This week I thought I’d share with you a great (and short!) video on the fine-tuning of the universe. Please click here: I think you will enjoy it.
The video shows how many important constants of physics (the video doesn’t say how many, but perhaps 31) are just about perfect for life, and that a small change in any of these constants would result in a universe without life. One example in the video (and in my book) is gravity. If the gravitational constant were a little bit stronger the universe would have collapsed in on itself. If it were a little bit weaker the universe would have expanded too rapidly and stars and planets would not have formed. How narrow is the range where life can exist? The video notes (I explain this on pages 76 and 77 of my book) that a change in the gravitational constant of one part in 1060 would make life impossible. That’s mind-bogglingly precise. It’s like shooting a rocket from Earth so precisely that it hangs in Earth’s gravitational field for billions of years, on the edge between falling back to Earth and escaping to space. To get 1060 marbles, you need a ball of marbles stretching 50 light years in each direction, past the Sun, past the Solar System, past dozens of nearby stars; a huge ball 600,000,000,000,000 miles in diameter. I’m told that Stephen Hawking developed the formula on which this calculation is based. What are the chances of blindly reaching into a pile of marbles 600,000,000,000,000 miles in diameter and picking out a specified, “marked” marble? Not likely, that’s for sure! Even Hawking admits this is “a remarkable fact”!
Design or accident? Next week we’ll look at the “God Theorem”; which proves you can’t try to explain this away with an infinite number of universes.
Thanks for reading.