Category Archives: Writing

Fine-Tuning: The Argument That Won’t Die

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The universe shouldn’t work.

That’s not a philosophical position. It’s an engineering observation. The constants that govern how matter behaves (the strength of gravity, the mass of the electron, the rate at which the universe expands) are set to values so specific that adjusting any of them by a fraction of a percent collapses the whole structure. No stars. No chemistry. No time long enough for anything to happen. The tolerances are absurd.

Physicists call this fine-tuning. The name is polite. What they mean is: the odds against this universe are so extreme that “chance” stops being a useful word for it.

The Two Escapes That Aren’t

Two answers dominate the debate, and neither is as clean as its proponents pretend.

The first is design. Someone set the dials. The universe looks like it was built for life because it was built for life. The problem is that this explains nothing mechanically; it just relocates the question one level up. Who built the builder? And why does a universe designed for life consist of 99.9999% lethal vacuum, with life confined to a thin biological smear on one unremarkable rock?

The second is the multiverse. If you generate enough universes (some versions say 10 to the power of 500, which is a number that has stopped meaning anything), eventually one rolls the right numbers. We’re in that one because we couldn’t exist in any other. This is the Weak Anthropic Principle: we observe what permits our observation. True, trivially. It explains why we’re here without explaining what set the parameters. It also requires an infinite number of unobservable universes as its load-bearing assumption, which puts it in the same epistemic category as the thing it’s trying to replace.

Both positions treat the constants as prior: fixed before any observer arrives. That assumption is where the argument gets interesting.

The Observer Problem

Quantum mechanics has an unresolved problem at its core. A particle exists in a superposition of states until it’s measured. At the moment of measurement, it resolves to one outcome. The math is exact. The mechanism is unknown. Why does observation collapse probability into actuality?

Most physicists park this question and get on with the calculations. A few take it seriously as a clue about the nature of reality.

John Wheeler spent decades on it. His conclusion, which he called the Participatory Anthropic Principle, was that observers don’t just record the universe; they bring it into being. Not metaphorically. Retroactively, through the act of observation, the universe acquires a definite history. Without observers, there is no collapse, no resolution, no definite past. The universe requires participants to be real.

QBism (quantum Bayesianism) pushes this further. The wavefunction isn’t a property of the universe out there; it’s an agent’s belief-state about what they’ll find when they interact with it. Reality is co-created at the moment of contact between observer and system. There is no view from nowhere.

These aren’t fringe positions. They’re minority positions within a field where the majority hasn’t solved the measurement problem either. The standard interpretation (Copenhagen) essentially says: don’t ask. The wavefunction collapses when observed. Move on. That’s not an answer, it’s a professional courtesy.

What We’re Actually Arguing About

The fine-tuning debate has lasted this long because it isn’t really a physics debate. The physics is genuinely unresolved, but the heat comes from elsewhere. Fine-tuning is a mirror. It reflects whatever you bring to it: the theologian sees confirmation, the materialist sees a threat, the philosopher sees an infinite regress.

What it actually is, stripped of the freight, is an open question about the relationship between observers and the reality they observe. That question is at the center of quantum mechanics, unsolved after a century. Anyone who tells you they’ve answered it (with God, with the multiverse, with consciousness) is telling you more about themselves than about the universe.

The constants are what they are. The blueprints are still inside the control room. We’re standing outside, listening to the machinery run, and arguing about what the building is for.

The Inversion

I write sci-fi. I often start with a “what if” and build a universe from there: its physics, its rules, any departures from today’s starting point, then the situation, the characters, and let the story build itself. I discover the story a bit like you do when reading it.

Taking the above as a starting point: what if the constants aren’t set in advance? What if consciousness and cosmos co-emerge, and the tuning is the relationship, not the precondition?

The standard framing puts observers at the end of a long causal chain: universe forms, constants happen to permit chemistry, chemistry permits biology, biology permits minds. Fine-tuning is the mystery at step one.

The inversion says: the chain runs both ways. The universe doesn’t pre-tune for life. It and life arrive together, and the constants we measure are not prior constraints but the record of that co-emergence. We don’t observe a fine-tuned universe. We participate in one.

