It's All About Us

Warning: physics ahead. But even if you are not a physicist, this post may interest you because it recounts just a few of the reasons why this universe permits you to exist.

Physicist Tim Folger, writing in the latest edition of Discover magazine, provides some interesting facts about our universe that, in my judgment, support what is known in the physics world as "the anthropic principle", i.e., the notion that instead of being an unfathomably complex series of random events and circumstances, the universe was intelligently designed to support life.

Even the most ardent anti-creationists will admit that the universe's basic properties are "uncannily suited for life. Tweak the laws of physics in just about any way and—in this universe, anyway—life as we know it would not exist."

A few examples:



• All atoms consist of more elemental particles, namely, protons, neutrons, and electrons. If protons were 0.2 percent more massive, they would be unstable and decay into smaller particles, which means atoms could not exist, which means WE could not exist.

• Atomic nuclei are bound together by the so-called strong force. If that force were slightly more powerful, all the protons in the early universe would have paired off and there would be no hydrogen, which fuels long-lived stars. Water would not exist, nor would any known form of life.

• Stars like the sun produce energy by fusing two hydrogen atoms into a single helium atom. During that reaction, 0.007 percent of the mass of the hydrogen atoms is converted into energy, via Einstein’s famous E = mc2 equation. But if that percentage were, say, 0.006 or 0.008, the universe would be far more hostile to life. The lower number would result in a universe filled only with hydrogen; the higher number would leave a universe with no hydrogen (and therefore no water) and no stars like the sun.

• Earth's orbit around our sun provides a narrow range of temperatures on our planet within which an astounding variety of life forms can exist. Change the average distance between the sun and earth by a very tiny amount, and we are either crispy critters or popsicles.

• The early universe was delicately poised between runaway expansion and terminal collapse. Had the universe contained much more matter, additional gravity would have made it implode. If it contained less, the universe would have expanded too quickly for galaxies to form.

• Had matter in the universe been more evenly distributed, it would not have clumped together to form galaxies. Had matter been clumpier, it would have condensed into black holes.


What are the chances that, in purely random fashion, the universe became so finely balanced in so many different aspects that this thing we call LIFE could exist?

Despite my technical and scientific background, I cannot believe this all happened by chance. One law of physics nobody questions is: the derivative of entropy with respect to time is always positive, i.e., the universe left to itself is naturally increasingly chaotic. The fact that organisms as exquisitely complex as human beings exist at all is compelling evidence of some vastly intelligent force creating myriad instances of sublime order within the vast universal chaos. Thereby, that intelligence relegates the chaos to the background where it belongs, and infuses the ordered beings (us) with supernal, intrinsic value.

We are what matters in this universe.