The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [174]
1. The universe is not so finely tuned for life since the vast majority of the universe is empty space, and what little matter there is—in the form of stars and planets—is mostly inhospitable to life.
2. The idea that the universe is finely tuned for us is a problem in cosmic chauvinism, a grander variant of what Carl Sagan called “carbon chauvinism,” or the belief that life cannot be based on anything other than carbon. By rejecting cosmic chauvinism we see that the universe is not finely tuned for us, we are finely tuned for it. It is difficult for us to conceive of how a different physics could produce different forms of life, but it could. Science has had only four centuries to study the nature of life; evolution has had four billion years to create life. Evolution is smarter than science. It is too provincial of us to say that we know for sure that life could not evolve under a different set of laws.
3. Such numbers as the speed of light and Planck’s constant are, on one level, arbitrary numbers that can be configured in different ways so that their relationship to the other constants are not so coincidental or mysterious. As well, such constants may be inconstant over vast spans of time, varying from the big bang to the present, making the universe finely tuned only now but not earlier or later in its history. Physicists John Barrow and John Webb call these numbers the “inconstant constants,” and have demonstrated how in particular the speed of light, gravitation, and the mass of the electron have, in fact, been inconstant over time.28
4. There may be an underlying principle behind the six magic numbers that will be found when the grand unified theory of physics is discovered and constructed. Instead of six mysterious numbers, there will just be one. Until we have a comprehensive theory of physics that connects the quantum world of subatomic particles to the cosmic world of general relativity, we do not yet know enough about the nature of our universe to make the leap to something beyond nature. Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll notes:
Possibly general relativity is not the correct theory of gravity, at least in the context of the extremely early universe. Most physicists suspect that a quantum theory of gravity, reconciling the framework of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s ideas about curved spacetime, will ultimately be required to make sense of what happens at the very earliest times. So if someone asks you what really happened at the moment of the purported Big Bang, the only honest answer would be: “I don’t know.”29
That grand unified theory of everything will itself need an explanation, but it may be explicable by some other theory we have yet to comprehend out of our sheer ignorance at this moment in the history of science.
5. As a historian of science I strongly suspect that there are grander vistas still to be discovered by astronomers and cosmologists that will change the nature of the problem altogether, from explaining the nature and origin of the universe to explaining something else entirely. Consider the sequence of our visage of the cosmos over the past millennia: from the ancient Babylonians’ Earth-centered cosmology with a canopy of stars rotating around it that was picked up by the Hebrews and solidified by Aristotle’s model of a motionless Earth, to the medieval worldview of Earth at the center and the stars and planets rotating close by on their crystal spheres, to the sixteenth-century Copernican revolution that put Earth in motion and the stars far away, to William Herschel’s eighteenth-century conjecture that the fuzzy patches in the sky were “island universes,” to Edwin Hubble’s twentieth-century discovery that those nebulae were not in the Milky Way galaxy but were actually galaxies of immense size and distance expanding away from a big bang beginning, to the twenty-first-century finding that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, to … what?
6. Based on the history of