This has a strange implication for the Fermi paradox. That paradox asks, why, given a universe old enough and large enough to have produced intelligence a thousand times over, do we seem to be alone in our corner of it?

The standard answers are grim (they’re dead, they’re hiding, travel is impossible) or optimistic (we’re early, they’re out there, we haven’t looked hard enough). The inversion suggests something stranger: each consciousness-cluster tunes its local physics. Not deliberately, not by choice. By existing. The region of space we occupy is already, in some structural sense, spoken for. Other intelligences don’t fail to appear nearby because they never had a chance to evolve. This doesn’t rule out life; it says intelligence has an even higher evolutionary mountain to overcome. It can happen, but the positioning required is exquisite. Intelligence is separated by immense time and space by definition.

Light speed remains the speed limit of natural change (at the Planck foam level, tuning can propagate no faster). The observable universe is many billions of light years across. Other consciousness-centers can evolve concurrently (whatever “at the same time” means across cosmological scales) and as their influence zones expand and eventually overlap, they settle toward equilibrium. There’s no reason other intelligences haven’t evolved, won’t evolve. They just do so in ways that place them very far from each other. If they’re too orthogonal to reconcile, the incompatibility itself forces a fork: a separate universe instance where both can exist without contradiction.

The Soft Edge

If the constants are the product of co-emergence rather than prior fixtures, they can’t be infinitely rigid. The consciousness-affected zone is vast, maybe millions of light years across, but we can see vastly further than that. The universe across its whole breadth had to have had us as a possibility from the first, so it will be largely coherent. But at the very edges, looking out into reaches beyond our tuned zone, we might see the occasional wobble against our expectations. We do see things we can’t explain. Maybe that’s one reason.

There also has to be some original malleability in the underlying structure. At the Planck length, if our theories are even close, that’s where it would live. Once set, some mechanism, some momentum, holds things together. What that is remains open. But the what-if builds from here: what if minds operate in a non-deterministic state because we evolved a mechanism that makes us more than puppets of causality? What if that mechanism could be amplified? Could the universe, at small scales, be nudged by will, by perception: a natural ability turned up just enough to matter?

The rules of physics we measure in our tuned pocket are local, not universal. Outside them, things are possible that our physics would classify as impossible. Not because the laws of nature have been broken. Because the laws in that region haven’t fully hardened.

This is what a rigorous theory of magic would look like. Not violation of physics. Physics that hasn’t finished resolving.

This isn’t a claim about how the universe works. It’s a coherent frame, reasonably consistent with what we don’t know about quantum measurement and observer participation, and more interesting than either of the standard escapes.

A novel I’m working on takes this seriously as a premise. It builds from the cosmology down to the plot: what happens when a civilization discovers this reality, and what it means that others in distant galaxies may have known it for a long time and have reason to worry about a new competitor.

The adventure and space opera come with the territory. But the physics is the foundation.

What if our physics is contingent rather than absolute?

If You Want to Pull This Thread

John Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links” (1989). The paper where Wheeler lays out “It from Bit” and the participatory universe. Dense, but the original argument in his own words.

David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (1997). Makes the case for the multiverse more rigorously than most popularizations, and is honest about what it costs philosophically. Good for understanding the strongest version of the position before deciding what you think of it.

Chris Fuchs on QBism. His papers are technical, but his interviews and lectures are accessible. Search “QBism Fuchs” and find a talk. The core idea (that the wavefunction is an agent’s belief, not a fact about the world) takes about twenty minutes to understand and longer to shake.

Nick Bostrom, Anthropic Bias (2002). The most careful treatment of observer-selection effects and the anthropic principle. Dry, rigorous, and it will make you distrust every argument in this space, including the ones in this post.

Tags: physics, philosophy, cosmology, fine-tuning, quantum mechanics, consciousness, Fermi paradox

📺 YouTube: The Unretired Engineer | 🔗 LinkedIn | 📚 Published works — M.A. Harris

Andy Weir’s Genius in Project Hail Mary

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Andy Weir has a rare gift: he writes ordinary people — genuinely, recognizably ordinary — who have a skill that is also recognizable, and then puts them in situations where their one extraordinary competence is the only thing standing between them and death (in the case of Project Hail Mary, the extinction of the Human race.) The heroism is quiet and technical and you could almost believe that you could do that in the right circumstances.

