# Earliest example of naturalness/fine-tuning arguments

The notion of naturalness is important in particle physics, especially supersymmetry. I was a little surprised, then, that the idea, or at least the name, is apparently only ~30 years old ('t Hooft, 1980).

I know that Bayesian statistics, which formalises naturalness arguments with Bayesian evidence, is ~300 years old, and that with it one can elucidate connections between naturalness and Occam's razor (and even falsifiability). I don't know when those insights were first made, but surely not after 't Hooft?

Are there applications of the naturalness principle/fine-tuning in physics (or science) that significantly predate this 't Hooft definition? Or even Bayes? I should add that I consider naturalness to be distinct from Occam's razor.

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An example of #2 that is about 50 years old is that Brans and Dicke felt that the $\omega$ parameter in Brans-Dicke gravity should be of order unity. In their original paper describing their theory, they said prospectively that it should be of order unity, and implied that if it could be constrained to be much more than unity (which it soon was), they would consider that to be a falsification of the theory.