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These constants play a fundamental role in how the universe evolves. They not only collective decision and the size of galaxies, stars, the Earth, but also of Health: height of trees, formed a rose petal, weight and the size of ants, giraffes, and the will of the people. Reality, we know that will be very different if the constant change. As the name implies, these constants are different, in terms of time or space. This has been corrected, through careful observation of a well-off galaxies far. The initial conditions of the universe, their concern, inter alia, the amount of material, which includes the direction and the initial swelling.

 

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Measuring the Immeasurable

 

 

Since the sixteenth century, the place of humanity in the universe has gotten smaller and smaller. In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish priest, knocked the Earth off its pedestal as the center of the universe and discovered it was just another planet revolving around the Sun. Ever since, the ghost of Copernicus has continued to haunt us. If our planet wasn't at the center of the universe, then, our ancestors thought, the Sun must be. But along came an American astronomer, Harlow Shapley, who discovered that our sun is just a suburban star among the hundreds of billions of stars that make up our galaxy. We now know that the Milky Way is only one of the hundred billion or so galaxies in the observable universe, which has a radius of about 15 billion light-years. Humanity is just a grain of sand on this vast cosmic beach.

 

… This shrinking of our place in the world led to Pascal's cry of despair in the seventeenth century: "The eternal silence of endless space terrifies me." Pascal's words were echoed three centuries later by the French biologist Jacques Monod: "Man knows at last that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance." And the American physicist Steven Weinberg remarked, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."

 

Personally, I don't think that human life emerged purely by chance in an unfeeling universe. To my mind, if the universe is so large, then it evolved that way in order to allow us to be here.

 

...We must indeed be careful about arguments based on justifications of final causes. Science was itself born from a total and categorical rejection of any such teleological thinking, which is the province of religious doctrines. That said, modern cosmology has discovered that the conditions that allow for human life seem to be coded into the properties of each atom, star, and galaxy in our universe and in all of the physical laws that govern it.

 

The way our universe evolved depended on what are called "initial conditions" and on about fifteen numbers called "physical constants." Newton's law of gravity depends on one of these constants, a number called the "gravitational constant," which determines the strength of gravity's attraction. In the same way, there are three other numbers that control the power of the strong and weak nuclear forces and the electromagnetic force. Then we have the speed of light and the Planck constant, which fixes the size of atoms. After that, there are numbers that describe the mass of elementary particles, such as the proton, the electron, and so on. These constants play a fundamental role in how a universe evolves. They determine not only the mass and size of the galaxies, the stars, and the Earth, but also of living beings: the height of trees, the shape of a rose petal, the weight and size of ants, giraffes, and people. The reality we know would be quite different if the constants changed. As their name suggests, these constants do not vary in time or in space. This has been checked by careful observation of far-off galaxies. As for the initial conditions of the universe, they concern, among other things, the amount of matter it contains and its initial expansion rate.

 

If these constants and initial conditions were just slightly different, then we wouldn't be here talking about them. The universe, right from the start, seems to have carried the seeds that allowed for the emergence of consciousness, of an observer. In the words of the physicist Freeman Dyson, "The universe in some sense must have known that we were coming."

 

...[S]o far we haven't come up with a theory that explains why these constants were fixed at a particular value and not a different one. We've been handed these numbers on a plate and have to accept them.

 

 

 

 

 

— Trinh Xuan Thuan in  Matthieu Ricard, Trinh Xuan Thuan, The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet, Chapter 4 – The Universe in a Grain of Sand

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Indexes/12

 

 

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1 comments:

Sprit O said...

Personally, I do not think that people's lives there, and it is purely by chance, in a unfeeling universe. It seems to me that if the universe is so large, then its evolution, in order to enable us to come here.

O truth of the earth,
O truth of things,
I am determined to press my way toward you;
Sound your voice!

I scale mountains,
or dive in the sea after you.

Walt Whitman
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