Anthropic
/ænˈθrɒpɪk/adjective
Relating to human beings, especially in the argument that the universe looks the way it does because observers exist in it.
The Greek roots
Literally: “of a human being”
The story of the word
The adjective sat almost unused until 1973, when the cosmologist Brandon Carter proposed the anthropic principle at a conference held in Kraków for Copernicus's five-hundredth birthday: the physical constants look finely tuned because observers can only ever find themselves in a universe that permits observers. Carter later called the name a poor one, since the argument concerns observers of any kind rather than humans in particular. ἄνθρωπος means a human of either sex, which is why anthropology studies everyone while andrology studies half.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
Same family
In a sentence
He dismissed the anthropic argument as a tautology dressed up as physics.
Anthropic reasoning cannot predict anything, which is the standard objection to it.