![]() ![]() This would drastically alter the physics of stars, and presumably preclude the existence of life similar to what we observe on Earth. if the coupling constant representing its strength were 2% larger) while the other constants were left unchanged, diprotons would be stable according to Davies, hydrogen would fuse into them instead of deuterium and helium. If, for example, the strong nuclear force were 2% stronger than it is (i.e. The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life." As Stephen Hawking has noted, "The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. The premise of the fine-tuned universe assertion is that a small change in several of the physical constants would make the universe radically different. Among scientists who find the evidence persuasive, a variety of natural explanations have been proposed, such as the existence of multiple universes introducing a survivorship bias under the anthropic principle. However, he continued, "the conclusion is not so much that the Universe is fine-tuned for life rather it is fine-tuned for the building blocks and environments that life requires." He has also said that "' anthropic' reasoning fails to distinguish between minimally biophilic universes, in which life is permitted, but only marginally possible, and optimally biophilic universes, in which life flourishes because biogenesis occurs frequently". Physicist Paul Davies has said, "There is now broad agreement among physicists and cosmologists that the Universe is in several respects ‘fine-tuned' for life". ![]() īelief in the fine-tuned universe led to the expectation that the Large Hadron Collider would produce evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model, such as supersymmetry, but by 2012 it had not produced evidence for supersymmetry at the energy scales it was able to probe. "The list of anthropic properties, apparent accidents of a non-biological nature without which carbon-based and hence human life could not exist, is large and impressive", Hoyle wrote. Fred Hoyle also argued for a fine-tuned universe in his 1984 book The Intelligent Universe. Dicke claimed that certain forces in physics, such as gravity and electromagnetism, must be perfectly fine-tuned for life to exist in the universe. Henderson discusses the importance of water and the environment to living things, pointing out that life depends entirely on earth's very specific environmental conditions, especially the prevalence and properties of water. In 1913, the chemist Lawrence Joseph Henderson wrote The Fitness of the Environment, one of the first books to explore fine tuning in the universe. If the values of any of certain free parameters in contemporary physical theories had differed only slightly from those observed, the evolution of the universe would have proceeded very differently and life as it is understood may not have been possible. The characterization of the universe as finely tuned suggests that the occurrence of life in the universe is very sensitive to the values of certain fundamental physical constants and that the observed values are, for some reason, improbable. ![]()
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