From Dennis Overbye, “All of a Sudden, the Neighborhood Looks a Lot Friendlier,” in today’s NY Times:
… Cosmologists have found to their astonishment that life and the universe are strangely and deeply connected. Life As We Know It seems to depend on the miraculous and improbable juggling of the numerical values of a few atomic and astronomical constants – like the relative masses of elementary particles or the strength of the “dark energy” accelerating the universe outward. Twiddle these control knobs on nature’s console a little bit and the galaxies evaporate before stars and life have a chance to evolve, or atoms fall apart.
What this means is being debated fiercely these days by some of the smartest physicists in the world. Do we live in a lucky universe? Or are there zillions of different possible universes and we live in one with laws that happen to be conducive to life, the way that fish live on a planet that is warm enough to have liquid water?
If you’re interested in more information about this subject, try a Google search for the Anthropic Principle.
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