Bayesian Inductive Inference and the Anthropic Cosmological Principle
Many moons ago I wrote a paper with a person called Anthony J.M. Garrett with the title Bayesian Inductive Inference and the Anthropic Cosmological Principle; the full reference is A.J.M. Garrett and P. Coles, Comments on Astrophysics 17(1) 23-47 (1993). It got a few citations here and there, and has been discussed in a few books and other texts. In 1999, the journal Comments on Astrophysics was merged with some other journals to form Comments on Modern Physics which was then acquired by publishers Taylor and Francis in 2001, when it took over Gordon and Breach. The new publisher never put the old papers online in digital format. Most of the back catalogue of Comments on Astrophysics is indexed in NASA/ADS (bibstem: ComAp), but No. 1 of Volume 17 is not there. That classic paper is not, as far as I know, available anywhere on the internet. Or at least it wasn’t until now.
I was recently asked for a PDF of the paper so I made a scan and sent it. Now that I have a scan, however, and WordPress now has a PDF upload gadget, I thought I’d put it up here. I did a Google search for it earlier this evening and the AI Summary described the paper as “seminal”, which just goes to show that AI isn’t always wrong!
Anyway, here is a scanned PDF of the paper:
Apologies that it’s a bit grubby and wonky, but the scan is made from an old photocopy. I did have a proper offprint somewhere, but I can’t find it.
The real reason for doing this post, however, is to use it as a counter-example to something people often bring up when I criticize academic publishers: “..but they curate the literature!”. They don’t, actually. Libraries do that. The Garrett-Coles paper is available as a hard copy in libraries, but the publisher has nothing to do with that!
P.S. I did a blog post a while ago based on part of the paper.
P.P.S. If I get time I’ll contact ADS to see if they want to put this up in the official biblipgraphic collection…
In the Dark 
June 18, 2026 at 10:42 am
NB I’m Anthony not Antony. Shall I post you an offprint?
We had grand fun writing that paper, which was expanded from something I gave and put in the 1991 Maximum Entropy conference proceedings. In the 1990s I never needed much of an excuse to visit London from Cambridge. I’m a Mancunian, and I got to know my capital city a decade earlier, after my year at Cambridge graduated and most of the friends I had made got jobs in London, while I stayed on. About every second or third weekend I went to London in late morning on a Friday and spent the afternoon looking at the tourist sites and museums. After a year of that – and of kipping on sofas in all areas – I realised I’d seen more of London than most Londoners.
June 18, 2026 at 11:59 am
Thanks, Anthon. I’ve corrected the shpelling. Do you have any offprints? If so please send one. I think I gave all mine away. I can have a proper scan done for ADS from an original offprint.