The Collaborative International Dictionary
Anthropic \An*throp"ic\, Anthropical \An*throp"ic*al\, a. [Gr. ?, fr. ? man.] (Zo["o]l.)
Like or related to man; human. [R.]
--Owen.relating to the period of mankind's existence [WordNet 1.5] ||
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"pertaining to man," 1836, from Greek anthropikos "human," from anthropos "male human being, man" (see anthropo-). Related: Anthropical (1804).
Wiktionary
a. Of or pertaining to mankind or humans, or the period of humanity's existence.
WordNet
adj. relating to mankind or the period of mankind's existence [syn: anthropical]
Wikipedia
Anthropic may refer to:
- The dictionary meaning is: "Of or pertaining to mankind or humans, or the period of humanity's existence."
- In the earth sciences and biology, anthropic refers to being associated with humans, influenced by humans or taking place during human existence.
- In physics and cosmology, the anthropic principle states that humans should take into account the constraints that human existence imposes on the kind of theoretical universe that can support human life.
Usage examples of "anthropic".
At that point, they may find themselves with split loyalties: on the one hand, to defend the prime law of the anthropic cosmos, while at the same time, not wanting to surrender their misguided but nevertheless human peers into the claws of a great evil.
When he arrived, because of the strongly anthropic nature of reality, our perceptions caused his particulate structure to begin decaying, changing toward something approximating our own, and he grew more and more human.
The bubble of reality he generated was being eroded by the strongly anthropic process.
The most astonishing thing was that her conception of the cosmos was basically the same as the one I had sketched out back at Cal Tech, an infinite number of anthropic universes shuffling and reshuffling, combining on a quantum level.
THE CLEAREST INDICATION that the search for an unmerited privileged position for humans will never be wholly abandoned is what in physics and astronomy is called the Anthropic Principle.
We have no experimental method by which anthropic hypotheses may be tested.
Until that time comes, if it ever does, it seems to me premature to put faith in the Anthropic Principle as an argument for human centrality or uniqueness.
Rather than being the epitome of poetic grace in which everything fits together with inflexible elegance, the multiverse and the anthropic principle paint a picture of a wildly excessive collection of universes with an insatiable appetite for variety.
Theory permits its information to be available in that universewhich would become parallel to thisand the information would provide for the development of the anthropic principle.
In fact, the act may pretty much be necessary for a universe where the anthropic principle obtains.
Why the universe is put together in such a way that it has been called The Symbiotic Universe, and how the apparently amazing universal coincidences leading to the formulation of this Anthropic Principle have actually come into existence.
The anthropic theories of cosmological evolution were somewhere near their paradigmatic peak.
Theirs is an anthropic cosmology: man built a fire, then looked up and saw the stars, thus bringing into being the universe as we know it.
Big Bangbut there was no physical way of amplifying their effects at our level, the anthropic level.
One would feel happier about the anthropic principle, at least in its weak version, if one could show that quite a number of different initial configurations for the universe would have evolved to produce a universe like the one we observe.