NP- Our Universe: Only One of Many?

[David Morris]

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/29/science/space/29COSM.html

[...]

In effect, the knobs on nature's console have been set to these numbers.
Scientists can imagine twiddling them, but it turns out that nature is
surprisingly finicky, they say, and only a narrow range of settings is suitable
for the evolution of complexity or Life as We Know It.

For example, much of the carbon and oxygen needed for life is produced by the
fusion of helium atoms in stars called red giants.

But a change of only half a percent in the strength of the so-called strong
force that governs nuclear structure would be enough to prevent those reactions
from occurring, according to recent work by Dr. Heinz Oberhummer of Vienna
University of Technology. The result would be a dearth of the raw materials of
biology, he said.

Similarly, a number known as the fine structure constant characterizes the
strength of electromagnetic forces. If it were a little larger, astronomers
say, stars could not burn, and if it were only a little smaller, molecules
would never form.

So is this a lucky universe, or what?

In 1974, Dr. Brandon Carter, a theoretical physicist then at Cambridge, now at
the Paris Observatory in Meudon, pointed out that these coincidences were not
just luck, but were rather necessary preconditions for us to be looking at the
universe.

After all, we are hardly likely to discover laws that are incompatible with our
own existence.

That insight is the basis of what Dr. Carter called the anthropic principle, an
idea that means many things to many scientists. Expressed most emphatically, it
declares that the universe is somehow designed for life. Or as the physicist
Freeman Dyson once put it, "The universe in some sense must have known that we
were coming."

This notion horrifies some physicists, who feel it is their mission to find a
mathematical explanation of nature that leaves nothing to chance or "the whim
of the Creator," in Einstein's phrase.



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