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 By Steve Dayton Mar. 4, 2006 Yes, it’s “hypothesis” week on U-K. This one will blow your doors off, intellectually at least. I’ll try to give you a “Wow” moment the best I can, but radioactive material like the kind that can be found on Ray Kurzweil's website is simply too hot for my brain to handle competently without frying my neurons. These physicist dudes… I mean, come on! These guys rock in a serious way. I mean, there’s smart and then there’s goofy smart. Richard Feynman level smart. This bespectacled group would be a nightmare audience where everything that came out of your mouth would go over like a silent but deadly lead balloon, with embarrassed smiles and accompanying nods and murmurs of sympathy about our failing school systems. (I present you with the above link to a long and very technical essay by James Gardner only out of a misguided sense of duty for completeness, but you are on your own otherwise. Bring a dictionary and clean your monitor... you're going to be staring at it for a while.) Anyway, here is the low down: We were meant to be here. As conscious, intelligent beings, I mean. Pre-destined in the most fundamental way possible. In the laws of fundamental physics. In physics there are important things called “constants” which have numerical values that don’t change. Like the Universal Gravitation Constant, for instance, discovered by Isaac Newton, or a less well known animal that hardly ever makes an appearance in pop-culture called the “Fine Structure Constant,” which determines the electromagnetic strength between basic particles like electrons. Some of the best minds in physics have become “suspicious,” if you will, that the set of physical constants which comprise and create the very mathematical and scientific foundation of our Universe are overtly friendly to conscious, intelligent life. Like, “really” friendly to life, meaning that if some of them were tweaked only slightly in their numerical values, life would never have existed. Kind of analogous to the current NASA theory that water must be present for life to exist. I said “kind of.” This new burger is a “Whopper” compared to the relatively trivial H2O on Mars conundrum. The physical constants we’re discussing here only apply to things we have always considered previously as “inanimate objects” like rocks and how fast they fall when you drop them, mind you. Big Bang stuff. They’re only numbers, after all. Remember, these are the things your high school physics teacher wrote on the blackboard, and you obediently punched into your calculator before you were finally released to find some geniuinely physically “animate” objects in cheerleader outfits. Sure, you need a puddle of wa-wa to evolve tadpoles (and hence cheerleaders), but do you really need a precise, measurable level of “dark energy” sprinkled into the gumbo of fundamental physics before those squirmy little frog precursors start splishin’ and those pom-poms start splashin’? I just thought of an example. A radio, sitting on your kitchen counter, plays only static until you “tune” it in to a station and acquire a clear signal. Imagine the position of the tuning knob to be a physical constant – like it’s set at 100.5, or something. You hear a nice rendition of Stairway to Heaven coming from the speaker. You turn the dial a small amount, say to 100.7, and you get only static. Assuming for the moment that Led Zeppelin music represents “life” (which it certainly does for many people), we can now say that the when the physical constant represented by the position of our tuning knob has a value of 100.5, it is conducive or “friendly” to life. A slight tweaking to the right or left and you get nothing resembling life. So Radio Universe 100.5 would be a universe like ours, and Radio Universe 100.7 would be a barren universe devoid of life, and quite possibly with other different characteristics. I’m trippin’ you out already… come on, admit it. It’s called the “anthropic observation.” It’s a very strange thing, because there is nothing really dictating that these important physical constants HAVE the life-critical values that they do. Quantum Theory says that they could have different values, and nothing much would happen except that intelligent life would never evolve. Which means we would never be here, typing away on incredibly fast electronic computers which are getting exponentially faster every year, or staring up at the stars wondering if we will one day join with them in our destiny. (Hint: yes). Because of this peculiar and particular affinity of our universe for evolving conscious, intelligent life, the top cosmological physicists have postulated that the collection of physical constants – yes, just a bunch of pure numbers -- essentially forms a DNA CODE. A “biosignature,” they call it. Dude, imagine a universe-sized CELL. By the way, this is the “Wow” moment. I will pause for you to catch your breath. 1…2…3…4…5…6…7...8...9…10 You’ve heard of the word “prediction” before, but have you ever heard of “retrodiction?” A prediction about the past instead of the future. An example of a retrodiction would be that the first few U-K articles penned by Ken Hughes contain countless spelling and grammatical errors, based on observations of his most recent articles. (Ha! I just wanted to see if he read my stuff.) The Selfish Biocosm Hypothesis states that because our obviously life-friendly universe has this DNA code composed of physical constants, this means that … get ready… all this Big Bang and primordial ooze and evolution stuff HAS HAPPENED BEFORE. Intelligent life-producing, Biophilic universes have been created in the past -- and furthermore there is something incredibly sweet and totally way out there coming for everybody who hangs on to their ticket stub. Says Tipler: "Almost all of space and time lies in the future. By focusing attention only on the past and present, science has ignored almost all of reality. Since the domain of scientific study is the whole of reality, it is about time science decided to study the future evolution of the universe." The lifeless, physical fabric of our Universe is the very STUFF of life itself. Our entire Universe is quite literally ALIVE. I’ll let Freeman Dyson say it better: “The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming. There are some striking examples in the laws of nuclear physics of numerical accidents that seem to conspire to make the universe habitable.” Wow. ------------ About the author: Steve Dayton writes articles like he hits range balls: high, far-out, and sometimes even straight. Email: stixus_steve@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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