Topics such as the Multiverse, fine-tuning (especially for life), the Anthropic Principle, and so on—some or all of which are often, but not always, discussed together—are hotly debated topics. However, to some extent, I think that some of the confusion is due to people talking past each other, using the same term to mean different things, describing the same thing by different terms, confusing various definitions, and so on, so I've written up my thoughts on that topic. As mentioned in the acknowledgements, the paper is a greatly expanded version of a poster I presented at a Cosmology 2018 in Dubrovnik.
My hope is that, even if you don't agree with me regarding those topics, or even if you think that my description of possible confusion is wrong, you'll at least appreciate that there is more than the usual risk of being misunderstood when talking about such topics.
The file linked to below is the author's accepted manuscript (a technical term with a very specific meaning). According to FoP policy, a preprint can be posted at any time on any webserver, but the AAM can be posted after acceptance on a personal website and, after the 12-month embargo, can be posted to
their employer's internal website; their insitutional and/or funder repositoriesThat means that the only way to have it on arXiv would be as a preprint, but for several reasons I (used to) put stuff on arXiv only after acceptance, so this paper will never appear on arXiv. However, I've stopped submitting to arXiv anyway. Except for some matters of formatting, especially for the references, it is essentially identical to the published version.
This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after
peer review and is subject to Springer Nature's
AM terms of use,
but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance
improvements, or any corrections. The Version of Record is available
online at:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-023-00732-8.
A link to a freely available official version can be found on the
abstract page.
The link below points to one file containing the complete text, all figures and tables etc.