You believe it because he’s made you believe in the person first. I saw the movie. I read the book years ago. Both are excellent, and the movie is one of the most faithful book-to-screen adaptations in recent memory.

Like The Martian before it, the film sticks closely to the book in both thesis and spirit. That fidelity matters: both stories rely on the reader/viewer trusting that the protagonist’s problem-solving is real, not movie-magic. Break that contract and the whole thing collapses. Weir earns it on the page; the filmmakers preserved it on screen.

The one genuine gap between novel and film is interior monologue. Novels handle internal states naturally; movies almost cannot. But Weir constructs scenes that externalize internal conflict visually — and those translate superbly.

A couple of minor side arcs from the book are absent, and I think those were wise cuts. They deepened the protagonist on the page but would have felt excessive at feature length.

One thread that bothered me in the book and still bugs me in the movie: Ryland Grace is pulled into the program because in his post-doctoral research he had proposed that alien life does not require water and carbon — and had defended that position to a career-ending degree. When the AstroPhage is first discovered it appears very alien, so Grace is brought in for initial analysis. He then finds it’s made of the same materials as Earth life — which undercuts his entire reason for being there and threatens to sideline him. That it doesn’t is a good twist; go see the movie or read the book for how it resolves.

Here’s where my engineering brain creates further friction. The AstroPhage’s energy density is extraordinary, and the novel acknowledges this and hand-waves it away. I cannot see how any life form built on biology similar to our own could handle those energy levels — it feels bolted in, even if it probably wasn’t. Similarly, Rocky — the alien Grace meets at the target sun — turns out to be exactly what Grace originally proposed: a non-water/carbon life form, which feels a little convenient in vindicating him.

There are complaints about Rocky delivering a specific thematic point about first contact and communication. My view is the opposite (other than the niggle above) that whole piece is brilliantly on point and there would not have been much of a story without it.

None of that diminishes what Weir achieves. He takes relatable people with very human quirks and puts them in situations where they have to fight to survive — and we root for them completely. And here i put the very alien Rocky in the bucket of people…he is about the best alien I have seen in a move ever. I wish I were half the author he is, and I say that as someone who is trying. Project Hail Mary is the rare book where you finish it and immediately want someone else to read it so you can talk about it. The movie earns the same feeling. Go see it.

The Physics Produced the Ship

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The Dagger Design

Most fictional spacecraft are designed backwards. The writer decides what the ship needs to do dramatically, then invents a reason it can do that. The result is technology that serves the plot. Which is fine, until you need it to do something different in book three, at which point you quietly bend the rules and hope no one notices.

Engineers don’t do that. Not because we’re more disciplined — because we can’t. You don’t change the spec because the schedule is tight. You re-examine the architecture or you live with the constraint.

That instinct, applied to fiction, produces something different.

The principal auxiliary warship in the Sea of Suns universe is called a Dagger. Here’s how it got its name — and it wasn’t because I thought “dagger” sounded good.

The Transit system — the FTL drive in this universe — works through a rail. The rail is a linear gravity generator that manipulates quantum foam to open a wormhole large enough for the ship to pass through. The rail controls volume you can push through: the more mass you want to move between stars, the more rails you need. Compute controls speed: the transit step is a calculation, and the faster you want to step, the more computing capacity you need.

That trade-off isn’t decoration. It’s the architecture.

An auxiliary warship needs to be fast. In this universe, fast means compute capacity. Compute capacity takes up volume inside the vessel. So a fast warship is, almost by definition, a ship that has traded its interior for processors. Twin rails — enough to move a meaningful crew and weapons load — with almost every remaining cubic metre given over to compute. Crew of two to five on a thousand-foot vessel. Not much else aboard.

