often the correct one,
and the best counter to that one has always been: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." - H. L. Mencken

Occam's Razor has broad appeal to people who like to deal in absolutes. For instance, the man who wrote it believed the Pope to be a heretic, and was kicked out of the church for his trouble. Would it not have been a simpler assumption to believe that Ockham himself was the heretic? The Pope evidently thought so, applying Ockham's own principle.

For reasons not completely clear, Carl Sagan liked this principle enough to use it often.

It is my fervent hope that scientists at least will stop using either of these principles as though they were science (because they aren't), and yesterday would not be soon enough.

 

The anthropic principle doesn't care for the future, it can only tell us something about the world as it is right now, and yes, of course there was a anthropic principle also for the dinosaurs, up to the point of their exitinction, just as it is applicable for us up to the point of our extinction.

The principle isn't evidence of anything, but can tell us which direction to look for answers.

That ice floats on water isn't only beneficial for us, the oceans would freeze completely from the bottom up otherwise, leaving most of earth a icey planet, ice also takes up more space displacing the water above it so that perhaps there would not be any land at all, just a giant ice-sheet. Of course, evolution could have prepared life for that situation, if life can form in such conditions.

I agree with you that the second graph really is just speculation, the first graph is better though, showing pretty clearly our place in the scheme of things. Could be explained by multiverse, or perhaps that the constants are actually variable. When things are striking to us, then we look that direction to try to answer it, anthropic principle is just a explanation in place of the real explanation. You could see it as a "dummy" until we get the real answer. It does have applications in science though, and as long as it does we would be fools not to use it. Whenever we see something that fits "too perfectly" we should always try to see if there is something beneficial to us observers.

We can take a completely imaginary scenario to illustrate this; let's say that synthesizing the first living cell required the condition that most of the sunlight was gone but radiation that could pass through the moon was kept, perhaps because sunlight would scramble the particles otherwise or something (this is imaginary of course so just bare with me), and some scientist would look and wonder if eclipses had something to do with life because of the anthropic principle, he would now have a first stepping stone for discovering a key part of the formation of the first cell. Similarly other anthropic aspects can set us on the right path to discover something new, specifically about us observers.

Neither the anthropic principle or occham's razor should be taken as absolute truth though, some things are coincidence as well, and there's no telling if a more complex theory is actually what reality does, but it's at least easier to describe a theory that doesn't have unnecessary elements.

 

Ockham's Razor simply says that the simplest explanation consistent with the facts is to be preferred. There is nothing about this that says the simple answer is most likely to be right, as you put it.

Ockham's Razor is just the principle of not introducing unnecessary hypotheses. So, if a simple explanation fails to account for the facts, a more complex one should be resorted to - as common sense would indicate.

(Mencken's comment is no criticism of Ockham's Razor. It is a criticism of tidy-minded people, especially in politics, who pretend that everything can be reduced to something simple.)