The universe, many physicists agree, is “fine tuned” for life. If any one of a number of different of fundamental, physical constants were altered only just a little, life – at least as we know it – would not be possible.
One of these fundamental constants is the so-called “fine structure” constant, so named because by multiplying a number of other fundamental constants together a pure, unitless number is attained. The fine structure constant, known to physicists as α is elegantly dimensionless, and utterly mysterious, as quantum mechanic Richard Feynman wrote:
Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the “hand of God” wrote that number, and “we don’t know how He pushed his pencil.” We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don’t know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!
Except it turns out that, perhaps – maybe – α is not constant at all:
What (a research team) found shocked them. The further back they looked with the (very large telescope), the larger alpha seemed to be—in seeming contradiction to the result they had obtained with the Keck. They realised, however, that there was a crucial difference between the two telescopes: because they are in different hemispheres, they are pointing in opposite directions. Alpha, therefore, is not changing with time; it is varying through space. When they analysed the data from both telescopes in this way, they found a great arc across the sky. Along this arc, the value of alpha changes smoothly, being smaller in one direction and larger in the other. The researchers calculate that there is less than a 1% chance such an effect could arise at random. Furthermore, six of the quasars were observed with both telescopes, allowing them to get an additional handle on their errors.
Or put another way, and in another context, “”What we’re suggesting is that something that can’t interact with anything is changing something that can’t be changed.”
Maybe Bostrom was right.
“I know I have not found the answers to all of my questions. The answers I have found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions. In some ways I am as confused as ever, but I believe that I am confused on a higher level and about more important things.”
–unknown
+1 – I think, I’m so confused I’m really not sure … or am I.
if I think I am confused, is that simulation or reality?
The more science I know, the more I come to agree with the Psalmist “the fool hath said in his heart there is no God.” Paul also said that the evidence of the universe itself leaves no room for any excuses whn it comes to God.
We’re not in a simulation, we’re in the universe created by God. He did fine tune it to support life. Your’s and mine.
Should people who believe life is a simulation be considered mentally fit to fly other people?
If you re-spell it to “stimulation” (NOT THAT KIND!), then yes…they should fly them and provide a very stimulating flight!
Although stimulation of *that kind* would lead to a very interesting airline!
And, I’m sorry Lex. It only took the sixth post to turn this incredibly interesting and high-browed post on the absolute cutting edge of both science and philosophy to sex jokes.
Anyone got a way to work farts into this?
If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.”
Richard Feynman
My favorite Feynman “quote” (actually a paraphrase):
“If you can’t explain it to a college freshman you don’t really understand it.”
His connection with the students and being able to explain those concepts are major reasons his lectures were often SRO.
A friend of mine does portraits -has a great one of Einstein on the wall. I’m torn between asking for one to be done of either Churchill or Feynman. I admire both men a great deal, though I only became aware of Feynman due to his involvement in the Challenger inquiry (’86?), whereas Churchill has been an acquaintance for over forty years.
From an outsiders perspective, I do not see where NASA has improved much since that time -politics still abound and the dream seems to have died.
Perhaps regrinding the mirrors to follow a constant gradient would fix the variance. But then with light being bent, as it were, by atmospherics and gravitational influence of heavenly bodies, perhaps a adaptable mirror capable of straightening the light would do the trick. I know what the influence of a heavenly body in my life can lead to…all kinds of altered perceptions. After all, it’s perception that matters. Isn’t it?
PAMDO: You’ve been spending way too much time in the jet shop, sniffing JP-5 back by the exhaust nozzles. You need to get out more, buddy.
Just a few weeks ago sniffing the JP-5 was “out.” Any other form of getting out meant a long swim to nowhere in particular.
Of course, it IS labor day weekend coming on and I DON’T live on the Atlantic seaboard . . .
Isn’t it amazing how much blind faith it takes to believe that everything “just happened?” I’ll go on believing in God, thank you very much. Even if it turns out that the Biblical story of the Creation isn’t 100% accurate and God actually set it up like a giant Goldbergesque toy to amuse Himself.
I think it was Eon by Greg Bear that suggested that one of the first measurement tests on a new reality was to see if pi remained the same constant.
Constant’s have a way of drifting in life.
The universe is not only stranger than you do know, it is stranger than you can know- Gothe (I believe)
The English astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington was the guy, Stephen..
oh heck, I thought that was Zaphod’s demi brother.
Physicists. The fault lies not in your (absence of) theology, but in your postulates.
We’ve never been off this mudball (except for a few, and not far), but we insist on describing objects too far away to comprehend interacting on scales to vast to measure with instruments too crude to measure accurately from this location, based on the assumptions that the conditions long ago and far away were the same as they are here and now.
Usually the get away with it. The details will, from time to time, bite.
I’ve always had a fondness for the fine structure constant. In boot camp, I was in Co. 137. The road outside of Great Lakes RTC is IL 137. We graduated on July 13, the 13th day of the 7th month. And on that day, my father and I played number 137 in the lottery, he in Ohio and I in Illinois… and we both lost. Coincidence? Hah!
@ Steve, LOL
The house of cards that is modern physics/cosmology(string theory anyone?)meets Bostrum’s epistemological navel-gazing.
Having just re-read “Anathem” by Neal Stephenson, I am quite sure that Fraa Jad would have something to say about this. I do think that Platonic Ideals might leak between cosmi. Pythagoras, baby!
Oh, the Avout from the Ringing Vale in that novel seem to be the Platonic Ideal of US Marines.
P.s. You can tell from reading Stephenson’s other book, “Cryptonomicon”, that he is fond of Marines. I am, too. They are my favorite dangerous lunatics.