Now you have a ship that’s fast, carries almost no cargo, and spends all its operational time in real space. Real space means it’s detectable. A detectable warship needs stealth. The most effective passive stealth for a vessel in this universe is minimising cross-section — flat surfaces, minimal radar return. You sheath the hull in flat panels that force the profile into a long, slender blade shape.

The name isn’t metaphor. It’s a description of what the physics produced.

I didn’t design a cool warship and retrofit a justification. The constraints generated the vessel, and then the vessel generated scenes I hadn’t planned, because once you know what a Dagger can and can’t do, certain tactical situations become inevitable.

That’s the engineer’s advantage in hard SF, and it’s not what most people think it is.

It’s not technical accuracy. You’ve invented the technology — accuracy isn’t really the point. It’s that engineering training gives you a specific habit of mind: ask what the constraints produce, not what you need them to produce. Follow the logic. Let the system build itself.

When the system is honest, the world it generates is consistent without effort, because everything follows from the same rules. The Dagger’s tactical role, its crew size, its limitations, the scenarios it enables — none of that required invention. It came out of the trade-off.

The reader doesn’t need to understand the Transit physics to feel that the Dagger is real. They just need to encounter it behaving consistently with itself across the whole story. That consistency is what creates the texture that makes a fictional universe feel inhabited rather than constructed.

Thirty years of engineering taught me that coherent systems generate their own logic. Turns out that works in fiction too.

Why Engineers Write Better Hard SF is on The Unretired Engineer YouTube channel —

Stranded in the Stars, Book One of the Sea of Suns Trilogy, is available on Kindle. The Dagger appears early and often. https://www.amazon.com/Stranded-Stars-M-Harris-ebook/dp/B0GT123PLP

The Problem With AI Answers Is That They’re Almost Right

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AI slop isn’t obvious. That’s what makes it dangerous.

If an AI gave you complete nonsense, you’d catch it. The problem is when it gives you something fluent, confident, and “mostly” correct — with a flaw buried in the middle that you’ll only find if you already know the answer.

That’s the thing about AI as a research tool: it will give you the consensus view, coherently expressed, at the level of resolution that the training data supports. Where the training data is thin, ambiguous, or where real expertise requires distinguishing between things that *look* similar but aren’t — that’s where it fails. And it fails confidently.

Even when you use the deep research tools there are problems. When I was developing some content for my YouTube channel, The Unretired Engineer I ran into this doing research on Wolfspeed’s financial situation and the SiC power electronics market. I asked a deep research tool to pull together an analysis. What came back looked thorough. The problem was that it took a lot of information that had gone out about the future of the fab and future plans for markets and conflated them with what had happened and what was likely to happen in the near future.

To someone without a background with Wolfspeed and the real status of the SiC, the analysis would have read as authoritative. It wasn’t. It had serious timing errors delivered with confidence. I knew it was wrong because I’d spent years in that space. If I hadn’t, I might have taken it as written.

The fix isn’t to stop using it. The fix is to put yourself into it.

When I work with AI on my engineering writing, or on the physics underlying my novels, I’m not asking it to do the thinking. I’m using my domain knowledge to steer it, to catch the near-misses, and to push it past the consensus into territory where the expertise actually matters. The AI amplifies what I bring. Without that, it’s just averaging.

Use it as a tool. But know what it can’t know — and that’s usually the thing that matters most.

—

https://youtube.com/shorts/mbmKm_JcHQ0?feature=share

Mark Harris is a system and mechanical engineer and the author of “Stranded in the Stars” (Book One, The Sea of Suns Trilogy), available now on [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Stranded-Stars-M-Harris-ebook/dp/B0GT123PLP)
 

The Engineer’ Return to the Keyboard

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Optimization, Systems, and Storytelling: Why I’m Back

It has been a while—twenty years by some counts—since I first sat down to bridge the gap between “This World” of high-tech engineering and the “Others” I build in my fiction.

For four decades, my world was defined by electronic packaging, power electronics, and project engineering for EVs in both the commercial and defense sectors. I’ve spent my time in the trenches of “Dilbert’s world,” working the real details that make everything from electromagnetic guns to nuclear electric space probes real. But as any engineer knows, a system is only as good as its last optimization.

