Ancient origins of a modern anthropic argument against cosmologies involving infinite series of past events are considered. It is shown that this argument – which in modern times has been put forward by distinguished cosmologists such as Paul C. W. Davies and Frank J. Tipler – originates in pre-Socratic times and is implicitly present in the cyclical cosmology of Empedocles. There are traces of...

We consider the little-known anthropic argument of Fontenelle dealing with the nature of cometary orbits, given a year before the publication of Newton’s Principia. This is particularly interesting in view of the rapid development of the recently resurgent theories of cometary catastrophism and their role in the modern astrobiological debates, for instance in the “rare Earth” hypothesis of

I use Bousso’s causal diamond measure to make a statistical prediction for the dark matter abundance, assuming an axion with a large decay constant fa ≫ 10 GeV. Using a crude approximation for observer formation, the prediction agrees well with observation: 25% of observers see less dark matter than we do while 75% of observers see more dark matter. Larger values of the dark matter ratio are di...

Expressing spatial information with iconic gestures is abundant in human communication and requires to transform a referent representation into resembling gestural form. This task is challenging as the mapping is determined by the visuo-spatial features of the referent, the overall discourse context as well as concomitant speech, and its outcome varies considerably across different speakers. We...

English intonation can be difficult for L2 speakers to learn, particularly for those whose L1 intonation system works differently from English. This study investigates whether Hong Kong English (HKE) speakers whose L1 is Cantonese have knowledge of the appropriate English intonation patterns in specific contexts. Results from an intonation pattern selection tasks indicate that HKE speakers (n =...

The affirmative statement of the existence of extraterrestrial life is tentatively raised to the status of a principle. Accordingly, Fermi's question is answered and the anthropic principle is shown to be fal-sifiable. The timescale for the development of life on Earth and the age of the universe are the fundamental quantities upon which the arguments are framed.