Equation 2 · Part 1 · Fine-Tuning Without a Tuner: Selection Effects in Physics
Symbol P
What this part means
P is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Its job in the formula
P is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Full expression→Symbol P→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
Done correctly, the weak principle is pure statistics: it is a conditioning operation, identical in structure to correcting a biased sample in any other empirical science. A concrete instrument in this article’s own world makes the logic exact rather than analogical. A magneto-optical trap holds a cloud of atoms by continuously discarding the ones moving too fast to be captured by the cooling beams; every atom visible in the trap already survived a velocity cut. Someone who measured only the trapped cloud and concluded “the atoms in this room are unusually cold” would be committing exactly Eddington’s error — the room is not unusually cold, the trap is unusually selective, and the correction…
Learn the underlying idea
A function assigns an output to each allowed input. The expression f(x) means “apply f to x”.
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Sources cited in the surrounding passage
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