Episode Details

Are certain cosmological constants “too good to be random or coincidental”?

Apologies to my high school geography teacher. The only thing I seem to remember learning in that class was how to balance pencils on the end of their erasers!? I’d seen street performers turn the art of balancing odd things into an impressive revenue generator … maybe I could make something of it too? I might have taken an entirely different career path if I’d learned how to take that to the next level by turning the pencil around and balancing it on its point, but no one on earth has ever been able to do that. It’s as if earth’s gravity amplifies an imbalance of even a few molecules to instantly topple even the most carefully poised pencil (air currents are not the problem, because astronauts can do it in the space station). Chaos theory and the butterfly effect come into play here: the very smallest initial event gets magnified into an catastrophic system failure.

Scientists have learned that many physical constants that dictate the structure and function of our universe seem to be so precisely tuned it’s as if they were like pencils standing on their points.

If the ratio of the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force were off by a decimal with thirty two zeroes in front of it, the sun would burn a million times faster … and any life that ever appeared on earth would be immediately vaporized in that intense heat.

If the balance between the nuclear and electromagnetic forces holding atomic nuclei together was off by a decimal with dozens of zeroes in front of it, the universe would have either ended up as just one super-gigantic ball of mass like a mega-supersized proton, or as a vastly dispersed cloud of particles that could never form planets or life forms.

Those are some p