During those 40-plus years, I was an intermittent author of fiction and science fiction, though at times the projects I worked on felt like fiction as well.

At 68, I was “unretired.” (You can see the genesis of this in my YouTube video, EVs Ate My Job.) Through my channel, The Unretired Engineer, I explore how a lifetime of technical rigor applies to the modern world. Now, I am bringing that same focus back to this blog and my novels. Writing is, after all, the ultimate engineering challenge: building a world from scratch that doesn’t collapse under the weight of its own physics.

What to Expect Moving Forward:

Technical Deep Dives: The “how-to” behind the tech in my books, like the propulsion systems in The Sea of Suns.

The Editing Trench: Updates on my current copy-editing passes for The Sea of Suns and the structural work on Under Siege.

System Reflections: Thoughts on remote work, optimization theory, and the reality of a 40-year career.

World Reflections: Perspectives on technology, civilization, and war based on four decades of study.

The Workshop: Occasional updates on making with wood, resin, and whatever else I’m tinkering with.

I’m no longer just “tinkering.” I’m building. Whether you followed me here from YouTube or found my work on Smashwords, I’m glad you’re part of the system.

Let’s see what we can build next.

Stealing the Lede

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eye4dtail

So 2 of our most obnoxious ‘organizationoids’ Black Lives Matter (the Org not the concept) and Antifa (Anti-fascist, which is technically anybody not International Socialist[communist-marxist]) essentially stole the lede as I think of that term, which is essentially something like ‘mind share tag.’

When you steal the lede, that mind share tag, you make it very difficult for others to use certain symbols, words, phrases, ideas, against you. For Black Lives Matter it made it very difficult for the majority to point out that they were destroying little B black, little L lives, by destroying their neighborhoods and local businesses. As has been pointed out elsewhere, it made pointing out that Antifa is exactly fascistic in its heart and operations, impossible to make stick.

In both of those cases i think the evidence clearly shows that if you seal off some of our ability to communicate things clearly it in fact makes it very difficult to combat actions and ideas until the damage is obvious enough not to be obfuscated by ‘mere’ words.

Mutant Ninja Turtles 2014

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teenage_mutant_ninja_turtles_ver14_xxlg-720x1013OK so Rotten Tomatoes gives it a grilling but its a fun movie and pretty well done.  I’d be lying if I say its worth full price or 3D, but cor a matinee, which is all I and my son go to, its…well…fun.    It gets the tone right, neither too campy or too serious and the characters are, uh, well what can you say about a near seven foot, bipedal rat and turtles? The characters have to have lay it on thick personalities that was the way they always have been.  The TNMT’s are fun loving reasonably serious young guys.  The bad guys are villains with goons what can you add?  Megan Fox’s character is central, and she held the movie together.   Her O’Neal is not a shrinking violet, victim or Mz KickAss, for the plot she had to be a bit pig headed and very naive, but she was well cast and played it well.

We’d certainly go and see a sequel if it’s done as well and doesn’t have much competition.

 

Guardians of the Galaxy, go and see it!

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hr_Guardians_of_the_Galaxy_film posterSo Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is a fun movie.  If you want a fun afternoon or night out, go a see it, you’ll laugh and be amazed.  I love Groot and Rocket Raccoon the two CGI characters shown  in their own movie poster below.

There are many who are over the top about this movie, I think because it could have been awful and isn’t.  There is something about the movie that makes me hold back from saying Fantastic, but it is very, very good. There may be other things playing in, but  the pace was too frenetic the cutting too staccato for me to fully enjoy.   Also a lot of characters seemed to intimate some link to a deeper story that we didn’t get to see. An introductory movie set in a deep universe like Marvel’s may be prone to this and my ‘author’s bump’ maybe too sensitive to these things but these ‘issues’ kept me from getting as deeply engrossed as I did in Edge of Tomorrow and some of the other Marvel films.

But its a fun movie, go and root for Groot, Rocket and their pets.

 

grootrocketraccoon1

 

Lucy the Movie

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Lucy_(2014_film)_posterLucy is a disappointing movie. That is not to say it is awful, but I could not argue with someone who said that it was awful.  For me the movie started out very well and was watchable throughout but it left me feeling like I had seen a Hollywood Horror, not the child of the Luc Besson, director of the movie The Fifth Element.   The movie feels like it was cut short.  Started out on a path like, if a bit less out there than, TFE but then got chopped short.  It as if the script was written around a very tight plot but instead of spending time fleshing out the story and the characters it was decided to just get something out the door as cheaply and quickly as possible.  I suppose that Johansson or others were not available for the time Besson needed to do a TFE like work.   Whatever it was this is a very disappointing movie, mainly because it had great potential.

The details:  the violence is what some called ‘over the top’ but unfortunately it’s what I call pseudo realistic; Lucy starts out as a believable type…and ends equally believable but without an audience leading transition ; while the Lucy UberHuman [LUH]is believable I think a more relate-able version was possible ; the LUH’s abilities are fantastical, over the top, a creepier, more understated version was  possible ; the plot is ultra simple and while the plot holes are there they don’t derail the movie ; [SPOILER ALERT] the bad guys are workmanlike if a bit too Bond-Goon-Squadish, but I really really wanted to evil surgeon from the early scenes to get terminated with prejudice ; the end is utterly anticlimactic the ‘happy’ ending wasn’t cheery and had no punch, the LUH metastasizes to another plane leaving behind the USB key fob to the universe, the confused boy toy police guy gets a text message from the beyond and the world goes on…meh.

Details of the details:

LUH’s creation: The crap about the utilization of the human brain was good as a way of thinking about human capacity but its scientific bunk, which spoiled the movie a bit for me.  The drug was TFE Beeson over the top (as was its introduction) but its derivation and supposed affect were not very convincing.  I’d have bought a material that increases intelligence by accelerating and reorganizing the brain, but requires constant new fill-ups or the user becomes a vegetable, it’s the first of a new family of bio-nanotech human enhancement drugs the Chinese mob has stolen, one vial of the stuff could infect hundreds or thousands, who would all become vegetables if they cannot get the fix… a trope matrix that could have been much more scary.

Violence:  I think that LUH had to use violence she had no time to explain.  The emotionless LUH had no compunction about using it which was funny the first time but troubling with no context.  Also the violence was too risk free, humans react to violence, modern training makes us hesitate but there are many among us who would react almost instinctively.  LUH did to some extent explain herself to the surgeon but the hole here was their reaction to her and the lack of a police response in the time it took to take out the bag etc…A couple of soliloquies or appologetic explanations to victims (even dead ones) would have helped and could even have been funny….

Emotionless: Emotions are chemical and triggered by autonomous systems, LUH could suppress them…believable.  But I lost any real human interest in the whole story when I knew she was essentially a machine with a hard stop use by date.  The appearance of the hurting, frightened, grieving old Lucy would not have been hard or out of place, her goodbye to her mother was only part of what should have been a thread through to the end.

LUH powers: Telekinesis, really? Mental control of electronics plays into my idea for LUH abilities but its just magical crap with the trope used.  With ability to control her physiology, and ultra fast processing she could have senses and reactions and strength way beyond the norm, and would have needed to eat like a horse (that was consistent in a way) she might be able to exude skin oils or pheromones with powerful effects, could heal herself fast, maybe even read minds if in contact with the target, etc, etc.  These effects and her having to think her way out of dead ends would have supported the simple story line.  The magical powers she exhibited should have been part of a movie with more complexity / depth in other areas, where those powers play are a way to keep the story moving fast….here they just truncated this already too simple movie.

Bad Guys: OK pretty good in a Bond Villain Goon Squad sort of way but still.  And what about the evil surgeon? he really needed his own poetic if gory end.

The ending:  A more effective ending would have been failure…the bad guys kill her, the bad guy’s die, maybe science guy and boy toy survive to grieve Lucy’s death.  Then maybe a hint that she did not fail but that she had made sure that the bad guys got sucked in and destroyed while the drug or whatever that created LUH will be treated like a mixture of nuclear weapon and Ebola.